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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 operate from early childhood rules about how to handle such threats (working models). Such parents could be expected to be extra sensitive to social cues about power.

All of the "interaction" between parent and child took place through a computer which was controlled by the experimenter. In other words, subjects (consisting of 160 mothers of elementary school children who had been pretested for power perceptions and selected as either high or low PC adults) never ...

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Effects of Mothers' Power Perceptions. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:09, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683927.html