There is an old adage that goes “A daughter is a daughter all of her life, but a son is a son ’til he takes him a wife.” Deborah M. Merrill, associate professor of sociology at Clark University explores whether or not this saying accurately describes marriage and intergenerational relationships today in her new book, “When Your Children Marry: How Marriage Changes Relationships with Adult Children”

“When Your Children Marry” examines how marriage changes relationships between adult children and their parents and how this differs for sons versus daughters. The text examines both the quality of parent–adult child relationships following marriage and the process by which those relationships change.

The book is based on interviews with 25 mothers who had at least one married son and one married daughter as well as 25 adult children (eight men and 17 women) who had at some point been married for at least two years. Because the book is based on interviews rather than quantitative data, it uses colorful real-life scenarios and first-person quotes to support a finding rather than relying simply upon statistics.

“Marriage is greedier toward men than women with respect to intergenerational relationships.”

Merrill’s book is unique in that it accounts for the perspectives of both mothers and adult children—rather than putting the focus on just one of these groups—to provide a more complete picture of today’s intergenerational relationships.

Curious? Continue reading

 

Source: Clark University in Massachusetts

Dr. Richard J. McNally, researcher in the psychology department at Harvard University, and author of What Is Mental Illness?
and Maia Szalavitz, author and editor at Time.com’s Healthland blog,  discuss the chemistry and controversy of antidepressant medications.
Listen to the podcast on Skeptically Speaking

Source: Skeptically Speaking with a hat tip to Vaughan Bell 🙂

Gestalt psychology contends that the human brain organizes what the eyes see based on traits such as similarity, common background, and proximity. But a new illusion that took second place in the 2011 Best Illusion of the Year Contest—a competition held annually by the Neural Correlate Society—illustrates that our brains can also organize what we see based on changes in contrast.

Arthur Shapiro, professor of psychology at American University, Erica Dixon, a first-year PhD student at AU, and Kai Hamburger, a researcher at Universität Giessen (Germany), created the illusion called “Grouping by Contrast.”

The illusion brings a new dimension to understanding how our brains organize what we see.

“We perceive a world that can be divided into objects with boundaries,” said Shapiro. “According to Gestalt psychology, the objects constitute the foreground, while the rest of the world acts likes the background for these objects. Our illusion illustrates that the visual system can organize the world based on the transition between the foreground and the background.” [continue reading…]