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Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
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Published on: September 19, 2019

Bringing work home: the emotional experiences of mothers and fathers

Jennifer L Matjasko1, Amy F Feldman

  • 1Department of Human Ecology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA. matjasko@mail.utexas.edu

Journal of Family Psychology : JFP : Journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43)
|March 30, 2006
PubMed

Given the salience of work in our society, this study investigated how intrinsic work motivation, work hours, and taking time for self influenced the interplay between the emotional climates of work and home. The authors examined day-to-day emotional transmission between work and home (spillover) for 143 families using the experience sampling method and interview data from the Sloan Center's 500 Family Study (L. J. Waite & B. Schneider, 1997). Intrinsic work motivation, work hours, and taking time for self were used as predictors of spillover. There was evidence of emotional transmission from work to home for mothers' happiness, anger, and anxiety as well as for father's anxiety. Also, fathers scoring higher on intrinsic work motivation tended to report greater overall anxiety at home after the workday. Anxiety from work was less likely to spill over to the home when fathers reported working longer hours. These findings have practice implications for improving worker productivity and the well-being of two-working-parent families.

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