Emotions and the Family

"The family is the place where minds come in contact with one another" - Buddha Emotions and the Family reflects the dramatic change in how professionals and practitioners working with today's families view the role of emotions in general family and marital processes. Professionals, researchers, and academics present a wide variety of approaches to the study of emotion and family functioning, providing a rare theoretical and empirical look at how emotions regulate, guide, and influence actions and behaviors within the family. This unique book will provide you with new avenues of research, theory, measurement, and analysis, emphasizing contexts that range from the focus on specific relationships within the family to the impact of contextual influences in family emotionality. Emotions and the Family examines the shift that has taken place in how practitioners and therapists view emotions - as having important interpsychic functions instead of as a function of intrapsychic processes. The book will show you how emotions are involved in almost every aspect of family development: from the beginnings of the family formation (dating, courting, and marriage) to the transition to parenthood (pregnancy, birth, bonding, and attachment) to the dissolution of family relationships (divorce, death). Authors discuss aspects of how the fabric of family life is woven together by the complex interplay of emotions, with essential information on: - marital/family relationships - parenting - socialization - sibling relationships - family health - dysfunctional family processes - family therapy - and much more! Emotions and the Family functions as an invaluable textbook for graduate studies in family sciences, child development, psychology, social work, and sociology. The book is equally effective as a professional resource for clinical practitioners in psychology, marriage and family therapy, and social work.

Richard Fabes, Gary W Peterson, Suzanne Steinmetz

- Part I: General Family/Marriage Processes - Introduction - A Family-Wide Model for the Role of Emotion in Family Functioning - A Meta-Analysis of Family Expressiveness and Children's Emotion Expressiveness and Understanding - When My Mommy Was Angry, I Was Speechless: Children's Perceptions of Maternal Emotional Expressiveness Within the Context of Economic Hardship - Psychosocial Moderators of Emotional Reactivity to Marital Arguments: Results from a Daily Diary Study - Emotional and Relational Consequences of Coping in Stepfamilies - Affect Pattern Recognition: Using Discrete Hidden Markov Models to Discriminate Distressed from Nondistressed Couples - The Role of Emotions in Marriage and Family Therapy: Past, Present, and Future - Part II: Developmental and Parent-Child Processes - The Contributions of Older Siblings' Reactions to Emotions to Preschoolers' Emotional and Social Competence - Children's Understanding of Emotion Communication in Families - Maternal Sensitivity and Infant Emotional Reactivity: Concurrent and Longitudinal Relations - Children's Emotional Reactions to Stressful Parent-Child Interactions: The Link Between Emotion Regulations and Vagal Tone - The Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES): Psychometric Properties and Relations with Children's Emotional Competence - Parental Contributions to Preschoolers' Understanding of Emotion - Children's Emotional Regulation and Social Competence in Middle Childhood: The Role of Maternal and Paternal Interactive Style - Index - Reference Notes Included