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The Role of Causal Uncertainty in the Relationship Between Perceived Parental Dysphoria and Offspring’s Own Dysphoria

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Abstract

We proposed that exposure to parental depressive symptomatology as measured by adult children’s retrospective reports would predict children’s own levels of causal uncertainty or doubt in their ability to understand causal relations in the social world. Such social confusion could, in turn, contribute to children’s current depressive symptomatology. Across four studies, as predicted, causal uncertainty partially mediated the relationship between perceived parental dysphoria and offspring’s own current dysphoria. In Study 1c, higher levels of parental attachment moderated the mediational effects of causal uncertainty on the relationship between perceived parental dysphoria and offspring dysphoria, but moderated mediation was not replicated in Study 1d when perceived parental dysphoria was assessed in a separate session. Future research should try to reconcile the inconsistent results for parental attachment and more directly test the intergenerational transmission of dysphoria via causal uncertainty.

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Notes

  1. Additional details regarding participant recruitment, participation rates, etc. can be obtained from the first author upon request.

  2. For these analyses, we had to switch to a regression approach rather than a path model approach because a moderated mediation analysis has not been developed for use with structural equation modeling. Consequently, we could not use multiple groups analysis to more directly compare the results for Studies 1c and 1d.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant awarded to Jill A. Jacobson. We would like to thank the following people for their assistance with the data collection: Kate Bobyn, Eliane Boucher, Melissa Clemance, Lisa Fiorini, Brooke Sinclair, Eli Remington, and Vivian Tan.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, 62 Arch Street, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

    Kevin Rounding & Jill A. Jacobson

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  1. Kevin Rounding
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Correspondence to Kevin Rounding.

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Partial reports of these data were presented at the 2010 Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting and the 2010 Midwestern Psychological Association annual meeting.

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Rounding, K., Jacobson, J.A. The Role of Causal Uncertainty in the Relationship Between Perceived Parental Dysphoria and Offspring’s Own Dysphoria. Cogn Ther Res 37, 1058–1069 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-013-9539-y

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