This proposed project aims to further our basic knowledge about the etiology and maintenance of partner violence by cross-pollinating clinical science findings about coercive anger conflict behavior with basic science regarding the emotion and emotion regulation. Two questions are particularly vexing: Why do people persist in performing angry, coercive escalating behaviors toward family members despite the unpleasant and destructive qualities of the behavior (and despite the fact that such behaviors typically violate both personal and societal norms about how to treat loved ones)? How are some people able to deescalate out of angry conflict in a way that strengthens, rather than corrodes, their relationships? We propose a unifying explanation to both questions. By combining Patterson's (1982) model of how angry behavior escalation in families is unwittingly reinforced with basic emotion regulation research emphasizing the adaptivity of anger and the interactivity of its experiential, display/behavioral, and physiological components, we wilI posit an integrative model of the mechanisms that control dyadic anger escalation and de-escalation in couples' conflict. If our hypotheses are supported, not only will our understanding of the factors that promote and maintain partner violence be deepened, but we will have uncovered the natural consequences that underlie functional ways of handling angry conflict. The model will allow us to address some of the most pressing and basic, but unanswered, questions regarding partner violence, such as """"""""What accounts for the angry conflict behaviors of violent and nonviolent individuals: interpersonal processes orintra-individual ones? .... How do 1""""""""unctional individuals regulate angry conflicts to maximize their adaptiveness and minimize their destructive capacity?"""""""" """"""""What anger control strategies are effective and for whom? .... Which ones may be effective in some ways but counterproductive in others?"""""""" Answers to these questions are prerequisites to the creation of empirically derived, effective interventions for partner violence. We will test our hypotheses in an archival sample of 200 couples recruited from a representative sampling frame via random digit dialing procedures. Participants (a) were video-recorded during a 10-rain. marital conflict; (b) privately rated the intensity of their experienced anger on a moment-by-moment basis via a validated video-mediated recall procedure; and (c) privately indicated when they used intentional strategies to deescalate anger via a 2nd video-mediated recall viewing. As part of this application, we will code the intensity participants' displayed anger on a moment-by-moment basis, matching it with their ratings of experienced anger and intentional deescalation attempts.
| Lorber, Michael F; Slep, Amy M Smith (2005) Mothers' emotion dynamics and their relations with harsh and lax discipline: microsocial time series analyses. J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol 34:559-68 |
