Effects of Mothers' Power Perceptions

The purpose of Bugental and associates' (1993) research was to examine the effects of mothers' power perceptions in parent-child relationships on their emotional and physical responses to children and to then generalize findings observed in this examination to those maladaptive relationships where parents exert excessive and sometimes tyrannical control over the child. Based on a review of the existing research, it was hypothesized that those adults who perceived themselves as having low power and the child as having high power would evidence more negative emotions and stronger patterns of defensive physical arousal than would adults who perceived their power as high and the child's power as low.

Further, it was predicted that this pattern of response would differ for the two groups of adults (low vs. high personal power perceptions) depending upon whether the child with whom they interacted was responsive or unresponsive to their efforts to elevate personal power. Specifically, those adults viewing self at a power disadvantage (Low PC group) were expected to show more negative reactions when the child was unresponsive than when the child was responsive.

On the other hand, those adults who did not view self as at a power disadvantage were expected to react the same regardless of whether the child was responsive or unresponsive. This expectation was based on Bowlby's attachment theory which would suggest that parents interpret unresponsiveness as a threat and operat

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art, be due to methodological difficulties with the study. Article #4 Truly close relationships, according to Cook (1992) are characterized by a certain degree of interdependence. In his study, Cook examined family members' sense of control over other members and its implications for their sense of interdependence (where interdependence was defined as the extent to which two people control each other's outcomes). In order to examine these control issues with precision and accuracy, the authors conducted a good deal of psychometric testing on the scales used to collect control data. The scale was then used to assess the control perceptions of several families (all of whom were two-parent, two-children families). Measures of family members' sense of interpersonal control of other family members were in terms of: (1) their general feelings of personal control in the particular relationship (e.g. relationship with father, relationship with sibling, relationship with mother); (2) the degree to which they felt the that the other family member was in control of them; (3) and their degree of belief that the relationship was due to external factors such as fate or luck. Findings of the study indicated that one's general sense o

Category: Psychology - E