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The relationship between Young's (1999) Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs) and Baumrind's (1971) parental authority prototypes (i.e., permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative) were investigated. As hypothesized, parental authoritarianism positively predicted the prevalence of EMSs, whereas authoritativeness was inversely related to EMS scores. Together, parental authoritarianism and authoritativeness explained 31.7% of the variance in the Total EMS scores.

While numerous studies have emphasized more situational factors related to cheating, hooking up, and attention to romantic alternatives (e.g., alcohol use, need fulfillment, opportunity), the present findings support Finkel el al.'s (2012) argument for greater attentiveness to personal factors intrinsic to the individual that may influence the incidence of such behaviors. Personal factors (e.g., avoidant attachment, selfishness, and maximizing) were found to be significantly related to cheating, hooking up, and attention to romantic alternatives, explaining as much as 40% of the variance in these behaviors.

The relationship between Young's (1999) Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs) and several parental variables was investigated. The parental variables of interest were: (a) Nurturance, (b) Authority, (c) Intrusiveness, (d) Psychological Control, (e) Overprotection, and (f) Parentification. Regression analyses revealed that these parental practices predicted some of the categories of EMSs [e.g., Disconnection/Rejection (77%) and Impaired Autonomy/Performance (63%)] much better than others [e.g., Impaired Limits (30%) and Other Directedness (22%)]. Appended are: (1) Description of Young's Early Maladaptive Schemas; (2) Examples of Items from the Young Schema Questionnaire. (Contains 7 tables.) [This research was supported by University of St. Thomas Young Scholar's Research Grant.]

Students' levels of a frequently studied adaptive schema (optimism) as a function of parenting variables (parental authority, family intrusiveness, parental overprotection, parentification, parental psychological control, and parental nurturance) were investigated. Results revealed that positive parenting styles were positively related to the presence of optimism, whereas negative parenting styles were inversely related to the presence of optimism. In addition, the examined parenting variables explained nearly 50% of the variance in students' optimism. (Contains 1 table) [This research was supported by University of St. Thomas Young Scholar's Research Grant, Summer 2007.]

Studies employing the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-based Cook and Medley (1954) Hostility (Ho) Scale have suggested that Hostility may be a robust psychological disposition with pervasive implications for interpersonal functioning. For example, when compared to individuals who scored low in Ho, high Ho individuals were more suspicious, more anger-prone, and more irritable. This study investigated whether the self esteem (SE) levels of adolescents having high personal standards are more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of parental Ho than are the SE levels of those who do not hold high standards of personal performance. Subjects were 69 college students from intact families and both of their parents. College student subjects completed a global self-esteem questionnaire; a questionnaire measuring high personal standards, and a demographic information sheet. Parents filled out the Ho scale. The results indicated that mothers' and fathers' hostility were inversely related to their adolescents' self-esteem. High standards held by the adolescents for their own behaviors were not related to their self-esteem; however, these high standards had strong cognitive moderating effects, magnifying the deleterious consequences for adolescent self-esteem. (Author/ABL)

This study examined the relationship of adolescents' self-esteem (SE) to the familial variables of parental permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness and to the cognitive variables of high standards, self-criticism, and overgeneralization. Participants (N=99) were college students from a coeducational, liberal arts university. Participants completed a mothers' authority questionnaire; a fathers' authority questionnaire; the Attitudes Toward Self Scale; a self-esteem questionnaire; and a demographic information sheet. Consistent with previous findings, both Mother's and Father's Authoritarianism were inversely related to SE whereas Mother's and Father's Authoritativeness were directly related to SE. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that these effects of parental authority were strongly overshadowed by the cognitive variable of Overgeneralization. The tendency to overgeneralize from failure in a specific situation to a general sense of failure was associated with 33.6% of the variance in SE; the authority variables accounted for an additional 12.2% of the SE variance. One implication of these findings is the suggestion that investigations of SE development include more than one domain of potential influence. A related practical implication of these findings is a suggestion that those programs which are designed to assist adults in their role as parents should continue to instruct these individuals in appropriate uses of authority. (ABL)

An important focus of developmental research has centered upon the role of parents in the emotional-psychological development of children and adolescents. During the past 25 years a sizable body of empirical evidence on these socialization processes has emerged. In this study the relation of parents' hostility to the self-esteem of older adolescents was investigated. College students (N=125) and both parents of each student participated. Students responded to questionnaires measuring self-concept and self-monitoring, while parents completed the Hostility (Ho) Scale of the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale. Results indicated mothers' and fathers' hostility was correlated with their adolescents' self-esteem. Mothers' hostility was more strongly correlated (inversely) to sons' self-esteem, whereas fathers' hostility was more strongly correlated (inversely) to daughters' self-esteem. Adolescent Other-directedness had strong cognitive moderator effects, increasing the deleterious effects of fathers' hostility upon adolescents' self-esteem. These findings suggest that Ho may be a cognitive construct. (ABL)

