Sarah Vasques Presnell ENG 1102 Due 26 March 2014

Evaluative Works Cited

Whitton, Sarah W., et al. "Effects Of Parental Divorce On Marital Commitment And Confidence." Journal Of Family Psychology 22.5 (2008): 789-793. PsycARTICLES. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.

This is an online academic article from the scholarly Journal of Family Psychology published by the American Psychological Association. It finds links between parental divorce and their offsprings feelings towards relationships. It begins by describing her study of 265 engaged couples who have never been married before. It describes all of the areas that the ongoing study is looking at including relationship commitment, confidence, and parental divorce or inter-parental conflict of the subjects. The rest of the article describes the results of this study and the hypothesis drawn about the couples with divorced parents versus the couples with stillmarried parents. The study showed a remarkable correlation between negative attitudes towards marriage and having divorced parents. This article answers some questions about the effects of divorce on children but leaves me wondering about some specifics like how the effect might be different based on age or gender. The author Sarah W. Whitton has a Ph. D in psychology. She works at the University of Cincinnati teaching and researching the links between family and marital relationships and mental health. Shes written a lot for the Journal of Family Psychology along with a lot of other scholarly psychology journals. The Journal of Family Psychology is published by the American Psychological Association. This is the biggest scientific and professional psychology organization in the United States. Its clear that if she has written for this numerous times then she must have good credibility.

Shulman, Shmuel, Aynat Zlotnik, Lital Shachar-Shapira, Jennifer Connolly, and Yvonne Bohr. Adolescent Daughters Romantic Competence: The Role of Divorce, Quality of Parenting, and Maternal Romantic History. 5th. 41. Springer US, 2012. 593-606. Print.

This is a scholarly print article about a study, from the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. It is in the same general subject but answers some of my questions that I didnt find in the first source. Its focus is more specifically on how parental divorce impacts daughters. It is a study that took 80 mother-daughter pairs and assessed them. The finding showed that daughters of the divorced families had lower romantic competence that could only be alleviated by adaptive parenting and spousal relationships. I found this really interesting because it applies so directly to my situation, and technically it should mean that the findings relate to me. This article solidifies what the first article said about the damaging effects of divorce on children, so it seems like it can clearly be assumed that this must be true. However Im still left with a big question about how your age at the time of parental divorce plays a role, if any, in your development. Divorce happens when children are infants all the way to when theyre in adulthood and it seems like that would play a huge role in how it affects you. I find it a little strange that neither source has addressed this. This article comes from volume 41 of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, a research publication. I believe that this gives ton of credibility to the article, because the Journal of Youth and Adolescence is contributed to by psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists, and many other extremely educated professionals. This article specifically has five different authors. All work in a Department of Psychology at various universities. To write for this scholarly Journal I believe they must be very credible.

Brothers, Dr. Joyce. "Why We Love Who We Love: The real reasons why we choose that special someone." Reader's Digest. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. <http://www.rd.com/advice/relationships /why-we-love-who-we-love/2/>. This is a source thats a lot different than the previous two. Its actually an article from a popular online magazine, Readers Digest. This article describes the work of a few psychologists- most notably John Money, a professor of Medical Psychology and Pediatrics at John Hopkins University. What the article describes, in an easy-to-read way, is what the

psychologist calls our love map. The love map is developed from birth to the age of six, at which point its basically set in stone. During this time Money believes that you develop what will be your future quirks and interests in adult relationships. This article describes that if something like divorce happens while this love map is developing, it can have a huge effect on how you learn to feel and communicate love. If something like divorce happens after your love map is developed, it doesnt have as big of an impact. That answers my big question about the effect that a parental divorce has based on how old the children are. While its just one psychologists theory, this source could answer my question about the age factor. This would mean that my own parents divorce didnt have as big of an impact since it happened when I was eight. Because of this, Im now curious about other more subtle parental actions that could have an effect on us besides divorce. This article comes from an online magazine, but I dont think that necessarily hurts the credibility. Readers Digest is a popular magazine by the Readers Digest Association which says that the magazine gives expertly curated content in a way thats easy to read. Just because its a magazine doesnt mean it wasnt written by experts, its just written in a way that would be simpler for an average person to understand. The author of the article, the late Dr. Joyce Diane Brothers, was a psychologist, TV personality and columnist. She had a television show where she gave psychological advice and was the face of American psychology according to The Washington Post, which I think lends her a lot of credibility. Even though she was in entertainment, she was still a psychologist, and was knowledgeable in her field, therefore I trust this article.

