Joseph Veroff

Americans view their mental health

BOOK REVIEWS Americans View Their Mental Health. By Gerald Gurin, Joseph Veroff, and Sheila Feld. Price,

Who will Divorce: A 14-Year Longitudinal Study of Black Couples and White Couples:

7.50. Pp. 444. Basic Books, Inc., 59 Fourth Ave., New York 3, 1960. This is the fourth in the series of ten monographs sponsored by the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health and designed to assess the nations mental health resources and needs from a variety of perspectives. Its focus is the subjective dimension of mental health. Although not all of the monographs have been published so far, the findings and the recommendations of each have been already summed up and interpreted in the Commissions final report which, because of the publicity it has received, may be familiar to many readers. The present volume is based on an interview survey conducted in 1957 with nearly twenty-five hundred individuals selected to provide a probability sample of the countrys adult population. It is a product of three social psychologists, all of whom are on the staff of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, one of the few widely recognized and influential organizations of its kind in social sciences. Besides being impressive for sheer magnitude and the consistent clarity in the presentation and evaluation of the data, the study gives further testimony of the methodological sophistication and the technical know-how typical of the work produced by the Center. Without committing themselves to a definition of mental health, the investigators explore it through a number of measures of adjustment. The measures, however, all derive from the self-appraised, experiential realm of the respondent. In the area of general life adjustment, such measures are obtained from the information about the extent of worrying, evaluation of personal happiness, whether the respondent ever felt close to a nervous breakdown, and if he ever experienced a problem relevant for professional help. In the more specific areas of functioning, namely, marriage, parenthood, and work, adjustment is studied via consideration of such variables as satisfaction with the particular role, feelings of adequacy in performing it, degree of involvement, expectations about future, and the type of problems and their prevalence encountered in each role. It is worth pointing out that in taking a multiple-criterion approach to mental health, the investigators are implicitly in agreement with the current view (e.g., Jahoda, 1958; Smith, 1961) that the search for a conceptual formulation of mental health which could meet with a general consensus is futile because of the unavoidable valuative assumptions in all such formulations. The organization of the book is as follows : The first part deals mainly with the distribution and the interrelations of the indices of adjustment in different demographic groups, most often specified in terms of such variables as sex, education, and age. (Religion, in-

Dimensions of subjective mental health in American men and women

The present study examines the early development of marriage for a representative sample of urban white couples and black couples. We are interested in predicting the stability of these marriages over the first 14 years of marriage. First, we assess whether objective social and economic conditions account for divorce over time. These factors focus on oppressive social conditions, lower status positions in society, and challenges of parenthood and family responsibilities. Next, we concentrate on perceived interactive processes between spouses that are critical for maintaining a relationship over time. We postulate that race, gender, and time act as contexts in which to understand the quality and impact of structure and the perceptions of interaction in predicting divorce. Results indicate that both race and education are critical to the risk of divorce over 14 years. Perceived interactional processes are also important to divorce, but often depend on the contexts of race and gender.

Contextual Determinants of Personality

Confirmatory factor analyses were used to map dimensions of subjective mental health underlying 25 indexes of well-being and distress assessed in a 1976 national representative survey of adults. Partially confirming hypotheses, six dominant factors (Unhappiness, Lack of Gratification, Strain, Feelings of Vulnerability, Lack of Self-Confidence, and Uncertainty) emergedfor both men and women. Comparative analyses revealed that the six-factor model derived for men fit the data of both sexes, equally well. Thus, this model provides a means of assessing mens and womens self-evaluations comparably. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated the divergent validity of the dimensions in the model by differentially relating certain demographic and behavioral measures to the various factors. Four critical theoretical issues were discussed as underlying measures of subjective mental health: affective orientation (positive vs. negative), object offocus (world vs. self), time referent (past vs. present vs. future), and mode of reaction (spontaneous vs. reflective).

Perceptions of marital interaction among black and white newlyweds

An approach is developed that relies on the principle that an individuals personality is best described and understood in terms of various contexts in which that individual is embedded. Five different kinds of contexts are considered: historical, cultural (and subcultural), developmental, organizational, and interpersonal. Each is illustrated with findings from two national sample surveys (one done in 1957; the other in 1976) that measured social motives through thematic apperceptive techniques. This contextual approach implies that personality is dynamically accumulative over the life span and that it is best assessed by subdividing a given personality characteristic into variants of that characteristic, which, if measured, can accurately pick up the contextual effects on the characteristic.