In the recent past there has been a growing interest in the investigation of the self. A primary area of investigation has revolved around the question of the stability of the self-concept. This study investigated parental nurturance as a stable predictor of self-esteem across adolescent and young adult age groups. Subjects (N=784) were students from seven distinct age groups: seventh graders; eighth graders; high school sophomores; high school seniors; undergraduate freshmen; and undergraduate upperclassmen. Results revealed that even though parental nurturance was more strongly related to self-esteem during junior high school years than during the high school and college years, parental nurturance still remained a robust predictor of self-esteem during these latter years. Strong nurturant relationships with one's mother and one's father provide stable bases for global self-esteem throughout the early adolescent to early adulthood years. This is a time during which many individuals experience considerable change and discontinuity in their lives and are therefore in need of a relational context in which they can find stability, reassurance, and the support of caring relationships. When such a context is available, then the individual is better able to cope with the stress of change and more able to tolerate areas of discontinuity within his or her life. (CM)

In research efforts to account for the variance in parent-child interactions, two variables have been cited repeatedly for their explanatory cogency--nurturance and authority. This study was conducted to examine the relation of parents' Hostility (Ho) scores from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-based Cook and Medley Hostility Scale to older adolescents' phenomenological assessments of their parents' nurturance and authority and the relation of scores to the adolescents' self-esteem. College students (N=85) completed six questionnaires: a global self-esteem scale, a mother's nurturance scale, a father's nurturance scale, a mother's authority questionnaire, a father's authority questionnaire, and a demographic information sheet. Mothers and fathers of the students completed the Hostility Scale. Several inverse relationships were found between Ho scores and adolescent self-esteem and adolescent perception of their parental nurturance and authority. The magnitude of these effects was consistently greater for fathers' Ho than for mothers' Ho, adding support to the hypothesis that the behavioral and emotional consequences of Ho are different for men and women. (NB)

As a result of Freud's seminal postulations of the psychoanalytic bases for one's God-concept, it is a frequently accepted hypothesis that an individual's image of God is largely a reflection of experiences with and feelings toward one's own father. While such speculations as to an individual's phenomenological conceptions of God have an intriguing psychoanalytic appeal, supporting empirical evidence has been mixed. This study investigated the relationship of 213 college students' connotations of the "wrathfulness-kindliness" of God to their mother's and father's nurturance; their mother's and father's permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness; and their own self-esteem. While parental nurturance, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness were related to participants' conceptions of God (thus providing support for psychoanalytic assertions), the variable of self-esteem far outweighed all other variables in accounting for the variance in God-concepts. These results suggest that previous empirical support for psychoanalytic speculations as to the parental origins of individuals' God-concepts may largely derive from the influence of a strong correlate of parental nurturance and authority, i.e., self-esteem. (Author/ABL)

Different theorists have suggested that an individual's view of God may be related to one's view of one's father, one's mother, or one's self. A study was conducted to examine the relationship of college students' conceptions of the wrathfulness-kindliness of God to their conceptions of their father's and mother's permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness, and to their own self-esteem. Catholic college students (N=83) who considered God to be important in their lives, responded to the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, a father's Parental Authority Questionnaire, a mother's Parental Authority Questionnaire, and a conception of God questionnaire. The results revealed that respondents' conception of self was more strongly related to their conceptions of God than were any of the conception of parental authority variables; self-esteem accounted for 24% of the variance in respondents' conceptions of the wrathfulness-kindliness of God. Respondents who felt themselves valuable, capable, and worthy were more easily able to conceptualize God as a loving, patient, and forgiving authority figure than were those who viewed themselves with greater degrees of self-dissatisfaction and self-rejection. (NB)

While forgiveness has long been a crucial concept in the churches' formulations for the establishment and the preservation of spiritual, social, and emotional health, consideration of forgiveness by psychology pales in comparison. Research is needed to identify the psychological factors in mothers and fathers which serve as antecedents of the nurturance which they provide their children. In this study, college students (N=111) were asked to assess the nurturance they had received from their mothers and their fathers using a Likert scale. Scale items included "I am an important person in my mother's eyes;""My mother expresses her warmth and affection for me;" and "My mother is generally cold and removed when I am with her." The parents of the student participants responded to a forced-choice forgiveness scale with items such as "I am a very forgiving person, ready and willing to forgive anyone who has wronged me." The results suggest a strong relationship between self-reported forgiveness by parents and the degree of parental nurturance reported by their adolescent children. Mothers and fathers who reported the least level of forgiveness were appraised as having rendered significantly less nurturance than other parents. (Author/ABL)

Research has consistently shown parents' nurturance, acceptance, affection, support, and attention to be positively related to their children's self-esteem. Absent in these investigations of the relationship between parental nurturance and self-esteem, however, has been a consideration of whether the nurturance bases upon which these "reflected appraisals" of self-esteem are evaluated vary with changes in age. This study was conducted to investigate the stability of parental nurturance as a basis for mid-adolescent and late-adolescent judgments of global self-esteem. Data were collected from three samples: 61 15-year-old high school sophomores, 98 17-year-old high school juniors and seniors, and 333 19-year-old college students. All subjects were from intact families; high school students were living with their parents. All subjects completed a demographic questionnaire, the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and two forms of the Parental Nurturance Scale to measure mother's nurturance and father's nurturance. The results revealed that the self-esteem scores for the 19-year-olds were significantly higher than the scores for the younger age groups. Self-esteem was found to be strongly related to both mother's and father's nurturance at all three age levels. This high level of stability in the relationship between parental nurturance and adolescent's self-esteem across all three age groups suggests that parental nurturance is an important "arena of comfort" for adolescents during the potentially turbulent adolescent years. (NB)

