Parental rearing and transient thought disorder in young adults

Perceived depriving parental rearing and depression

Four groups of depressed patients 47 unipolars, 21 bipolars, 34 with neurotic-reactive depression, and 39 with unspecified depressive disorder completed, after recovery, the EMBU, a Swedish instrument aimed at assessing the experience of parental rearing practices. The results for three factors: "rejection", "emotional warmth" and "over-protection" and the global judgement scores of "severity" and "consistency" in rearing attitudes were compared with those obtained from 205 healthy individuals. Depressed patients, particularly in the unipolar unspecified groups rated both parents lower than the controls on emotional warmth. Patients tended also to rate their parents as less consistent in their rearing attitudes. The variables emotional warmth and overprotection allowed 64% of the patients and 72 of the unipolar depressives to be classified correctly. These results, like those of previous studies, support the hypothesis that deprivation of love during childhood represents an important psychological risk factor in the background of depressive disorders.

Cross-national study of perceived parental rearing behaviour in healthy subjects from Australia, Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands and Sweden: pattern and level comparisons

Samples of healthy subjects from Australia, Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands and Sweden completed the EMBU, a Swedish questionnaire aimed at assessing the experience of parental rearing practices. For the purpose of comparison three factors - "emotional warmth", "rejection" and "overprotection" - obtained in a previous factor analytic study, have been used. The most pronounced differences occurred between the Dutch and the Swedish sample on the one hand, and the Italian and Australian sample on the other, with the Danish sample in between. Differences in perceived parental rearing should be considered when comparing personality characteristics and/or psychopathological conditions in subjects from different countries.