Disqualifying family communication and anxiety in offspring at risk for psychopathology

The association between disqualifications in parental and family communication and manifest anxiety in boys (7 or 10 years) was investigated. The sample consisted of 59 families where one of the parents had previously been hospitalized for a functional mental disorder. Parental and family communication was observed in the Couples Rorschach (CR) and Family Rorschach (FR) tasks, respectively. The results showed that the amount of one particular type of disqualification, self-disqualification, correlated positively with the boy's anxiety level. Self-disqualification refers to utterances in which the speaker communicates in vague, egocentric or paradoxical ways, which makes it impossible for the receiver to know what has been said. This correlation was evident both with respect to the communication between the parents during CR and the communication from the family to the index boy during FR. The relationship between self-disqualification and anxiety was attributable to neither the boy's age or intelligence quotient nor the dimensions of parental psychopathology or functional impairment.