Parental Acceptance-Rejection:

Theory, Methods, Cross-Cultural

Evidence, and Implications
RONALD P. ROHNER
ABDUL KHALEQUE
DAVID E. COURNOYER

ABSTRACT This article summarizes concepts, methods, cross-

cultural evidence, and implications of parental acceptance-
rejection theory (PARTheory). The theory focuses primarily on
parental love—its expressions, impact, and origins. Nearly
2,000 studies in the United States and cross-culturally confirm
the widely held belief that children everywhere need acceptance
(love) from parents and other attachment figures. Evidence has
shown that when this need is not met, children worldwide—
regardless of variations in culture, gender, age, or ethnicity—
tend to self-report a specific form of psychological maladjust-
ment. Additionally, individuals who perceive themselves to be
rejected appear to be more disposed than accepted persons to
develop behavior problems, depression or depressed affect, sub-
stance abuse, and other mental health-related issues. Finally,
children and adults appear universally to organize their per-
ceptions of acceptance-rejection around the same four classes of
behavior. These include warmth/affection (or coldness/lack of af-
fection), hostility/aggression, indifference/neglect, and undiffer-
entiated rejection. [acceptance, rejection, parenting, universals,
mental health, cross-cultural]

ETHOS, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 299–334, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352.
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300 ● ETHOS

T
he research program reported in this article was initiated
almost four-and-a-half decades ago in response to claims by
Western social scientists that parental love is essential to the
healthy social and emotional development of children. Af-
ter about 2,000 empirical studies, many inspired directly by
parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory) described in this ar-
ticle, the conclusion is clear: Children everywhere need a specific form
of positive response—acceptance—from parents and other attachment
figures. When this need is not met satisfactorily, children worldwide—
regardless of variations in culture, gender, age, ethnicity, or other such
defining conditions—tend to report themselves to be hostile and aggres-
sive, dependent or defensively independent, impaired in self-esteem and
self-adequacy, emotionally unresponsive, emotionally unstable, and to
have a negative worldview, among other responses. Additionally, youths
and adults who perceive themselves to be rejected appear to be disposed
toward behavior problems and conduct disorders, to be depressed or have
depressed affect, and to become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, among
other problems.
Evidence reported below suggests that as much as 26 percent of the
variability of children’s psychological adjustment can be accounted for
by the degree to which children perceive themselves to be accepted or
rejected by their major caregivers. In addition, as much as 21 percent
of the variability in adults’ psychological adjustment can be explained by
childhood experiences of caregiver acceptance-rejection. Of course, these
figures leave a large portion of children’s and adults’ adjustment to be ex-
plained by a variety of factors such as other interpersonal relationships, so-
ciocultural factors, and behavioral genetic factors. Nonetheless, evidence
reported here confirms that perceived parental acceptance-rejection by
itself is universally a powerful predictor of psychological and behavioral
adjustment.
These bold claims are not made lightly. Testing the universality of
such principles is fraught with conceptual and methodological difficul-
ties, as discussed in this article. As a preview, though, we might note that
the line of inquiry reported here employs a wide range of research strate-
gies including ethnographic studies, holocultural (cross-cultural survey)
studies, and intercultural as well as intracultural psychological studies in
a broad array of the world’s societies and ethnic groups. The ethnographic
and psychological studies utilize participant observation procedures, in-
terviews, time- and setting-sampled behavior observations, and self-report
questionnaires—especially the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Question-
naire (PARQ) and the Personality Assessment Questionnaire (PAQ), as
described below.
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 301

An important conceptual feature of the research reported here is its

emphasis on individuals’ subjective perceptions of parenting behaviors.
That is, the key concepts of perceived acceptance and rejection are de-
fined in terms of the interpretations that children and adults make of
major caregivers’ behaviors. This allows individuals to make interpreta-
tions of parenting through their own cultural and personal lenses, and
thus avoids the possibility of misinterpreting the meaning of caregivers’
behaviors. However, even though the words and actions through which
children and adults interpret the behavior of significant others is usu-
ally shaped by culture, evidence provided in this article highlights the
fact that individuals everywhere appear to use a common meaning struc-
ture to determine whether they are loved (accepted). More specifically,
children and adults appear universally to organize their perceptions of
acceptance-rejection around the same four classes of behavior. These in-
clude warmth/affection (or its opposite, coldness/lack of affection), hos-
tility/aggression, indifference/neglect, and undifferentiated rejection, as
defined below. At this point, we should also note that the term parent is
defined in PARTheory as any person who has a more-or-less long-term pri-
mary caregiving responsibility for a child. Such persons may be biological
or adoptive parents, older siblings, grandparents, other relatives, or even
non-kinspersons.
These and other issues central to PARTheory are discussed in this
article, along with evidence supporting the major postulates of the theory.
More particularly, we begin with an overview of the history of research on
parental acceptance-rejection, and we situate PARTheory research within
the context of this history. Next we provide an overview of the main fea-
tures of the theory, discuss universal features of the warmth dimension of
parenting (parental acceptance-rejection), and then discuss PARTheory’s
three subtheories: personality subtheory, coping subtheory, and the so-
ciocultural systems subtheory. Following this, we describe major classes
of methods used to develop and test the theory. With this information in
hand, we are then able to present evidence supporting the main features
of the theory. Finally, we end with a brief discussion of the implications
of PARTheory and evidence for social policy and practice.

