Sensory experience and family process: perceptual styles tend to run in but not necessarily run families.

The science of family systems has begun to develop concepts and methods for objectively assessing important characteristics of families. Thus we now have ways of measuring differences among families with respect to cohesiveness, flexibility, clarity of communication, and shared views of social reality. We know practically nothing, however, about the origins of these differences among families. One possibility is that the skills or personal attributes of one or more individual members influences the characteristics of the family as a whole. This paper explores the hypothesis that the perceptual styles of individual members--the ways they organize their experience of their personal stimulus world--influence the shared perceptions the family develops of the social world in which it lives. We explored relationships between nine measures of perceptual style and problem-solving measures of the family's shared perception of its social world. The findings showed many similarities among members of the same family on several measures of perceptual style. However, perceptual style had only a few relationships with family performance in the problem-solving task.