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Using an indirect measure of family structure, relationships between parents and adolescents were studied in 99 U. S. and 60 Japanese families. As two-person relationships tend toward instability under stress, a third person may be drawn in to stabilize the system. Parents, for example, may avoid the tension in the marital relationship by focusing together on an adolescent's problem, or pull the adolescent into a coalition with one parent. Either way the parents are said to have "triangled" the adolescent. In this study, a relationship is found between parents avoiding tension in their own relationship and their tendency to triangle an adolescent. Triangled daughters, in both cultures, had lower scores on ego development, supporting the hypothesis that such patterns can be detrimental to the adolescent's personal development. The discussion includes comments on cross-cultural research.

Social norms are often cited as the cause of many social phenomena, especially as an explanation for prosocial family and relationship behaviors. And yet maybe we love the idea of social norms too much, as suggested by our failure to subject them to rigorous test. Compared to the detail in social norms theoretical orientations, there is very little detail in tests of normative theories. To provide guidance to researchers who invoke social norms as explanations, we catalog normative orientations that have been proposed to account for consistent patterns of action. We call on researchers to conduct tests of normative theories and the processes such theories assert.

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Evolution, of course, occurs through genes. The metaphor of competing genes is illuminating but, as far as we know, genes do not take an active part in their survival, notwithstanding the anthropomorphic survival "strategies" and teleological "designs" described by some authors (Axelrod, 1984;Clutton-Brock, 1991;

This longitudinal study explores the association between family system characteristics measured during adolescence and later midlife well-being. Home interviews were held in the 1970s with 99 families with adolescents. Connection and individuation in the family system were coded from taped family interactions. Twenty-five years later, telephone interviews were conducted with 54 men and 120 women (representing 82 families) who were adolescents in the 1970s interviews. Family experiences during adolescence predicted adult well-being 25 years later. In a structural equation model, there was a direct effect of family both on the adolescents' later marriage and on well-being at midlife; for men, marriage also affected well-being. The results support the importance of connection and individuation in the adolescent family for adult well-being.

Some scholars have suggested that individual religiosity inhibits deviant behavior. Others have suggested thatbehavior is more responsive to the influence of religiously-oriented moral communities than to the religiosity of individuals. Still others have suggested that non-religious moral communities, such as sports teams or self-help recovery groups, are just as effective as religious moral communities. The current article examines the associations between addicts' reductions in drug and alcohol use and religiosity, increase in church attendance, and increase in addiction self-help recovery group attendance, following participation in publicly funded treatment programs. Results indicate that increase in self-help recovery group attendance and church attendance were independently associated with reduction in alcohol use. Only increase in church attendance was significantly associated with reduction in cocaine use. Self-assessed religious conviction was not associated with changes in drug use.Three decades have passed since the results of the Travis Hirschi -Rodney Stark (1969) "Hellfire and Delinquency" study shattered scholarly consensus on the relationship between religion and social deviance. Religious respondents in Hirschi and Stark's sample were found to be just as likely as non-religious respondents to commit delinquent acts. Their findings were supported by Burkett and White (1974) for most areas of delinquent behavior, but were at least partially contradicted by Albrecht and colleagues (1977). The question of the influence of religion on behavior has not been settled in the intervening decades. Some studies conclude that individual religiosity deters delinquent conduct (Peek, Curry, and Chalfant, 1985;Benda, 1994;Burkett 1993; Cochran, Wood, and Arnklev, 1994), while others suggest that religiosity has no independent effect on most delinquent behaviors Ross, 1994).Recently, Stark and William Bainbridge (1998: 70-71) have noted that the results of studies on religion and deviance are consistent within regions of the United States, but differ between regions. Specifically, they note that church attendance rates for the Pacific coast, where the null results studies were conducted, are far lower than for other regions of the country. They regard this regional variation as empirical evidence for Stark's (1987) "moral communities" hypothesis, which states that individual religiosity influences behavior only when it is reinforced by a cohesive religious community. The moral communities theory is directly supported by results from a few studies (Welch, Tittle, & Petee, 1991;Stark, Doyle, and Kent, 1980). Although these studies make use of ecological data, Stark and Bainbridge (1998: 64-65) and Evans and colleagues (1995)