HISTORY OF RESEARCH INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT OF PARENTAL

ACCEPTANCE-REJECTION THEORY
The empirical study of parental acceptance-rejection has a history
going back to the 1890s (Stogdill 1937). It was not until the 1930s, how-
ever, that a more-or-less continuous body of empirical research began to
302 ● ETHOS

appear dealing with the effects of parental acceptance-rejection. Today al-

most 2,000 studies are available on the topic (Rohner 2005). A great many
individuals have contributed to this body of work, but a handful have made
especially significant and sustained contributions. These individuals and
groups represent different theoretical traditions and programs of research
and they employ distinctive concepts, measures, and research designs. For
example, an especially productive early collection of acceptance-rejection
research papers came from the Fels Research Institute in the 1930s and
1940s (Baldwin et al. 1945, 1949). Researchers associated with the In-
stitute used the Fels Parental Behavior Rating Scales (Champney 1941).
During the 1930s and 1940s the Smith College Studies in Social Work
also produced a long and useful series of research articles on the effects
of parental acceptance-rejection (e.g., Witmer et al. 1938).
Especially noteworthy in the 1950s and 1960s—and extending into
the 1970s and 1980s—was the seminal work of Schaefer and asso-
ciates using the Children’s Report of Parent’s Behavior Inventory (CRPBI)
(Schaefer 1959, 1961; Schludermann and Schludermann 1970, 1983).
Also noteworthy from the 1960s and 1970s was the work of Siegelman
and colleagues using the Parent-Child Relations Questionnaire (Roe and
Siegelman 1963). Rohner’s program of research, which ultimately led to
the construction of parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory)
and associated measures, grew directly out of these psychological tra-
ditions in the United States as well as from a 20-year anthropological
and psychological program of cross-cultural comparative research begin-
ning in 1960 (Rohner 1960, 1975; Rohner and Nielsen 1978; Rohner and
Rohner 1980, 1981). The conceptual foundations of PARTheory were also
influenced in the 1960s and 1970s by several theoretical paradigms. Most
important among these were learning theory, symbolic interaction theory,
psychoanalytic theory, and attachment theory.
Since that time, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, other indepen-
dent programs of research on issues of acceptance-rejection have influ-
enced the further development of PARTheory. In the United States three
of these are especially prominent. One is the sociological tradition of re-
search based on the concept of “parental support” and “parental support-
ive behavior” advocated by Rollins and Thomas (1979)—and utilizing a
wide variety of research measures and research designs (Amato and Booth
1997; Barber and Thomas 1986; Barnes and Farrell 1992; Peterson and
Rollins 1987; Whitbeck et al. 1993).
Another of these programs of research comes from Baumrind’s widely
recognized conceptual model dealing with parenting prototypes, includ-
ing the concepts of authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and reject-
ing/neglecting styles of parenting (Baumrind 1966, 1968, 1989, 1991).
Her work has been widely discussed and incorporated into the research of
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 303

many other investigators. Perhaps most prominent among these investiga-

tors are Steinberg and colleagues (Gray and Steinberg 1999; Lamborn et al.
1991; Steinberg et al. 1989). Baumrind’s parenting prototypes, especially
the claim that the authoritative style of parenting produces the most com-
petent children, have also generated more controversy than any other sin-
gle parenting model. Increasingly, doubt is growing about whether author-
itative parenting necessarily produces optimum developmental outcomes
for such ethnic minorities as African Americans (Baumrind 1972; Smetana
2000), Chinese Americans (Chao 1994), Hispanic Americans (Torres-Villa
1995), Korean Americans (Kim and Rohner 2002), and others.
Finally, the third recent program of research to influence PARTheory
comes from the work of Downey, Feldman, and colleagues (Downey and
Feldman 1996; Feldman and Downey 1994). These researchers explore
the issue of “rejection sensitivity.” According to them, interpersonal
rejection—especially parental rejection in childhood—leads children to
develop a heightened sensitivity to being rejected. That is, the children
become disposed to anxiously and angrily expect, to readily perceive, and
to overreact to rejection in ways that compromise their intimate relation-
ships as well as their own well-being. Additionally, these authors and their
colleagues have found that rejection-sensitive children and adults often
interpret the minor or imagined insensitivity of significant others—or the
ambiguous behavior of others—as being intentional rejection.
These three bodies of work focus heavily—though not exclusively—
on European Americans. However, at least three programs of international
acceptance-rejection research have also been influential in the develop-
ment of PARTheory. First, with the construction and validation of a self-
report questionnaire called the EMBU (Perris et al. 1980), Perris, Arrindell,
and others launched a productive European and cross-cultural program
of research on the psychological effects of acceptance-rejection (Arrindell
et al. 1998; Perris, Arrindell, and Eisemann 1994).
Second, a somewhat less developed but noteworthy body of inter-
national research is that of Parker and associates, working primarily in
Australia and England, and using the parental bonding instrument (PBI)
(Parker 1983, 1986; Parker et al. 1979; Torgersen and Alnaes 1992).
Finally, beginning in the 1990’s Chen and colleagues have been developing
a productive series of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies primarily
in The People’s Republic of China and Canada on issues surrounding both
maternal and paternal acceptance and rejection (Chen, Liu, and Li 2000;
Chen, Rubin, and Li 1997; Chen, Wu, Chen, Wang, and Cen 2001).
Approximately 400 PARTheory-related studies completed in more
than 60 nations internationally—as well as in every major ethnic group
of America—are indebted in various ways to these theoretical paradigms
and programs of research.
304 ● ETHOS

