Externalizing Anxiety

Running head: INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF EXTERNALIZING PSYCHOPATHOLOGY ACROSS GENERATIONS

Intergenerational Transmission of Externalizing Anxiety in Parents and the Association with that in their Children between the age 10 to 18

Misho Hristov
University of Nicosia
Spring Semester 2010

In fulfillment of the requirements for PSY-495
Xenia Hadjicharalambous

ABSTRACT
Anxiety is an affective state that affects everyone. However, not enough is known about the relationship between parental anxiety and the transmission to that of child’s. The current study attempted to examine the intergenerational transmission of anxiety from parent to child in the Cypriot population and thus add some support of existing data. We tested
However, the rate return of completed correctly questionnaires was only 20 in total which would have been too low in order to perform any significant observations. Therefore, a joint participants data was created together with another researcher working with the same developed questionnaire. Which leads to the total number of participants contributing to the study of 26 of which 13 were children between the ages of 10 to 18 and the other 13 were their parents (since one of the parents did not provide demographic data we will not count it as invalid due to completion of the other scales of the questionnaire). Both of the parents and their children participated by filling up a self-report questionnaire, which differed by the design of the questions for children and parents. There were 4 fathers and 8 mothers; the mean age of the participant group was 44.75 and a standard deviation of 6.784. In the child population there were 5 boys and 8 girls; the mean age of the children was 14.53 and a standard deviation of 2.509. Out of all participants, 61 percent reported to practice the Christian orthodox religion. Moreover, half of the participants described them self’s as Cypriot (12 participants), and approximately 75 percent of the parents reported to be married. The participants were selected randomly from a private English schools in
We started by gathering information regarding the participant’s learning history that allowed us to create a basic picture to what extent the learning experiences are related to any anxiety symptoms Learning History Questionnaire (LHQ; Ehlers, 1993).Consequently we introduced Self Construal Scale (SCS; Singelis, 1994), which helped us assess independent and interdependent self construal. Following, was the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998) in the adolescent questionnaire and the Spence Child Anxiety Scale for parents (SCAS-P; Spence, 1999) in the parent questionnaire to test for anxiety symptoms. Next in the adolescent questionnaire we utilized the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997) where children were assessed on their social and emotional behavior. On the other hand, in the parent questionnaire we looked at the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety and stress by the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 21-item (DASS-21; Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995).And so we could measure the social support both in parents and their children we introduced the Social Support Scale (SSS;……). Finally, in the questionnaire the participants found the Demographics section where we gathered general characteristic of the participating population.
The research design involved