Joseph Veroff

Terri L. Orbuch

Diane Holmberg

Researchers have studied marriage for decades, but how is the transition to married life actually experienced by the couples involved? From an insider's perspective, Thrice Told Tales examines married couples' own stories of their relationship. A representative sample of 199 African-American and 177 White married couples were asked to tell the story of their relationship. It provides accounts of courtships, weddings, honeymoons, their adjustment in the early years, and hopes for the future. These stories were first collected a few months after their weddings, and again in the third and seventh years of their marriages. What features of their relationship do the couples highlight as central in the early years? How do their stories change over time? What can we learn about couples' marital well-being by analyzing their stories? How do the stories of men and women, and of White and African-American couples differ? These questions were systematically addressed using extensive coding schemes and comprehensive quantitative analyses. Details of the coding system and procedures are included, making this volume a useful reference for any researcher contemplating analysis of narrative data. However, the key points are also explained in simple prose and illustrated with quotes from the couples' own stories, making the book accessible to anyone with an interest in how young couples experience married life today.

Married Couples Tell Their Stories

Thrice Told Tales

Fred B. Bryant

This book is about savoring life—the capacity to attend to the joys, pleasures, and other positive feelings that we experience in our lives. The authors enhance our understanding of what savoring is and the conditions under which it occurs. Savoring provides a new theoretical model for conceptualizing and understanding the psychology of enjoyment and the processes through which people manage positive emotions. The authors review their quantitative research on savoring, as well as the research of others, and provide measurement instruments with scoring instructions for assessing and studying savoring. Authors Bryant and Veroff outline the necessary preconditions that must exist for savoring to occur and distinguish savoring from related concepts such as coping, pleasure, positive affect, emotional intelligence, flow, and meditation. The book’s lifespan perspective includes a conceptual analysis of the role of time in savoring. Savoring is also considered in relation to human concerns, such as love, friendship, physical and mental health, creativity, and spirituality. Strategies and hands-on exercises that people can use to enhance savoring in their lives are provided, along with a review of factors that enhance savoring. Savoring is intended for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in positive psychology from the fields of social, clinical, health, and personality psychology and related disciplines. The book may serve as a supplemental text in courses on positive psychology, emotion and motivation, and other related topics. The chapters on enhancing savoring will be especially attractive to clinicians and counselors interested in intervention strategies for positive psychological adjustment.

A New Model of Positive Experience

Savoring

Joanne B. Veroff

Social Incentives: A Life-Span Developmental Approach presents a developmental perspective about universal social goals, one that provides an examination of human motivation over the life span. The book aims to discover the kind of goals people display in their interactions with one another, how to understand them, how are they acquired, and how do they help in understanding human social behavior. Discussions on the theory of social incentives from the point of view of developmental psychology; social motivations during the different stages of life; and the socialization process based on a life-span developmental model of social motivation brings us closer to understanding the topic. Social and developmental psychologists, motivational experts, and clinicians will find the text invaluable.

A Life-Span Developmental Approach

Social Incentives

Elizabeth Douvan

Shirley J. Hatchett

An attempt to find what factors influence marital instability in the first years of marriage.

Joseph Veroff

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