Parental reports of depressives. An investigation of several explanations.

Associations linking parental reports of low care and/or overprotection with several grades of depressive experience have been reported in a number of studies. Three non-causal explanations of those associations are examined in the present paper: that depression levels might influence judgement of parental characteristics, that reported parental characteristics may not reflect actual parental characteristics, and that those with a potentially depressive temperament of dependency might elicit less parental care and greater parental overprotection. Varying levels of depression in a clinical group did not influence scores on a self-report measure of parental characteristics, the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI). Subjects' scores on the PBI (i.e. perceived parental characteristics) correlated significantly with scores returned by family observers and judges in 2 separate studies, supporting the validity of the PBI as a measure of actual parental characteristics. Depression scores in subjects were strongly linked with lower maternal care and with maternal overprotection, whether the maternal characteristics were judged by the subjects or by the mothers themselves. There was no evidence to support the view that those with marked dependency traits elicit different parental responses.