Introduction to the special series.

Abstract

Although the assessment and treatment of marital and family disorders from a psychological perspective have been conducted in one form or another for the past 40 years, the progression toward a view of these disorders as involving both intrapersonal as well interpersonal and broader systemic factors has been an arduous and uneven one. Early theoretical views of marital dysfunction in the 1940s were primarily intrapersonal in nature, with relationship distress seen as the culmination of unresolved conflicts; intrapersonal dysfunction was viewed as both a necessary and sufficient source of interpersonal distress. The promulgation of family systems views in the 1950s and 1960s reflected at least in part a rejection of narrow psychodynamic formulations and drew attention both to socioecological factors in individuals' personal and relationship functioning and to nonlinear, reciprocal patterns of influence. Although systemic formulations were intuitively appealing on a conceptual level, they presented difficulty in generating specific, operationalized predictions. Consequently, a strong impetus existed for the development of marital and family treatment programs from a behavioral or social-learning perspective in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, although they offered both theory driven and testable predictions regarding relationship functioning, early sociallearning models suffered from a naive exclusion of intrapersonal or cognitive mediators of interpersonal exchange. The rapprochement of intrapersonal and interpersonal models has been confined primarily to the last decade, drawing heavily on research from other subdisciplines within psychology on attention, attribution, expectancies, and subjective values. Despite the absence of a dominant, coherent theoretical model, both clinical practice and research in marital and family therapy have demonstrated exponential growth in the last two decades, as reflected by an increase in scholarly journals devoted to this area, by both the number and size of professional associations representing marital and family practitioners and researchers, and (as recently as 1985) by the designation of family psychology as a separate division within the American Psychological Association. To what should such growth be attributed? Traditionally, explanations have emphasized the high incidence of marital dissolution or the prevalence of marital and other family concerns in those individuals who seek mental health services. More recently, attention has turned to the role of marital and family dynamics not only in psychological difficulties in children or domestic violence but also in such individual disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse. The series begins with three articles examining the role of marital and family dysfunction in more traditional psychiatric disorders. Jacobson, Holtzworth-Munroe, and Schmaling review both theoretical models and empirical data relating marital therapy to the treatment of depression, agoraphobia, and alcoholism. Hahlweg et al. examine previous research on expressed emotion in families of psychiatric patients and on relapse following hospitalization to present data relating interactional patterns in the families of schizophrenics to expressed emotion in patients' relatives; both base-rate and sequential analyses demonstrate strong effects of negative interactions and suggest the potential utility of family interaction patterns as indicators of relapse proneness. Alexander, Waldron, Barton, and Mas examine the effects of relabeling and of positive versus negative interactions in altering attributions in families of delinquent adolescents; their results suggest that initial, negative exchanges in these highly conflicted families may generate negative artributional schemata highly resistant to clinical intervention. Kazak extends the conceptual framework beyond emotional or behavioral disorders in arguing for the importance of a systems and social-ecological perspective in serving families of chronically ill children. Three articles examine considerations in marital therapy from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. Baucom, Epstein, Sayers, and Sher discuss the role of cognitions in marital This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the user and is not to be disseminated broadly.