OVERVIEW OF PARENTAL ACCEPTANCE-REJECTION THEORY

Parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory) is an evidence-
based theory of socialization and lifespan development that attempts to
predict and explain major causes, consequences, and other correlates of
parental acceptance and rejection within the United States and worldwide
(Rohner 1986, 2004; Rohner and Rohner 1980). It attempts to answer
five classes of questions divided into three subtheories. The subtheories
are personality subtheory, coping subtheory, and sociocultural systems
subtheory. Personality subtheory asks two general questions. First, is it
true, as the subtheory postulates, that children everywhere—in different
sociocultural systems, racial or ethnic groups, genders, and the like—
respond in essentially the same way when they perceive themselves to
be accepted or rejected by their parents? Second, to what degree do the
effects of childhood rejection extend into adulthood and old age? Coping
subtheory asks one basic question: What gives some children and adults
the resilience to emotionally cope more effectively than most with the ex-
perience of childhood rejection? Finally, sociocultural systems subtheory
asks two very different classes of questions. First, why are some parents
warm and loving and others cold, aggressive, neglecting/rejecting? Is it
true, for example—as PARTheory predicts—that specific psychological,
familial, community, and societal factors tend to be reliably associated
the world over with specific variations in parental acceptance-rejection?
Second, in what way is the total fabric of society as well as the behav-
ior and beliefs of individuals within society affected by the fact that most
parents in that society tend to either accept or reject their children? For
example, is it true, as PARTheory predicts, that a people’s religious beliefs,
artistic preferences, and other expressive beliefs and behaviors tend to be
universally associated with their childhood experiences of parental love
and love withdrawal?
Several distinctive features guide PARTheory’s attempts to an-
swer questions such as these. First—employing a multimethod research
strategy—the theory draws extensively from worldwide, cross-cultural ev-
idence as well as from every major ethnic group in the United States.
Additionally, it draws from literary and historical insights as far back as
two thousand years. More importantly, it draws from and helps provide a
conceptual framework for integrating the empirical studies already men-
tioned on issues of parental acceptance-rejection published since the end
of the nineteenth century, mostly within the United States. From these
sources the theory attempts to formulate a lifespan developmental per-
spective on issues surrounding parental acceptance and rejection. Much of
this perspective is incorporated into PARTheory’s personality subtheory,
described later. First, however, we discuss the concepts of parental
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 305

acceptance and rejection, or the warmth dimension of parenting, recall-

ing that in PARTheory the term parent refers to whoever the major care-
giver(s) is/are of a child—not necessarily biological or adoptive parents.

THE WARMTH DIMENSION OF PARENTING

Together, parental acceptance and rejection form the warmth dimen-
sion of parenting. This is a dimension or continuum on which all humans
can be placed because everyone has experienced in childhood more or
less love at the hands of major caregivers. Thus, the warmth dimension
has to do with the quality of the affectional bond between parents and
their children, and with the physical and verbal behaviors parents use to
express these feelings. One end of the continuum is marked by parental
acceptance, which refers to the warmth, affection, care, comfort, con-
cern, nurturance, support, or simply love that children can experience
from their parents and other caregivers. The other end of the continuum
is marked by parental rejection, which refers to the absence or significant
withdrawal of these feelings and behaviors and by the presence of a variety
of physically and psychologically hurtful behaviors and emotions. Cross-
cultural research reveals that parental rejection can be experienced by
any combination of four principal expressions: 1) cold and unaffection-
ate, the opposite of being warm and affectionate; 2) hostile and aggressive;
3) indifferent and neglecting; and 4) undifferentiated rejecting. Undiffer-
entiated rejection refers to individuals’ beliefs that their parents do not
really care about them or love them, even though there might not be clear
behavioral indicators that the parents are neglecting, unaffectionate, or
aggressive toward them. Researchers may study any one or a collectivity
of these behaviors (which tend to be significantly intercorrelated), but
generally researchers find that the sum of all four expressions provides
strongest evidence about behavioral and developmental outcomes.
These four forms of behavior are shown graphically in Figure 1. Ele-
ments to the left of the slash marks (warmth, hostility, and indifference) in
Figure 1 refer to internal, psychological states of parents. That is, parents
may feel or be perceived to feel warm (or cold and unloving) toward their
children, or they may feel or be perceived to feel hostile, angry, bitter,
resentful, irritable, impatient, or antagonistic toward them. Alternatively,
parents may feel or be perceived to feel indifferent toward their children,
feel or be perceived to feel unconcerned and uncaring about them, or have
a restricted interest in their overall well-being. Elements to the right of
the slash marks in Figure 1 (affection, aggression, and neglect) refer to ob-
servable behaviors that result when parents act on these emotions. Thus,
when parents act on their feelings of love they are likely to be affectionate.
 306 ● ETHOS

Figure 1. The warmth dimension of parenting.

