Personality Relationships among Parents and Adolescent Offspring in Inpatient Treatment

Abstract

The present investigation examined relationships between personality characteristics of 51 adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and their biological parents. Family members were administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) within one week of adolescent hospital admission. Pearson product-moment correlations were performed for all possible group comparisons on each MMPI scale. Analysis of variance of difference scores reflecting the relationship of adolescent to parent profile elevations was used to examine the effects of sex of adolescent, sex of parent, and adolescent diagnostic classification on similarity of parent's and offspring's profiles. Interpreted in the context of previous research, results suggest that the more severe the adolescent psychiatric disturbance, the more dissimilar personality characteristics of parent and child. With the possible exception of emerging antisocial patterns, abnormal personality development may be related to adolescents' failure to establish or copy parental personality characteristics.