J. M. Gottman, L. F. Katz, and C. Hooven (1996) make an exciting and original contribution to the understanding of how parent-child relationships may affect children's development and adaptation. This comment attempts to place their contribution in the current context of family research; to raise some questions about the measurement, meaning, and function of meta-emotion; and to expand on some of Gottman et al.'s suggestions about directions for further research. During the past five decades, psychology has come a very long way toward contextualizing the study of children's development. Two quite different research paradigms are gradually beginning to come together—the study of regularities in the development of cognitive and social competence in the normal child and the study of dynamic family system properties that constitute risk and protective variables for the development of child psychopathology. In attempting to account for the range of adaption in children's behavior found in both clinical and nonclinical samples, researchers since the 1970s have moved from initially focusing on motherchild relationships as the primary context of children's development to examining the impact of father-child relationships (e.g., Parke, 1996), marital relationships (e.g., Cummings & Da vies, 1994), three-generational relationships
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Philip A. Cowan (1996) studied this question.