Fraley, R. Chris. "A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research." University of Illinois. 2010. Lecture. This online paper/lecture introduced me to the Attachment Theory, which was created by a psychologist named John Bowlby. This paper is a sort of beginners-guide to the theory, which was perfect because I had never heard of it. John Bowlby hypothesized that an infants attachment to their caregiver had an enormous effect on them throughout their life. The attachment results from how the mother cares for the infant in the very beginning of its life (from birth to about age two). There are two main ways infants can attach, these attachment styles are securely or insecurely. Fraley explains the Strange Situation test invented by psychologist Mary Ainsworth to test which attachment style an infant is. A short description of the test is that it begins with an infant and mother playing in a room. The mother leaves, a stranger is introduced, and then the mother returns. How the baby reacts during each event displays which attachment style they are. The baby can be securely or insecurely attached. The paper then goes

to briefly describe the adult attachment theory, which is how your infant attachment style affects your personality towards relationships as an adult. This article is what introduced me what to I wanted to focus my inquiry on. I was curious about the effects of parenting on children, and this presents a theory correlating an infants caregiving to their later personality. It demonstrates how hugely your behavioral tendencies can be impacted by the way that you were raised, instead of just by major life events. It even states that divorce has little to no effect on adult attachment style. That means that compared to what I found about parental-divorce affecting some aspects of your personality, your attachment style must be so deep-rooted that it cant be affected. Unlike any previous sources, this is neither a scholarly article nor magazine article. Its a paper written by R. Chris Faley, not for any Journal or organization. However it has high credibility. Faley is a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Psychology. In 2007 he received, from the American Psychological Association (that I researched earlier), The Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Individual Differences. His main area of research is the study of attachment processes in relationships. This gives him a ton of credibility for exactly what hes writing about in his paper. I believe this makes the information in this paper very trustworthy.

Cherry, Kendra. Attachment Styles. <http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/ss/attac hmentstyle_6.htm, . Keynote.>.

This is an online slide-show from an About Psychology educational site. It briefly summarizes what I learned about Attachment theory from my previous article, but then goes into detail about four specific attachment styles and how they translate to adult personality traits. This is written not in article format, but in the way that you might learn it in a classroom. It has slides with diagrams and bulleted key points that is simple and useful if youre not an expert in psychology (unlike the scholarly journals.) The slides focus on adult attachments. Although Fraley talked about two attachment styles, secure and insecure, there are a few sub-styles that fall under the insecure category. Secure attachments tend to lead to adults who are comfortable in romantic situations and dont have anxiety towards them. But the three insecure attachments: Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized might cause difficulty in adult relationships. In short, Avoidant types might grow up to think love is rare and temporary. Ambivalent types might fall in love often but be afraid of getting too close to a romantic partner. And disorganized types would have a combination of these effects. It also explains how each attachment style is caused. Secure attachments are usually the result of attentive, very nurturing mothers. Insecure attachments on the other hand are caused when mothers are insensitive to an infants needs and dont comfort them quickly or at all.

This article is really interesting to me because I wanted to know more about how attachment styles affected you as an adult, and specifically what the outcomes of each type were. It was not only really interesting for me, but easy for me to understand. This slide-show was on an About Psychology website, which looked a little less professional than my other sources. About.com is a general collection of websites that claim to collect quality information on almost every topic. Specifically the psychology page seems to be aimed at students, helping them understand simple topics while also having pages about how to write psychology papers and take psychology exams. So far it doesnt s eem extremely credible, however the author of my specific article gives this specific source credibility. Kendra Cherry holds a BA in psychology and a Master of Science in Education. Her primary research is in educational psychology, which would give her credibility to be teaching this topic. She works as a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist to help children overcome behavioral issues caused by emotional disturbances. Although the site might not be credible, I believe Cherry has the necessary credentials for this to be a trustworthy slide-show. Not only has she studied this theory, but she works with children affected by it so she has first-hand experience with how it can impact you.