The role of parental personality and parental reflective functioning in explaining vulnerability to psychopathology: a longitudinal approach

This PhD thesis will address the purported role of parental personality and parental reflective functioning in explaining vulnerability to psychopathology in a series of studies drawing on the Leuven Adoption Study (LAS), a long-term prospective follow-up study of adopted children and their parents and a sample of community-dwelling parents and their children. Although both cross-sectional studies and a growing number of longitudinal studies suggest that parental reflective functioning, the capacity of parents to envision their child in terms of inner mental states, is associated with psychosocial development of children and vulnerability to psychopathology in offspring in particular, there is a dearth of truly longer-term follow-up studies investigating these hypotheses. Moreover, given the complexity of child development, it is likely that several biological and psychosocial factors may mediate and moderate these associations. In this PhD study, therefore, the potential moderating and mediating role of parental personality and biological stress reactivity will be investigated in a 10+ years follow-up study of adopted children and their parents and children of biological parents.