Baumrind (1971) proposed three distinct patterns of parental authority (permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness) and measured these parenting styles through interviews with parents and their children and through observations of parents interacting with their children. This study was undertaken to develop a readily-accessible, standardized measure of Baumrind's parental prototypes. Forty-eight questionnaire items were constructed based upon Baumrind's descriptions of the permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative prototypes. Items were stated from the perspective of an individual evaluating the patterns of authority exercised by his or her parents. Professionals (N=21) in the fields of psychology, social work, sociology, and education evaluated the accuracy of the items and accepted 36 of the items for the final pool of items. From this pool, 10 permissive, 10 authoritarian, and 10 authoritative items were retained for the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ). Two forms of the questionnaire were constructed to evaluate the parental authority of mothers and of fathers. Seven studies were conducted to test the PAQ's reliability, internal consistency, content-related validity, criterion-related validity, discriminant-related validity, and its correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. The results of these studies showed the PAQ to have highly respectable measures of reliability and validity. The PAQ should be useful for assessing the parental authority exercised by both mothers and fathers and it is appropriate for both females and males who are older adolescents or young adults. (The Parental Authority Questionnaire Pertaining to Fathers is included.) (NB)

Symbolic interactionists have proposed that one's self-concept is primarily affected by interactions with others to the extent and in the way one perceives those interactions. According to this perspective, an individual's global self-esteem is largely the result of subjective "reflected appraisals" of others' evaluations of him rather than their actual evaluations of him. This study hypothesizes that if the symbolic interactionist position is veridical, then high self-monitoring participants would be more attuned to the behavioral and emotional manifestations of parental discipline than are individuals low in self-monitoring. Participants (N=222) were college students who were asked to appraise their own self-esteem and their parents' disciplinary style as well as to complete Synder's Self-Monitoring scale. Results showed the self-esteem of college students to be inversely related to parental authoritarianism and directly related to parental authoritativeness. The strength of these relationships was much greater for high self-monitors than for low self-monitors. The results suggest that "looking glass" explanations for self-esteem may not have universal cogency, but may be far more germane to high self-monitors' self-esteem development than to that of low self-monitors. (ABL)

Past research has implicated the familial variables of parental nurturance and parental discipline in the development of global self-esteem in children. This study examined college students' levels of self-esteem as a function of their own versus their parents' appraisals of parental nurturance and parental authority. Subjects were 128 college students and both of their parents. Students completed a global self-esteem scale, a mother's nurturance scale, a father's nurturance scale, a mother's Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ), a father's PAQ, and a demographic information sheet. Each parent completed a nurturance scale and a PAQ. The results revealed that both mother's and father's nurturance (as perceived by the students) were strongly related to self-esteem. Based upon students' appraisals, parental authoritativeness was directly related to self-esteem while parental authoritarianism was inversely related to self-esteem. Students' assessments of parental nurturance and authority were more strongly related to self-esteem than were the parents' assessments of these variables. Results of regression analyses suggest that parental authority may be an important source of parental nurturance information. (Author/NB)

Research has shown variables of parental nurturance (acceptance, encouragement, support) of their children to be positively correlated with their children's self-esteem. This study investigated the effects of parental nurturance and the use of permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative parental discipline upon the self-esteem of college students. College students (N=335) completed a demographic information sheet and five questionnaires designed to measure parental nurturance, parental discipline, and self-esteem. The results revealed that parental nurturance of both the mother and father were more strongly correlated with self-esteem than were the parental discipline variables. While the use of authoritarian and authoritative discipline significantly correlated with self-esteem, regression analyses revealed that their effects upon self-esteem were primarily due to their influence upon parental nurturance. The six variables that correlated significantly with self-esteem were mother's nurturance, father's nurturance, mother's authoritarianism, mother's authoritativeness, father's authoritarianism, and father's authoritativeness. The familial variables of parental nurturance and parental discipline were more strongly correlated with the self-esteem of females than with the self-esteem of males. (Author/NB)

Parents are the primary agents in the development and definition of the self. Previous research has reported nurturance as the most notable parental factor in global self-esteem. This study examined the relationship of parental nurturance to self-esteem for the first time with subjects older than high school students. College students (N=333) completed the 76-item Parental Nurturance Scale and the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale. The results revealed that 43 percent of the variance in self-esteem for women and 30 percent of the variance for men were associated with parental nurturance. Father's nurturance was as important as mother's nurturance to the self-esteem of both men and women. The demonstrated relationship between parental nurturance and self-esteem is noteworthy since it has been shown to persist after children have moved away from home and gone to college. Individual item response/self-esteem correlation coefficients were significant. Results confirmed the unitary nature of the Parental Nurturance Scale. (Tables of the correlations for item responses and self-esteem on the Mother's and Father's Nurturance Scales are included.) (ABL)