Abstract
Background: Even though child psychopathology assessment guidelines emphasise comprehensive multi-method, multimodal, and multi-informant methodologies (Pelham, Fabiano, & Massetti, 2005), maternal report symptom-rating scales often serve as the predominant source of information. Research has shown that parental mood symptomatology affects their reports of their offspring’s psychopathology. For example, the depression-distortion hypothesis suggests that maternal depression promotes a negative bias in mothers’ perceptions of their children’s behavioural and emotional problems (Gartstein, Bridgett, Dishion, & Kaufman, 2009). We investigated this difference in perception between adoptive mothers and their internationally adopted children. Most previous studies have suffered from the potential bias caused by the fact that parents and children share genetic risks. Our study design allows the elimination of passive gene-environment correlation, which is a phenomenon that occurs when there is a shared genetic background between a rearing parent and a child (Harold et al., 2011; Jaffee & Price, 2007; Price & Jaffee, 2008).Methods: Data were derived from the Finnish Adoption (FinAdo) survey study (a subsample of adopted children aged between 9 and 12 years; N = 222). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) (Achenbach & Ruffle, 2000) was used to assess the emotional and behavioural problems and competences of the adopted children. The CBCL was completed by the adoptive mothers and the adopted children. Maternal depressive symptoms were measured using the short version of the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg & Hillier, 1979).Results: On average, mothers reported fewer total CBCL symptoms in their children than the children themselves (0.25 vs 0.38, p-value < 0.01 for difference). Mothers’ depressive symptoms moderated the discrepancy in reporting internalizing symptoms (β = -0.14 and p-value 0.01 for interaction), the total symptoms scores (β = -0.22 and p-value < 0.001 for interaction), and externalizing symptoms in girls in the CBCL.Limitations: The major limitation of our study was its cross-sectional design and the fact that we only collected data in the form of questionnaires.Conclusions: The results of our research support the depression-distortion hypothesis concerning the association between maternal depressive symptoms and child internalizing symptoms and externalizing symptoms in girls in a sample without genetic bias.
The effects of maternal depression on their perception of emotional and behavioral problems of their internationally adopted children
