Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair and Members

Kevin Meehan, Chair

Philip Wong

Cory Chen

Keywords

Attachment, Facial emotion recognition, Parental bonding instrument, Parenting behaviors, Personality traits, PID-5

Abstract

Parental post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms have been associated with various psychological and behavioral outcomes in their offspring. Utilizing a sample of (N=330) adult offspring of trauma-exposed parents, this study used self-report and behavioral measures to examine the relationship between parental PTSD symptom severity and adult participant’s romantic attachment insecurity, pathological personality traits, and facial emotion recognition (FER) accuracy for subtle emotional expressions. Additionally, it explored the role of maladaptive parenting behaviors on these associations. Results indicated that higher parental PTSD was associated with higher levels of parental care and an affectionate constraint parenting style. Additionally, parental PTSD was related to offspring attachment anxiety through high parental care, particularly when the less traumatized parent exhibited low care. Additionally, we found that all pathological personality traits were related to both attachment anxiety and avoidance. With regards to FER, we found that trait Antagonism was related to less accurate recognition of fear, anger, and neutral facial expressions. We also found that higher negative affectivity (NA) and lower disinhibition (DI) were related to increased accuracy in recognizing fear, with low parental control mediating the NA-Fear relationship. Results also indicated that offspring were more sensitive to fear and anger but had reduced accuracy in recognizing these emotions, likely due to heightened emotional vigilance. Additionally, greater parental PTSD was associated with reduced accuracy in recognizing happiness. This highlights the complex impact of parental trauma on offspring's emotional processing. Limitations of the present study and future directions are also discussed.

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