Psychological maladjustment mediates the link between remembrances of parental rejection in childhood and loneliness in adulthood: A cross‐cultural comparative study

Abstract

Drawing stimulus from interpersonal acceptance‐rejection theory, this multicultural study examined relations between men's versus women's remembrances of maternal and paternal acceptance‐rejection in childhood and their current level of loneliness, as mediated by adults' self‐reported psychological maladjustment. Adults (N = 899) from five nations (Iraq, Italy, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and the United States) responded to the Adult version of the Parental Acceptance‐Rejection Questionnaire‐short form for mothers and fathers, the Adult version of the Personality Assessment Questionnaire‐short form, and the Interpersonal Acceptance‐Rejection Loneliness Scale. Adults' remembrances of maternal and paternal rejection in childhood significantly and independently predicted feelings of loneliness but remembered paternal rejection was more strongly related to these feelings than were remembrances of maternal rejection. Psychological maladjustment fully mediated the effect of remembered maternal rejection but only partially mediated the effect of remembered paternal rejection on loneliness. There were no significant differences in these results across the five countries or genders. Overall, the results suggest that adults' remembrances of parental rejection in childhood—along with the theoretically expected development of psychological maladjustment—are likely to be associated panculturally with the experience of loneliness in adulthood.

The Relationship Between Loneliness and Psychological Adjustment: Validation of the Italian Version of the Interpersonal Acceptance–Rejection Loneliness Scale

“…The more the individuals feel distressed by loneliness, the higher their reported psychological maladjustment. This result is consistent with the previous literature (Heinrich and Gullone, 2006;Richardson et al, 2017;Menec et al, 2020;Rohner et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020) highlighting the link between loneliness, psychosocial difficulties, and mental health and is consistent with the IPARTheory, postulating that the perception of unsatisfactory and rejecting interpersonal relationships are associated with psychological maladjustment (Rohner, 2019).…”

“…Results of Study 2 showed, as expected, that the perception of loneliness in adults is strongly associated with the general psychological adjustment and that this effect is observed beyond age and gender differences (Rohner et al, 2020). These results allowed further verification of the validity of the IPARLS scores (concurrent validity) and confirmed that the IPARLS is a valid tool for monitoring loneliness distress among the adult age groups.…”

“…Results confirmed that the scale has a unidimensional structure, adequate reliability, and adequate validity (Rohner and Molaver, 2015;Rohner et al, 2020). Moreover, for the first time, the analysis of the invariance (Putnick and Bornstein, 2016) of the scale was carried out considering gender and age factors.…”

“…Higher scores on all scales indicate less positive psychological adjustment. In line with recent studies (Rohner et al, 2019(Rohner et al, , 2020Senese et al, 2020a), a total score of psychological maladjustment was calculated for each participant by summing all the scales except for the "dependence or defensive independence" dimension, which was not correlated with the other subscales. The reliability indices of the maladjustment score, measured by means of ordinal Cronbach's alpha and omega (ωt; Revelle and Condon, 2019), were 0.939 and 0.952.…”

“…The operationalization of the construct is based on the theoretical model of the IPARTheory (Rohner, 2019 ) that emphasizes the impact of subjective perceptions of the quality of interpersonal relationships on well-being. Recently, the IPARLS was adapted into four languages (Dutch, Kurdish, Italian, and Urdu) and was used to explore the association between the remembrances of parental acceptance–rejection in childhood, psychological maladjustment of adults, and the level of loneliness in five nations (Rohner et al, 2020 ). The research showed that the scale has adequate psychometric characteristics in each version; however, the latent structure investigations and the validity analysis were not reported.…”