Richters J, Pellegrini D
Laboratory of Developmental Psychology, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.
Child Dev. 1989 Oct;60(5):1068-75. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1989.tb03537.x.
The belief that depressed mothers have distorted perceptions of their children's problems has gained considerable currency in recent years. The empirical basis for this belief at present amounts to little more than reliable demonstrations that depressed mothers tend to report more behavior problems in their children than do nondepressed mothers. An obvious alternative to the distortion interpretation is that depressed mothers are accurate about their children's behavior problems. We examined these competing models by comparing teachers' ratings of children with ratings provided by their mothers, who varied on the dimensions of depressed mood, depressed clinical state, and history of depression. Mothers' and teachers' ratings yielded substantially similar portraits of child behavior problems at the group level, with children of in-remission and in-episode mothers manifesting significantly higher levels of behavior problems than children of control mothers. Moreover, agreement between mothers and teachers was in the moderate range for all index groups and did not differ significantly from the mean level of mother-teacher agreement reported by other investigators based on unselected samples. The limitations of these findings and of earlier reports for assessing a depression----distortion influence on mothers' ratings of their children are considered.
近年来，认为抑郁母亲对其孩子问题存在扭曲认知的观点颇为流行。目前，这一观点的实证依据不过是一些可靠的研究表明，抑郁母亲往往比非抑郁母亲报告出孩子更多的行为问题。对于这种扭曲解释，一个明显的替代观点是，抑郁母亲对其孩子的行为问题的认知是准确的。我们通过比较教师对孩子的评分与母亲提供的评分来检验这些相互竞争的模型，这些母亲在抑郁情绪、抑郁临床状态和抑郁病史等方面存在差异。在群体层面上，母亲和教师的评分得出了大致相似的儿童行为问题情况，处于缓解期和发作期的母亲的孩子表现出的行为问题水平显著高于对照组母亲的孩子。此外，所有指标组中母亲和教师之间的一致性处于中等范围，与其他研究者基于未选样本报告的母亲 - 教师一致性平均水平相比，没有显著差异。我们还考虑了这些研究结果以及早期报告在评估抑郁 - 扭曲对母亲对孩子评分的影响方面的局限性。
