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Social psychologists interested in the study of group processes have largely ignored social interactions in the context of the family. In contrast, much of the research in developmental psychology has focused on parent-child interactions and how they facilitate children's and adolescents' social and emotional development and adjustment. This chapter focuses on one aspect of family interactions, parent-adolescent conflict, and describes the results of an ongoing program of research that investigated adolescents' and parents' interpretations of conflicts, or the meaning different family members ascribe to their disputes. Research employing middle-class European-American and African-American families and lower-class Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong is used to illustrate cultural differences and similarities in types of conflicts, conflict frequency and intensity, reasoning about conflicts, and conflict resolution. The proposition advanced here is that adolescent-parent conflict helps to transform and restructure family relationships and to facilitate adolescent development. These findings challenge researchers interested in group processes to develop models that describe how groups change and evolve in response to conflict.

We are growing accustomed to shock tactics of the US Administration in dealing with toxic residues in food or additives which are a hazard to man, as well as the daily press infusing sensation, even melodrama, into them, but the recent action of the FDA in calling in from the food market several million cans of tuna and other deep sea fish because of the presence of mercury has had the worthwhile effect of drawing world attention to the growing menace of environmental pollution. The level of mercury in the fish is immaterial; it should never have been there at all, but it stresses the importance of the food chain in the danger to man and animal life generally, including fish beneath the sea. Without underestimating risks of pollution in the atmosphere from nuclear fission products, from particulate matter carried in the air by inhalation or even skin absorption, food and drink, which includes aqua naturale would seem to be the greatest danger to life. What these recent events illustrate in a dramatic manner, however, is the extent of pollution.