Relationship Between Parental Rejection and Personality

Abstract

Background: Parental rejection plays an important role in individual's life at different stages of their development. Some types of personality are the major predictors of mental illness and individuals' maladjustment.
Objective: The purpose of the present study was to explore the possible relationship between parental rejection and personality of adults in the context of Bangladesh.
Methods: A total 100 adults (39 male and 61 female) participated in this study. Their age range was 18 to 60 years. They were selected from Department of Psychiatry, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, University of Dhaka and some residential areas of Dhaka city by purposive sampling. The instruments used in this study were a Demographic questionnaire, validated Bangla version of Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), validated Bangla version of Adult version of Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire for Father (Adult PARQ: Father) and Adult version of Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire for Mother (Adult PARQ: Mother).
Results: From this study, we found that paternal rejection is positively correlated with psychoticism but negatively correlated with extraversion at the 0.05 levels of significance. The result showed that there was no significant correlation between paternal rejection and neuroticism. Results also showed that maternal rejection is positively correlated with psychoticism and neuroticism at the 0.01 level of significance but negatively correlated with extraversion (at the 0.05 levels).
Conclusion: These results suggest that there is an association between parental rejections and individual's personality.

Key word: Parental rejection; Personality; Psychoticism; Neuroticism; Extraversion.

DOI: 10.3329/bsmmuj.v2i2.4759

BSMMU J 2009; 2(2):61-65