 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 307

As noted in Figure 1, parental affection can be shown physically (e.g.,

hugging, kissing, caressing, and comforting), verbally (e.g., praising, com-
plimenting, and saying nice things to or about the child), or symbolically
in some other way, as with the use of culturally specific gestures. These
and many other caring, nurturing, supportive, and loving behaviors help
define the behavioral expressions of parental acceptance.
When parents act on feelings of hostility, anger, resentment, or en-
mity, the resulting behavior is generally called aggression. As construed
in PARTheory, aggression is any behavior where there is the intention
of hurting someone, something, or oneself either physically or emotion-
ally. Figure 1 shows that parents may be physically aggressive (e.g., hitting,
pushing, throwing things, and pinching) as well as verbally aggressive (e.g.,
sarcastic, cursing, mocking, shouting, saying thoughtless, humiliating, or
disparaging things to or about the child). Additionally, parents may use
hurtful, nonverbal symbolic gestures toward their children.
The connection between indifference as an internal motivator and ne-
glect as a behavioral response is not as direct as the connection between
hostility and aggression. This is true because parents may neglect or be
perceived to neglect their children for many reasons that have nothing to
do with indifference. For example, parents may neglect their children as a
way of trying to cope with their anger toward them. Neglect is not simply
a matter of failing to provide for the material and physical needs of chil-
dren, however; it also pertains to parents’ failure to attend appropriately
to children’s social and emotional needs. Often, for example, neglecting
parents pay little attention to children’s needs for comfort, solace, help,
or attention; they may also remain physically as well as psychologically
unresponsive or even unavailable or inaccessible. All these behaviors, real
or perceived—individually and collectively—are likely to induce children
to feel unloved or rejected. Even in warm and loving families, however,
children are likely to experience—at least occasionally—a few of these
hurtful emotions and behaviors.
Thus, it is important to be aware that parental acceptance-rejection
can be viewed and studied from either of two perspectives: either as per-
ceived or subjectively experienced by the individual (the phenomenolog-
ical perspective), or as reported by an outside observer (the behavioral
perspective). Usually, but not always, the two perspectives lead to similar
conclusions. PARTheory evidence suggests, however, that if the conclu-
sions are very discrepant one should consider placing an emphasis on
information derived from the phenomenological perspective. This is true
because a child may feel unloved (as in undifferentiated rejection), but
outside observers may fail to detect any explicit indicators of parental
rejection. Alternatively, observers may report a significant amount of
parental aggression or neglect, but the child may not feel rejected. This
308 ● ETHOS

occurs with some regularity in reports of child abuse and neglect. Thus,
there is only a problematic relation between so-called “objective” reports
of abuse, rejection, and neglect on the one hand and children’s percep-
tions of parental acceptance-rejection on the other. As Kagan (1978:61)
put it, “parental rejection is not a specific set of actions by parents but a
belief held by the child.”
In effect, much of parental acceptance-rejection behavior is symbolic.
Therefore, to understand why rejection has consistent effects on children
and adults, one must understand its symbolic nature. Certainly in the
context of ethnic and cross-cultural studies investigators must strive to
understand people’s symbolic, culturally-based interpretations of parents’
love-related behaviors if they wish to fully comprehend the acceptance-
rejection process in those settings. That is, even though parents every-
where may express, to some degree, acceptance (warmth, affection, care,
concern) and rejection (coldness, lack of affection, hostility, aggression,
indifference, neglect), the way they do it is highly variable and saturated
with cultural or sometimes idiosyncratic meaning. For example, parents
anywhere might praise or compliment their children, but the way in which
they do it in one sociocultural setting might have no meaning (or might
have a totally different meaning) in a second setting. This is illustrated in
the following incident:
A few years ago I [Rohner] interviewed a high caste Hindu woman about family matters
in India. Another woman seated nearby distracted my attention. The second woman
quietly and carefully peeled an orange and then removed the seeds from each segment.
Her 9-year-old daughter became increasingly animated as her mother progressed. Later,
my Bengali interpreter asked me if I had noticed what the woman was doing. I answered
that I had, but that I had not paid much attention to it. “Should I have?” “Well,” she
answered, “you want to know about parental love and affection in West Bengal, so you
should know . . . .” She went on to explain that when a Bengali mother wants to praise her
child—to show approval and affection for her child—she might give the child a peeled
and seeded orange. Bengali children understand completely that their mothers have
done something special for them, even though mothers may not use words of praise—
for to do so would be unseemly, much like praising themselves. [Rohner 1994:113; see
also Rohner and Chaki-Sircar 1988]

In everyday American English, the word “rejection” implies bad par-

enting and sometimes even bad people. In cross-cultural and multiethnic
research, however, one must attempt to view the word as being descrip-
tive of parents’ behavior, not judgmental or evaluative. This is so because
parents in about 25 percent of the world’s societies behave in ways that
are consistent with the definition of rejection given here, but in the great
majority of cases—including historically in the United States—these
parents behave toward their children the way they believe good, respon-
sible parents should behave, as defined by cultural norms. Therefore, in
the context of cross-cultural research on parental acceptance-rejection,
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 309

a major goal is to determine whether children and adults everywhere

respond the same way when they experience themselves to be accepted
or rejected as children—regardless of cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, or
social class differences, or other such defining conditions. This issue is
discussed next in the context of PARTheory’s personality subtheory.

PARTHEORY’S PERSONALITY SUBTHEORY

As we said earlier, PARTheory’s personality subtheory attempts to
predict and explain major personality or psychological—especially mental
health-related—consequences of perceived parental acceptance and re-
jection. The subtheory begins with the assumption that over the course
of hominid evolution humans have developed the enduring, biologically
based emotional need for positive response from the people most impor-
tant to them. The need for positive response includes an emotional wish,
desire, or yearning (whether consciously recognized or not) for comfort,
support, care, concern, nurturance, and the like. In adulthood, the need
becomes more complex and differentiated to include the wish (recognized
or unrecognized) for positive regard from people with whom one has an
affectional bond of attachment. People who can best satisfy this need are
typically parents (for infants and children) but include significant others
and nonparental attachment figures (for adolescents and adults).
As construed in PARTheory, a significant other is any person with
whom a child or adult has a relatively long-lasting emotional tie, who is
uniquely important to the individual, and who is interchangeable with
no one else. In this sense, parents are generally significant others, but
parents also tend to have one additional quality not shared by most
significant others. That is, children’s sense of emotional security and
comfort tends to be dependent on the quality of their relationship with
their parents. Because of that, parents are usually the kind of signifi-
cant other called “attachment figures” in both PARTheory and attach-
ment theory (Ainsworth 1989). Parents are thus uniquely important to
children because the security and other emotional and psychological
states of offspring are dependent on the quality of relationship with their
parent(s). It is for this reason that parental acceptance and rejection
is postulated in PARTheory to have unparalleled influence in shaping
children’s personality development over time. Nevertheless, according
to PARTheory’s personality subtheory, adults’ psychological adjustment
and sense of emotional security and well-being generally tend to be more
strongly associated with the perceived quality of relationship with current
attachment figures than with remembered childhood relationships with
parents.
310 ● ETHOS

