A theory was proposed to reconcile paradoxical findings on the invariance of personality and the variability of behavior across situations. For this purpose, individuals were assumed to differ in (a) the accessibility of cognitive-affective mediating units (such as encodings, expectancies and beliefs, affects, and goals) and (b) the organization of relationships through which these units interact with each other and with psychological features of situations. The theory accounts for individual differences in predictable patterns of variability across situations (e.g., if A. then she X, but ifE then she Y), as well as for overall average levels of behavior, as essential expressions or behavioral signatures of the same underlying personality system. Situations, personality dispositions, dynamics, and structure were reconceptualized from this perspective. The construct of personality rests on the assumption that individuals are characterized by distinctive qualities that are relatively invariant across situations and over time. In a century of personality research, however, abundant evidence has documented that individual differences in social behaviors tend to be surprisingly variable across different situations. Although this finding has been interpreted as evidence against the utility of the personality construct, we show that it need not be and, on the contrary, that this variability reflects some of the essence of personality coherence. When personality is conceptualized as a stable system that mediates how the individual selects, construes, and processes social information and generates social behaviors, it becomes possible to account simultaneously for both the invariant qualities of the underlying personality and the predictable variability across situations in some of its characteristic behavioral expressions. In this article, we begin with a review of recent empirical data demonstrating that individuals are characterized not only by stable individual differences in their overall levels of behavior, but also by distinctive and stable patterns of behavior variability across situations. These findings invite a new conception of personality in which such patterns of variability are seen not as

/pdf/a-cognitive-affective-system-theory-of-personality-2vf59hya67.pdf

A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure.

People who are sensitive to social rejection tend to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to it. This article shows that this cognitive-affective processing disposition undermines intimate relationships. Study 1 describes a measure that operationalizes the anxious-expectations component of rejection sensitivity. Study 2 provides experimental evidence that people who anxiously expect rejection readily perceive intentional rejection in the ambiguous behavior of others. Study 3 shows that people who enter romantic relationships with anxious expectations of rejection readily perceive intentional rejection in the insensitive behavior of their new partners. Study 4 demonstrates that rejection-sensitive people and their romantic partners are dissatisfied with their relationships. Rejection-sensitive men's jealousy and rejection-sensitive women's hostility and diminished supportiveness help explain their partners' dissatisfaction.

https://www.ffri.hr/~ibrdar/komunikacija/seminari/Downey,%201996%20-%20Rejection%20Sensitivity%20for%20intimate%20relationsh.pdf

Implications of rejection sensitivity for intimate relationships.

A "stuck" system, that is, a family with a problem, needs new ideas in order to broaden its perspectives and its contextual premises. In this approach, a team behind a one-way screen watches and listens to an interviewer's conversation with the family members. The interviewer, with the permission of the family, then asks the team members about their perceptions of what went on in the interview. The family and the interviewer watch and listen to the team discussion. The interviewer then asks the family to comment on what they have heard. This may happen once or several times during an interview. In this article, we will first describe the way we interview the family because the interview is the source from which the reflections flow. We will then describe and exemplify the reflecting team's manner of working and give some guidelines because the process of observation has a tendency to magnify every utterance. Two case examples will be used as illustrations.

https://www.willhall.net/files/OpenDialogueReflectingTeamAndersenFamilyProcess1986.pdf

The Reflecting Team: Dialogue and Meta‐Dialogue in Clinical Work

The concept of resilience, the ability to withstand and rebound from crisis and adversity, has valuable potential for research, intervention, and prevention approaches aiming to strengthen couples and families. Resilience has been viewed as residing within the individual, with the family often dismissed as dysfunctional. This article advances a systemic view of resilience in ecological and developmental contexts and presents the concept of family resilience, attending to interactional processes over time that strengthen both individual and family hardiness. Extending our understanding of normal family functioning, the concept of family resilience offers a useful framework to identify and fortify key processes that enable families to surmount crises and persistent stresses. There are many pathways in relational resilience, varying to fit diverse family forms, psychosocial challenges, resources, and constraints. Shared beliefs and narratives that foster a sense of coherence, collaboration, competence, and confidence are vital in coping and mastery. Interventions to strengthen family resilience have timely relevance for weathering the rapid social changes and uncertainties facing families today.

The concept of family resilience: crisis and challenge.

