Perceived Parental Rejection in Middle Childhood as a Predictor of Lower Adulthood Resilience.

Camden, Abigail A.; Brown, Carrie M.

Negative relationships with parents can affect psychological adjustment, coping, and stress levels. It is possible that these relationships can also impact resilience, although this is an area not greatly explored. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from, or thrive despite, potentially traumatic events. One theoretical framework from which to explore resilience's association with perceived negative parental relationships is interpersonal acceptance-rejection theory, or IPARTheory, a theory of human development aiming to uncover the associated outcomes of perceived acceptance and rejection from significant others. Research investigating IPARTheory has revealed that perceived parental rejection is negatively associated with wellbeing, with some evidence for a negative association with resilience. Thus, we sought to investigate if perceived parental rejection would predict lower resiliency, for both women and men, and how the predictive strength of perceived maternal and paternal rejection might differ for men and women, separately. Participants (N = 308; Mage = 36.29) were recruited via snowball sampling and Amazon Mechanical Turk, and they completed measures of perceived parental acceptancerejection and resilience. Using multiple linear regression, we found that perceived paternal rejection--but not perceived maternal rejection--predicted lower resilience for men and women combined (β = . 19, p = .007). However, analyzing genders separately, the only significant regression was perceived paternal rejection predicting lower resilience for men (β = . 29, p = .02). Additional results controlling for age are reported. The present findings suggest that perceived parental rejection is an imperative focus for future resilience research and intervention.

SENSORY perception; PARENTAL rejection; PREDICTION (Psychology); PSYCHOLOGICAL resilience; PSYCHOLOGICAL adaptation

Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 2017, Vol 22, Issue 4, p294

2164-8204

Academic Journal

10.24839/2325-7342.JN22.4.294