The concept of personality is defined in personality subtheory as an

individual’s more or less stable set of predispositions to respond (i.e., af-
fective, cognitive, perceptual, and motivational dispositions) and actual
modes of responding (i.e., observable behaviors) in various life situations
or contexts. This definition recognizes that behavior is motivated, is influ-
enced by external (i.e., environmental) as well as internal (e.g., emotional,
biological, and learning) factors, and usually has a regularity or orderli-
ness about it across time and space. PARTheory’s personality subtheory
postulates that the emotional need for positive response from significant
others and attachment figures is a powerful motivator, and when children
do not get this need satisfied adequately by their parents (or when adults
do not get this need met by their intimate partners or other attachment
figures), they are predisposed to respond emotionally and behaviorally in
specific ways. In particular—according to the subtheory—individuals who
feel rejected are likely to be anxious and insecure. In an attempt to allay
these feelings and to satisfy their needs, persons who feel rejected often
increase their bids for positive response, but only up to a point. That is,
they tend to become more dependent, as shown in Figure 2.
The term dependence in the theory refers to the internal, psycholog-
ically felt wish or yearning for emotional (as opposed to instrumental or
task-oriented) support, care, comfort, attention, nurturance, and similar

Figure 2. Dependence/independence in relation to parental acceptance-rejection.

 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 311

behaviors from attachment figures. This term, as used in PARTheory, also

refers to the actual behavioral bids individuals make for such respon-
siveness. For young children, these bids may include clinging to parents,
whining, or crying when parents unexpectedly depart, and seeking physi-
cal proximity with them when they return. Older children and adults may
express their need for positive response more symbolically—especially in
times of distress—by seeking reassurance, approval, or support, as well
as comfort, affection, or solace from people who are most important to
them—particularly from parents for youths, and from nonparental signif-
icant others and attachment figures for adults.
Dependence is construed in PARTheory as a continuum, with inde-
pendence defining one end of the continuum and dependence the other.
Independent people are those who have their need for positive response
met sufficiently so that they are free from frequent or intense yearning or
behavioral bids for succor from significant others. Very dependent people,
on the other hand, are those who have a frequent and intense desire for
positive response, and are likely to make many bids for response. As with
all the personality dispositions studied in PARTheory, humans everywhere
can be placed somewhere along the continuum of being more or less de-
pendent or independent. According to the theory, much of the variation
in dependence among children and adults is contingent on the extent to
which they perceive themselves to be accepted or rejected. Many rejected
children and adults feel the need for constant reassurance and emotional
support.
According to personality subtheory, parental rejection as well as
rejection by other attachment figures also leads to other personality out-
comes in addition to dependence. These include hostility, aggression, pas-
sive aggression, or psychological problems with the management of hostil-
ity and aggression; emotional unresponsiveness; immature dependence or
defensive independence depending on the form, frequency, duration, tim-
ing, and intensity of perceived rejection and parental control; impaired
self-esteem; impaired self-adequacy; emotional instability; and negative
worldview. Theoretically, these dispositions are expected to emerge be-
cause of the intense psychological pain produced by perceived rejection.
More specifically, beyond a certain point—a point that varies from individ-
ual to individual—children and adults who experience significant rejection
are likely to feel ever-increasing anger, resentment, and other destructive
emotions that may become intensely painful. As a result, many rejected
persons close off emotionally in an effort to protect themselves from the
hurt of further rejection. That is, they become less emotionally respon-
sive. In so doing, they often have problems being able or willing to express
love and in knowing how to or even being capable of accepting it from
others.
312 ● ETHOS

Because of all this psychological hurt, some rejected individuals be-

come defensively independent. Defensive independence is like healthy
independence in that individuals make relatively few behavioral bids for
positive response. It is unlike healthy independence, however, in that
defensively independent people continue to crave warmth and support—
positive response—although they sometimes do not recognize it. Indeed,
because of the overlay of anger, distrust, and other negative emotions gen-
erated by chronic rejection, they often positively deny this need. Defensive
independence with its associated emotions and behaviors sometimes leads
to a process of counter rejection, in which individuals who feel rejected, in
turn reject the other person(s). Not surprisingly, this process sometimes
escalates into a cycle of violence and other serious relationship problems.
In addition to dependence or defensive independence, individuals
who feel rejected are predicted in PARTheory’s personality subtheory to
develop feelings of impaired self-esteem and impaired self-adequacy. This
comes about because—as noted in symbolic interaction theory (Cooley
1902; Mead 1934)—individuals tend to view themselves as they think
their parents or significant others view them. Thus, insofar as children
and adults feel their attachment figures do not love them, they are likely
to feel they are unlovable, perhaps even unworthy of being loved. Whereas
self-esteem pertains to individuals’ feelings of self-worth or value, self-
adequacy pertains to their feelings of competence or mastery to per-
form daily tasks adequately and to satisfy their own instrumental (task-
oriented) needs. Insofar as individuals feel they are not very good people,
they are also apt to feel they are not very good at satisfying their needs.
Alternatively, insofar as people feel they are no good at satisfying their per-
sonal needs, they often come to think less well of themselves more globally.
Anger, negative self-feelings, and the other consequences of perceived
rejection tend to diminish rejected children’s and adults’ capacity to deal
effectively with stress. Because of this, people who feel rejected often tend
to be less emotionally stable than people who feel accepted. They often be-
come emotionally upset—perhaps tearful or angry—when confronted with
stressful situations that accepted (loved) people are able to handle with
greater emotional equanimity. All these acutely painful feelings associated
with perceived rejection tend to induce children and adults to develop a
negative worldview. That is, according to PARTheory, rejected persons are
likely to develop a view of the world—of life, interpersonal relationships,
and the very nature of human existence—as being untrustworthy, hostile,
unfriendly, emotionally unsafe, threatening, or dangerous. These thoughts
and feelings often extend to people’s beliefs about the nature of the su-
pernatural world (i.e., God, the gods, and other religious beliefs) (Rohner
1975, 1986), as discussed more fully below in PARTheory’s sociocultural
systems subtheory.
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 313

