Cluster analysis was applied to the marital reports of 99 husbands and wives (from 104 families) obtained when their firstborn sons were 10,27, 36, and 60 months of age to identify distinct patterns of change in marital functioning. Husband-love and wife-conflict scores revealed 3 distinct change patterns-stays good, bad to worse, and good gets worse-which afforded the opportunity to address 2 distinct questions, the 1st dealing with the correlates of consistently good and poor functioning marriages and the 2nd with what distinguishes marriages that initially functioned similarly (and well) but proceeded to develop in distinctively different ways. Results show, consistent with related findings from a study of newly weds (B. Kamey & T. Bradbury, 1997), that the answer to the 1st question is found in enduring personality traits of spouses, whereas the answer to the 2nd is found in observed marital dynamics (reflecting coparenting processes).

To test the hypothesis that early attentional persistence will moderate the effect of infant negative emotionality on social competence, problem behavior, and school readiness at age 3, data collected as part of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were subject to structural equation modeling analyses (N = 1,038). Consistent with Eisenberg et al.'s data on older children, high levels of negative emotionality were associated with low levels of social competence only when attentional persistence was poor. No such moderating effects of attentional persistence emerged in the case of behavior problems. And in the case of school readiness, findings indicated that high levels of negative emotionality predicted high levels of school readiness when attentional persistence was high, a result opposite to that found with respect to the prediction of social competence.

Data gathered from mothers on parenting and family climate when almost 1,000 children in the Dunedin, New Zealand, longitudinal study were 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, and 15 years of age were used to predict intergenerational relations between young adult children (age 26) and their middle-aged parents. Analyses focused on distinct developmental epochs revealed greater prediction from the middle-childhood and early-adolescent periods than from the early-childhood years: most indicated that more supportive family environments and child-rearing experiences in the family of origin forecasted more positive and less negative parent-child relationships (in terms of contact, closeness, conflict, reciprocal assistance) in young adulthood, though associations were modest in magnitude. Some evidence indicated that (modestly) deleterious effects on intergenerational relations of experiencing relatively unsupportive child-rearing environments in 1 but not 2 (of 3) developmental periods studied could be offset by relatively supportive family environments in the remaining developmental periods.

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This study examines differences in marital role attitudes and expected behavior among college students in mainland China and Taiwan. It is hypothesized that people in mainland China have become more egalitarian than have people in Taiwan with respect to the division of marital roles. Survey responses from 339 Taiwan students and 288 mainland China students are compared on four dimensions of marital role attitudes and six areas of traditional husband and wife role behaviors. These dimensions were determined through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The data indicate that although most of the hypothesized societal differences are supported, some are not. Possible regressive changes in mainland China and progressive changes in Taiwan during the past decade were speculated to be responsible for the discrepancy between hypotheses and results.