This essay examines the systemic guiding principles of neutrality, hypothesizing, and circularity, historically developed by the Milan Team of Selvini-Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, and Prata (12, 13). With the reorganization of these team members (see 11 for a summary of the distinctions between the work of the Selvini-Palazzoli and Prata research team and the Cecchin and Boscolo training team), different reconstructions of the original systemic principles have evolved. New understanding of the concepts of circularity, hypothesizing, and neutrality are now possible, given the systemic epistemology on which the early Milan model was based. It should be emphasized, however, that the ideas presented in this essay are most associated with the systemic work of the Cecchin and Boscolo team.

Hypothesizing, circularity, and neutrality revisited: An invitation to curiosity.

This article presents a multidimensional, theoretical model for the understanding of relationships in which men are violent toward women. It argues that abusive relationships exemplify, in extremis, the stereotypical gender arrangements that structure intimacy between men and women generally. Moreover, it proposes that paradoxical gender injunctions create insoluble relationship dilemmas that can explode in violence. A multifaceted approach to treatment, which incorporates feminist and systemic ideas and techniques, is described.

Love and Violence: Gender Paradoxes in Volatile Attachments†

"Feed-forward" is a technique that encourages families to imagine the pattern of their relationships at some future point in time. Questions about the future, in conjunction with positive connotation, put families in a metaposition to their own dilemmas and thus facilitate change by opening up new solutions for old problems.

Feed‐Forward: Future Questions, Future Maps

This article uses the ideas of social constructionism to explore how families change by investigating the way our perceptions of ourselves in relation to others are formed through language. The idea that language has the inherent potential to generate a reply has strongly influenced our thinking. We propose that the reply to others is shaped by our initial reply to ourselves in inner conversation. Interaction moves back and forth from inner conversation to conversation with others, from monologue to dialogue, becoming the “stuff” of new narratives. The particular focus on language in this article is on how adding writing to the session conversation produces a “participant text,” a therapeutic narrative that is composed of the voices of the family and the therapists. These voices, often newly discovered or invented, allow our narrative discourse to expand and multiply. Using this approach with individuals, couples, and families from different socioeconomic levels, we have worked with mourning, divorcing couples, recovery from abuse, marital conflict, parenting dilemmas, and physical illness.

Creating a Participant Text: Writing, Multiple Voices, Narrative Multiplicity

Coalitions and binding interactions in families with chronic illness.

In our work with families that struggle with a chronic illness, we have relied on three ideas. First, we regard illness as a relationally traumatizing experience, not just for the person with the illness, but for other members of the family as well. We use the phrase “relational trauma” because of its effects on members of a wider system who also show signs of physical stress, isolation, and helplessness (Sheinberg & Fraenkel, 2000). Our second concern is how the conversation that leads to new stories is expanded through the development of voice and the use of writing. Looking at language, we are particularly attentive to the social prevalence of negative metaphors that surround and engulf the ill person and her family: dependence, poor genes, repressed personalities, weak constitutions, et cetera (Sontag, 1984). These negative metaphors, or outside voices, join with the inner voices of the ill person and result in a silence that disconnects people at a time when connections must be relied on and above question. Our third emphasis is on the use of writing as the means to create new voices, metaphors, and multiple descriptions that can reinvigorate the conversations silenced by the illness. Once the family's voices are reconstituted through writing, the emotions that have been displaced by the illness are restored to their conversation. I have included new research from JAMA detailing the treatment of patients with chronic illness through their use of writing.

I was 43 years old, a practicing, licensed psychologist for over 25 years, and happily married to the man with whom I was raising a 14-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter. I had just finished one year of treatment for cancer, a treatment the noted surgeon, Dr. Susan Love [citation omitted] refers to as “slash, cut, and burn.” My life was bleak and lonely because I lived in silence: certain that no one could bear to hear the feelings and thoughts I had following my year of treatment; unwilling to find out if I was right; certain that I needed to protect people from my experiences; and failing in those few times that I tried to put into words the chaos of my emotions and the terror that lived in my flesh.

—Kaethe Weingarten (2000, p. 390)

Peggy Penn

Papers

Love and Violence: Gender Paradoxes in Volatile Attachments†

Feed‐Forward: Future Questions, Future Maps

Creating a Participant Text: Writing, Multiple Voices, Narrative Multiplicity

Coalitions and binding interactions in families with chronic illness.

Chronic illness: trauma, language, and writing: breaking the silence.