Negative worldview, negative self-esteem, negative self-adequacy, and

some of the other personality dispositions described above are important
elements in the social cognitions or mental representations of rejected
persons. In PARTheory, the concept of mental representation refers to
an individual’s more-or-less organized but usually implicit conception of
existence, including a conception of things that the individual takes for
granted about self, others, and the experiential world, as constructed
from emotionally significant past and current experiences. Along with
one’s emotional state—which both influences and is influenced by one’s
conception of reality—mental representations tend to shape the ways in
which individuals perceive, construe, and react to new experiences, in-
cluding interpersonal relationships. Mental representations also influence
how individuals store and remember experiences.
Once created, individuals’ mental representations of self, of signifi-
cant others, and of the world around them tend to induce them to seek
or to avoid certain situations and kinds of people. In effect, the way indi-
viduals think about themselves and their world shapes the way they live
their lives. This is notably true of rejected children and adults. For exam-
ple, many rejected persons have a tendency to perceive hostility where
none is intended, to see deliberate rejection in unintended acts of signif-
icant others, or to devalue their sense of personal worth in the face of
strong counter-information. Moreover, rejected persons are likely to seek,
create, interpret, or perceive experiences, situations, and relationships in
ways that are consistent with their distorted mental representations. And
they often tend to avoid or mentally reinterpret situations that are in-
consistent with these representations. Additionally, rejected children and
adults often construct mental images of personal relationships as being
unpredictable, untrustworthy, and perhaps hurtful. These negative men-
tal representations are often carried forward into new relationships where
rejected individuals find it difficult to trust others emotionally, or where
they may become hypervigilant and hypersensitive to any slights or signs
of emotional undependability. Because of all this selective attention, selec-
tive perception, faulty styles of causal attribution, and distorted cognitive
information processing, rejected individuals are expected in PARTheory
to self-propel along qualitatively different developmental pathways from
accepted or loved people.
The pain of perceived rejection is very real. In fact, brain imaging
(fMRI) studies reveal that specific parts of the brain (i.e., the anterior cin-
gulate cortex, and the right ventral prefrontal cortex) are activated when
people feel rejected, just as they are when people experience physical pain
(Eisenberg et al. 2003; see also Squire and Stein 2003).
It is perhaps for reasons such as these that most studies tend to show
that about 80 percent of the children and adults assessed so far respond
314 ● ETHOS

Figure 3. Copers and troubled individuals in relation to PARTheory’s personality

subtheory.

as personality subtheory predicts. In fact, we know of no methodologi-

cally adequate study that fails to show the same basic trend portrayed in
Figure 3. That is, Figure 3 graphically displays PARTheory’s postulates
about expected relations between perceived acceptance-rejection and in-
dividuals’ mental health status. More specifically, Figure 3 shows that,
within a band of individual variation, children’s and adults’ mental health
status is likely to become impaired in direct proportion to the form, fre-
quency, severity, and duration of rejection experienced. Some individuals
who come from loving families, however, also display the constellation
of psychological problems typically shown by rejected individuals. These
people are called “troubled” in PARTheory; many are individuals (e.g.,
adults) who are in a less than loving (e.g., rejecting) relationships with at-
tachment figures other than parents. This fact helps confirm PARTheory’s
expectation that, for most people, perceived rejection by any attachment
figure at any point throughout the lifespan effectively compromises the
likelihood of healthy social-emotional functioning. However, it is also ex-
pected in PARTheory that a small minority of individuals will be able to
thrive emotionally despite having experienced significant rejection by an
attachment figure. As shown in Figure 3 these people are called “cop-
ers.” They are the focus of PARTheory’s coping subtheory briefly dis-
cussed next.

PARTHEORY’S COPING SUBTHEORY

As we said earlier, PARTheory’s coping subtheory deals with the ques-
tion of how some rejected individuals appear to be able to withstand the
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 315

