The Family Emotional System: An Integrative Concept for Theory, Science, and Practice presents an ongoing dialogue among scientists, family investigators, and clinicians related to a natural systems view of the family and human behavior that has been occurring over several decades. The concept of the family as an emotional system, as defined in Bowen theory, is presented as the principal integrative concept underlying this dialogue and an effort to move toward a science of human behavior. As a natural system, the family forms the immediate and most important context for individual development, and may be the most central and important environment shaping brain development across the lifetime of the individual. This book explains how the family system can serve as an integrative framework within which specific factual discoveries and hypotheses from many areas of science can be brought together and understood as various manifestations of a coherent whole. The Family Emotional System provides understanding of what is entailed in conceptualizing the family as an emotional system, a sense of the breadth and depth of knowledge the sciences are contributing to this effort, and examples of how this theoretical framework contributes to family research and practice. The richness and excitement occurring in the ongoing dialogue between scientists and Bowen family systems practitioners and researchers is captured along with the promise it holds for the study of human behavior.
Part I Bowen Theory and the Family Emotional System Chapter 1 Toward a Science of Human Behavior Robert J. Noone and Daniel V. Papero Chapter 2 The Family Emotional System Daniel V. Papero Chapter 3 Multigenerational Family Emotional Process as a Source of Individual Differences in Adaptiveness Robert J. Noone Chapter 4 The Predictability of the Family Emotional System Randall T. Frost Chapter 5 The Family as an Emotional Unit Concept: Origins and Early History John F. Butler Part IIScientific Contributions to an Emotional Systems Perspective Chapter 6 Epigenetic Effects of Parental Care within and across Generations Frances A. Champagne and James P. Curley Chapter 7 Early Context-Dependent Epigenetic Modifications and the Shaping of Brain and Behavior David Crews and Robert J. Noone Chapter 8Nonhuman Primate Models of Family Systems Charles T. Snowdon Chapter 9 The Instinctual Foundations of Infant Minds: How Primary Affects Guide the Construction of Their Higher Cognitive Proclivities and Abilities Jaak Panksepp & Marina Farinelli Chapter 10 Evolution of Psychological Mechanisms for Human Family Relationship Mark V. Flinn Chapter 11 The Family System of a Social Wasp Raghavendra Gadagkar Chapter 12 Ants and Families LeAnn S. Howard and Deborah M. Gordon Part IIIExamples of the Influence of a Family Emotional Systems Perspective on Research and Practice Chapter 13 Emotional Systems and the Regulation of Reproduction with Ovulation as an Illustration Victoria Harrison Chapter 14 Mating and Parental Care: The Influence of Gender on the Primary Triangle Margaret G. Donley Chapter 15 Understanding Autonomic Physiology and Relationship Processes in High-Risk Families Elizabeth Skowron About the Contributors
