Vulnerability to depression as a function of parental rejection and control.

Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between depression proneness in 95 university students and the amount of care and overprotection they perceived from their parents during childhood. Care was taken to avoid some of the common shortcomings of earlier research in this area, including (1) not controlling for the effects of current depression on the recall of past parental practices, (2) not employing adequate measures of depression proneness, (3) not testing for sex-of-parent by sex-of-offspring interactions, and (4) not demonstrating that parental rejection and overprotection are uniquely related to depression rather than psychopathology in general. Analysis showed that for sons, depression proneness was associated with perceptions of a cold, rejecting father. For daughters, depression proneness was associated with perceptions of an intrusive and controlling mother. The pattern of correlations between parenting practices and depression proneness differed substantially from that observed between parenting practices and fearfulness, suggesting that perceptions of parental rejection and control are not characteristic of psychopatholoy in general. Lastly, the hypothesis that self-esteem mediates the relationship between parenting practices and depression proneness was not supported.