PERCEPTION OF MATERNAL CHILDREARING ATTITUDES, PERSONALITY OF THE PERCEIVER, AND INCIPIENT PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Abstract

The search for causal factors in the genesis of psychopathology has focused considerable attention upon early relationships within the family, particularly upon the mother-child relationship (i, 5, 6, 19). One of the major research avenues toward assessing the etiological importance of the mother-child interaction has been to compare the childrearing attitudes of mothers of behaviorally disordered offspring (typically schizophrenics) with the attitudes of mothers of normal sons or daughters. There have been some studies which have found systematic attitude differences between these classes of mothers (5, I6, 17), but other investigators (4, II, 13, 23) have failed to find differences in childrearing attitudes between mothers of disordered and normal offspring, perhaps suggesting the current limitations of a direct attitude assessment approach. A second method of investigating maternal attitudes as a factor in psychopathology is to assess the disordered child's perception of the mother's attitudes toward childrearing. The psychological (and phenomenological) rationale for this method is that the disruptive effecis of maternal attitudes are directly mediated by what the child perceives these attitudes to be. Singer (22), using TAT pictures, evaluated schizophrenics' perceptions of parental characteristics and familial relationships and concluded that they view parental figures as cold or rejecting and the relationships with parents as being relatively isolated. Lane and Singer (14) compared the responses of schizophrenics and normals on a modified TAT procedure and an opinion survey and found that schizophrenics viewed their mothers as more rejecting, as more often the dominant parent, and as more controlling relative to normals. Heilbrun (i i) compared the perceptions of maternal childrearing attitudes in female schizophrenics and normals by having them complete the Parent Attitude Research Instrument (2I) as they thought their mothers would. He found that schizophrenics tended to attribute more pathogenic authoritarian-control attitudes to their mothers relative to normals. In contrast to this, however, he found that schizophrenics tended to view their