Marital Instability: A Social and Behavioral Study of the Early Years

Perceptions of marital interactions were gathered from a representative sample of urban newlywed couples (199 Black and 174 White). A factor analysis of the reports found 6 factors common to husbands and wives: Disclosing Communication, Affective Affirmation, Negative Sexual Interaction, Traditional Role Regulation, Destructive Conflict, and Constructive Conflict. Avoiding Conflict was specific to men and Positive Coorientation was specific to women. Wives reported fewer constructive and more destructive conflict behaviors. Compared with Whites, Blacks reported more disclosure, more positive sexual interactions, and fewer topics of disagreement. They also more often reported leaving the scene of conflict and talking with others more easily than with the spouse. As hypothesized, perceptions that marital interactions affirm ones sense of identity strongly predicted marital well-being. Although regression analyses predicting marital happiness yielded few interactions with race or gender, those that are significant, coupled with race and gender differences in perceiving interaction, suggest taking a contextual orientation to the meaning of marital interaction.

Race and gender differences in black and white newlyweds’ perceptions of sexual and marital relations

Preface Introduction Premarital Factors in Marital Instability The First Year of Marriage: Interpersonal Attitudes, Perceptions, and Interactions The First Year of Marriage: External Factors The First Year of Marriage: Intergrative Marital Feelings The Second Year of Marriage: Stressors, Interference, and Integrative Feelings The Third Year of Marriage The Fourth Year of Marriage A Summing Up: Major Factors Affecting Instability Across the First Years of Marriage References Index

A Programmatic Review: Building a Two-Way Bridge between Social Psychology and the Study of the Early Years of Marriage

A representative sample of 199 Black and 174 White urban newlywed couples completed questionnaire items about their marital and sexual relations. In principal components analyses of these reports, care and positive relations in the marriage were associated with perceptions of sexual enjoyment in the marriage for women more than men, although these perceptions were also associated for men. Reports of sexual upset were associated with reports of irritation and tension for all groups, but least so for White wives. Reports of enjoyable and upsetting sexual relations emerged on separate factors for Black spouses but not White spouses, suggesting that Black spouses pay greater attention to sexual enjoyment in its own right. However, further analysis showed that this pattern characterized lower income Black wives, but not higher income Black wives, for whom positive and negative sexual relations items clustered, as they did for White wives. Thus, for these couples, race, gender, and class were all salient in sha...

Assessing the validity of the achievement motive in the presence of random measurement error.

We summarize our programmatic efforts to make use of several critical processes advanced by social psychological theorists that have direct relevance to the study of marriage. We show how these processes have been useful in our Early Years of Marriage Project, a longitudinal study of marital phenomena among black couples and white couples, and in other similar longitudinal marital studies. We also argue that, in such marital research, we can understand many aspects of social interaction not easily studied elsewhere in social psychology, and thus important new insights about the nature of social psychological processes in general emerge. We thus extend the richness of the general theoretical processes with which we started.

Commitment in the Early Years of Marriage

The presence of random measurement error in indicators of theoretical constructs biases observed estimates of relations among those constructs. Correcting for this bias is particularly important when random measurement error is substantial, or is substantially different for indicators of distinct constructs included in a theoretical model. Validity assessment in the case of thematic apperceptive measures of the achievement motive (TAT n Achievement) has been vulnerable to interpretive errors because these indicators of the achievement motive are typically much less reliable than indicators of other constructs to which the motive may be related, and no correction has been made for the bias introduced by such differential measurement error. Here we illustrate a causal modeling approach to validity assessment for TAT n Achievement that incorporates explicit true-score measurement models of theoretical constructs. We confirm the hypothesis that the achievement motive construct is positively related to work satisfaction in a representative sample of adult males in the United States, taken in 1976 (N = 413). Evidence for the discriminant validity of story content versus story length, an issue raised in the literature on the TAT, is also presented in this nomological network.