corrosive drizzle of day-to-day rejection without suffering the negative

mental health consequences that most rejected individuals do. Theoreti-
cally and empirically, the coping process is the least well-developed por-
tion of PARTheory. As is true for most other bodies of research on the
coping process (Somerfield and McCrae 2000), little is yet known with
confidence about the mechanisms and processes that help answer cop-
ing subtheory’s basic question described earlier. Nevertheless, it seems
clear that in order to understand the coping process—indeed the en-
tire acceptance-rejection process—one must adopt a multivariate, person-
in-context perspective. This perspective has three elements: self, other,
and context. Specifically, the multivariate model of behavior employed in
PARTheory states that the behavior of the individual (e.g., coping with
perceived rejection) is a function of the interaction between self, other,
and context. “Self” characteristics include the individual’s mental activ-
ities along with the other internal and external (personality) character-
istics discussed earlier. “Other” characteristics include the personal and
interpersonal characteristics of the rejecting parent(s) and other attach-
ment figure(s), along with the form, frequency, duration, and severity of
rejection. “Context” characteristics include other significant people in
the individual’s life, along with social-situational characteristics of the
person’s environment. A specific research hypothesis coming from this
perspective states that, all other things being equal, the likelihood that
a child is able to cope with perceived parental rejection is enhanced by
the presence of a warm, supportive, alternate caregiver or attachment
figure.
PARTheory’s emphasis on mental activity—including mental
representations—leads us to expect that specific social cognitive capa-
bilities allow some children and adults to cope with perceived rejection
more effectively than others. These capabilities include a clearly differen-
tiated sense of self, self-determination, and the capacity to depersonalize
(Rohner 1986). More specifically, coping subtheory predicts that the ca-
pacity of individuals to cope with rejection is enhanced to the degree that
they have a clearly differentiated sense of self, one aspect of which is a
sense of self-determination. Self-determined individuals believe they can
exert at least a modicum of control over what happens to them through
their own effort or personal attributes. Other individuals may feel like
pawns: They feel as though things happen to them because of fate, chance,
luck, or powerful others. Individuals with a sense of self-determination
are expected to have an internal psychological resource for minimizing
some of the most damaging consequences of perceived rejection.
Similarly, individuals who have the capacity to depersonalize are pro-
vided another social-cognitive resource for dealing with perceived rejec-
tion. Personalizing refers to the act of “taking it personally,” that is, reflex-
ively or automatically relating life events and interpersonal encounters to
316 ● ETHOS

oneself—of interpreting events egocentrically in terms of oneself, usually

in a negative sense. Thus, personalizers are apt to interpret inadvertent
slights and minor acts of insensitivity as being deliberate acts of rejection
or other hurtful intentions. Individuals who are able to depersonalize,
however, have a psychological resource for dealing in a more positive way
with interpersonal ambiguities. All three of these social cognitive factors
are expected to provide psychological shields against the most corrosive
effects of perceived rejection. However, these attributes themselves often
tend to be affected by rejection, thus complicating the task of assessing
the independent contribution that each might make in helping children
and adults cope with perceived rejection.
It is important to note here that the concept “coper” in PARTheory’s
coping subtheory refers to affective copers versus instrumental copers.
Affective copers are those people whose emotional and overall mental
health is reasonably good despite having been raised in seriously reject-
ing families. Instrumental copers, on the other hand, are rejected persons
who do well in school, in their professions, occupations, and other task-
oriented activities but whose emotional and mental health is impaired.
Instrumental copers maintain a high level of task competence and occu-
pational performance despite serious rejection. Many prominent person-
alities in history have been instrumental copers. Included among them
are such personages as Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, John Stuart Mill,
Richard Nixon, Edgar Allen Poe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and Mark
Twain, among many, many others (Goertzel and Goertzel 1962; Howe
1982). Biographies and autobiographies of these individuals reveal that
even though they were successful instrumental copers, they were not af-
fective copers. All appear to have been psychologically distressed in ways
described by PARTheory’s personality subtheory.
Even though the mental health status of affective copers is reasonably
good, it is generally not as good as that of individuals coming from lov-
ing (accepting) families—but it does tend to be significantly better than
that of most individuals coming from rejecting families. Over time, from
childhood into adulthood, however, all but the most severely rejected and
psychologically injured individuals are likely to have enough positive ex-
periences outside their families of origin to help ameliorate the most dam-
aging emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects of parental rejection.
Thus, given the ordinary resilience characteristic of most people most of
the time (Masten 2001)—in combination with successful psychotherapy,
positive work experiences, satisfying intimate relationships, or other such
gratifying processes and outcomes—adults who were rejected as children
are often better adjusted emotionally and psychologically than they were
as children under the direct influence of rejecting parents—although they
tend not to have as positive sense of well-being as adults who felt loved
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 317

all along. That is, important sequelae of rejection are apt to linger into
adulthood, placing even affective copers at somewhat greater risk for so-
cial, physical, and emotional problems throughout life than persons who
were loved continuously. This is especially true if the rejection process in
childhood seriously compromised the individual’s ability to form secure,
trusting relationships with an intimate partner or other adult attachment
figures.

PARTHEORY’S SOCIOCULTURAL SYSTEMS MODEL AND SUBTHEORY

As we intimated earlier in our discussion of PARTheory’s multivariate
model, parental rejection occurs in a complex ecological (familial, commu-
nity, and sociocultural) context. PARTheory’s sociocultural systems model
shown in Figure 4 provides a way of thinking about the antecedents, con-
sequences, and other correlates of parental acceptance-rejection within
individuals and total societies. This model drew stimulus when it was first
developed in 1966 from Kardiner (1939, 1945), and later from Whiting
and Child (1953; Whiting 1977). The model shows, for example, that
the likelihood of parents’ (element 3 in the model) displaying any given
form of behavior (e.g., acceptance-rejection) is shaped in important ways
by the maintenance systems of that society including such social institu-
tions as family structure, household organization, economic organization,
political organization, systems of defense, and other institutions that bear
directly on the survival of a culturally organized population within its nat-
ural environment (element 1 in the model). The model also shows that
parents’ accepting-rejecting and other behaviors impact directly on chil-
dren’s personality development and behavior (as postulated in personality
subtheory).
The double-headed arrow in the model (designed to suggest bidirec-
tionality between elements) shows that personal characteristics of chil-
dren, such as their temperament and behavioral dispositions, shape to a

Figure 4. PARTheory’s sociocultural systems model.

