Evelyn C. Rohner

Antecedents and consequences of parental rejection: A theory of emotional abuse

Abstract Parental acceptance-rejection theory predicts that emotional abuse by parents has consistent effects on the personality development of children everywhere, as well as having consistent effects on the personality functioning of adults who were rejected as children. More specifically, parental acceptance-rejection theory predicts—and worldwide tests of these predictions confirm the expectation—that rejected children everywhere tend more than accepted children to be: hostile, aggressive, passive aggressive, or to have problems with the management of hostility and aggression; to be dependent or “defensively independent,” depending on the degree of rejection; to have an impaired sense of self-esteem and self-adequacy; to be emotionally unstable; emotionally unresponsive, and to have a negative world view. The theoretical rationale for these predictions in parental acceptance-rejection theory is presented. The article also describes an effective multimethod research strategy for studying the antecedents and consequences of parental acceptance-rejection and emotional abuse internationally. Finally, some of the worldwide social correlates of parental acceptance-rejection are discussed. For example evidence shows that the effects of parental rejection and emotional abuse are not limited simply to individual personality and behavior disorders, but they reach into such abstract domains as the religious beliefs of a people, their art, music, and other expressive behaviors. There now seems to be little doubt that the results of parental rejection as well as the mechanisms which produce or distort parental warmth work uniformly throughout our species, regardless of differences in race, nationality, time or other limiting conditions.

Enculturative Continuity and the Importance of Caretakers: Cross-Cultural Codes

Using Murdock and Whites (1969) sample of 186 societies we present here a set of 20 holocultural codes pertaining to two classes of socialization variables: enculturative continuity, and the importance of various categories of child caretakers. Tests of inter relationships among variables showed that worldwide, mothers are generally the most important caretakers of children, although grandparents, siblings, fathers and others also exert substantial socializing influence on children Mothers and fathers tend to be about equally important as caretakers of sons, but mothers tend to be significantly more important than fathers as caretakers of daughters. Regarding enculturative continuity, to the extent that mothers (but not fathers or others) are important in the caretaking role, both boys and girls tend to be continuously socialized to particpate in the social system in essentially adultlike ways. Finally, the relative importance of mothers versus fathers as caretakers is significantly related to parental warmth, hostility, neglect, and control of children.

Social Class Differences in Perceived Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Self-Evaluation among Korean-American Children

Drawing on a sample of sixteen middle class and nine working class Korean-American families, this study confirms two hypotheses: children in middle class Korean-American families perceive their mothers as being, overall, significantly less rejecting than do children in working class fami lies; and children in middle class Korean-American families show more positive feelings of self-esteem and self-adequacy than do children in working class Korean-American families. Parental acceptance-rejection and childrens self-evaluation are measured by the Parental Acceptance-Rejec tion Questionnaire and by the Personality Assessment Questionnaire. Re sults of this study are consistent with the universalist postulates of parental acceptance-rejection theory.

Perceived Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Personality Organization Among Mexican and American Elementary School Children

We administered the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ) and the Personality Assessment Questionnaire (PAQ) to 175 elementary school children in Monterrey, Mexico. We compared the results of the same tests given to 220 elementary school children in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The Monterrey children perceive their parents as more rejecting and report themselves more negaticely in terms of certam per sonality dispositions than do the Washington, D.C. children. The results of these comparisons conform both with expectations derived from the literature on Mexican family and personality organization and with those derived from parental acceptance-rejection theory. We obtained significant social class differences only within the Mexican sample: middle class Mon terrey school children perceive their parents as more rejecting and report their own behavior in more negative terms than do working class children. We discuss these results in terms of middle class versus working class family structure.

Assessing Interrater Influence in Holocultural Research A Methodological Note

We draw attention here to the potential bias of interrater influence in holocultural research. We suggest a procedure for assessing quantitatively the significance of interrater influence in various types of research-especially holocultural research-where two independent raters code behavioral data.