Effect of Parental Mental Health in Estimation of One Personality Trait from Others with Structural Equation Models

Introduction: Adolescence is a transformational but vulnerable age. A favorable atmosphere at home and surroundings plays a pivotal role in development in different dimensions of personality. Lack of a support system may result in some psychiatric disorders among adolescents which might needs to be addressed. Eysenck Personality Questionnaire is a psychiatric tool to assess various dimensions of personality.

Objective: Adolescence is the beginning of the biological, social and psychological maturity. Personality starts taking shape at this age and the personality traits developed during this phase are likely to remain with a person for the whole life. Role of parents at this phase of life becomes very important to shape the personality. With this background we wish to examine the role of parents’ mental health which actually affects home environment, on adolescent personality.

Methods: Structural equation models with two and three layers were applied to estimate personality traits as identified by Eysenck Personality Questionnaire on two groups of adolescents: (i) The ‘Control’ group whose parents were not reported any psychiatric disorder; and (ii) the ‘Case’ group whose parent(s) were suffering from some psychiatric disorder as diagnosed by DSM-IV.

Results: The conventional three-layer model for ‘Control’ group estimated ‘Psychoticism’ directly by ‘Lie-scale’ and indirectly by ‘Extraversion’ with p-values < 0.05. The two-layered model yielded no significant difference between the base and the proposed model for ‘Control’ and ‘Case’ group as p-values were more than 0.05. The variability of Neuroticism was estimated up to 63.6% by a linear combination of Psychoticism, Lie-scale and Gender in Layer 1 of the model for the ‘Control’ group.

Conclusion: In this study either through the conventional three-layer model or the proposed two-layer models, we concluded that some information about one dimension can be extracted from the other dimension with EPQ even if the correlation is not significant. Also, the proposed two-layer model established the effect of gender at 10% level of significance in case of ‘Control’ group. Psychoticism and Neuroticism mean scores were higher for the ‘Case’ groups than those for the ‘Control’ group thus establishing the effect of parental mental health on adolescents’ personality.