318 ● ETHOS

significant extent the form and quality of parents’ behavior toward them.
Arrows in the model also reveal that—in addition to family experiences—
youths have a wide variety of often-influential experiences (element 5,
intervening developmental experiences) in the context of the natural en-
vironment in which they live, the maintenance systems of their society,
interaction with peers, and adults in the society (element 6), and the
institutionalized expressive systems of their society (element 7).
Institutionalized expressive systems and behaviors refer to the reli-
gious traditions and behaviors of a people, to their artistic traditions and
preferences, to their musical and folkloric traditions and preferences, and
to other such symbolic, mostly nonutilitarian, and nonsurvival-related
beliefs and behaviors. They are called “expressive” in PARTheory (as in
Whiting’s model) because they are believed to express or reflect people’s
internal, psychological states, at least initially when the expressive
systems were first created. Thus, expressive systems are believed in
PARTheory to be symbolic creations, formed over time by multiple
individuals within a society. As people change, the expressive systems
and behaviors also tend to change, although sometimes slowly and
grudgingly—especially if the systems have been codified in writing. It is
important to note here—according to sociocultural systems subtheory—
that even though expressive systems are ultimately human creations,
once created and incorporated into the sociocultural system they tend to
affect individuals, shaping their future beliefs and behaviors.
Guided by the sociocultural systems model, PARTheory’s sociocul-
tural systems subtheory attempts to predict and explain worldwide causes
of parental acceptance and rejection. The subtheory also attempts to pre-
dict and explain expressive correlates of parental acceptance and rejec-
tion. For example the subtheory predicts—and substantial cross-cultural
evidence confirms—that in societies where children tend to be rejected,
cultural beliefs about the supernatural world (i.e., God, gods, and the
spirit world) usually portray supernaturals as being malevolent (i.e., hos-
tile, treacherous, unpredictable, capricious, destructive, or negative in
other ways) (Rohner 1975, 1986). However, the supernatural world is usu-
ally thought to be benevolent—warm, supportive, generous, protective,
or kindly in other ways—in societies where most children are raised with
loving acceptance. No doubt these cultural differences are the result of ag-
gregated individual differences in the mental representations of accepted
versus rejected persons within these two different kinds of societies.
Parental acceptance and rejection are also known to be associated
worldwide with many other expressive sociocultural correlates such as
the artistic traditions characteristic of particular societies, as well as
the artistic preferences of individuals within these societies (Rohner and
Frampton 1982). Additionally, evidence suggests that the recreational and
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 319

occupational choices adults make may be associated with childhood ex-

periences of acceptance and rejection (Rohner 1986). All these and other
expressive behaviors and beliefs appear to be byproducts of the social,
emotional, and social-cognitive effects of parental acceptance-rejection
discussed earlier.
Why do parents in most societies tend to be warm and loving, whereas
parents in about 25 percent of the world’s societies tend to be mildly to
severely rejecting (Rohner 1975)? What factors account for these societal
differences and for individual variations in parenting within societies?
Questions such as these guide the second portion of PARTheory’s socio-
cultural systems subtheory. There is no single or simple answer to these
questions, but specific factors do appear to be reliably associated with so-
cietal and intrasocietal variations in parental rejection. Principal among
these are conditions that promote the breakdown of primary social and
emotional relationships. Thus, single parents (most often mothers) in
social isolation without social and emotional supports, especially if the
parents are young and economically deprived, appear universally to be
at greatest risk for withdrawing love and affection from their children
(Rohner 1986). It is useful to note, however, that from a global perspec-
tive poverty by itself is not necessarily associated with increased rejection.
Rather, it is poverty in association with certain other social and emotional
conditions that place children at greatest risk. Indeed, much of human-
ity is now and always has been in a state of relative poverty. But despite
this, most parents around the world raise their children with loving care
(Rohner 1975).

METHODS IN PARTHEORY RESEARCH

PARTheory’s program of cross-cultural research is guided method-
ologically by conceptual models called anthroponomy and the universalist
approach (Rohner 1986; Rohner and Rohner 1980). Anthroponomy is an
approach to the human sciences characterized by a search for universals,
that is, for worldwide principles of behavior that can be shown empirically
to generalize across our species under specified conditions whenever they
occur. Although many propositions advanced by Western social scientists
are assumed to apply to all humans, verification of such claims is com-
plex and involves attention to the role of culture, language, migration,
history, and other such factors. It also requires attention to the strengths
and weaknesses of individual measurement procedures (e.g., self-report
questionnaires) and general paradigms of research (e.g., the holocul-
tural method) (Cournoyer 2000; Cournoyer and Malcolm 2004; Rohner
1986).
320 ● ETHOS

In PARTheory these issues are addressed in the universalist approach,

a multi-methodology and multi-procedure research strategy that searches
for the convergence of results across an array of discrete measurement
modalities and paradigms of research in a broad range of sociocultural
and ethnic settings worldwide. More specifically, five discrete methods or
types of studies have been used to test core aspects of the theory. These
methods can be discussed in two clusters. The first cluster consists of
two types of studies. The first involves quantitative psychological stud-
ies using techniques such as interviews, behavior observations, and self-
report questionnaires, most notably the Parental Acceptance-Rejection
Questionnaire (PARQ) (Rohner 1990; Rohner and Khaleque 2005a), the
Parental Acceptance-Rejection/Control Questionnaire (PARQ/Control)
(Rohner 1990; Rohner and Khaleque 2005a), and the Personality Assess-
ment Questionnaire (PAQ) (Rohner 1990; Rohner and Khaleque 2005a).
Details about the conceptual and methodological characteristics and bases
on which these and other PARTheory-related measures were developed
are discussed at length in the Handbook for the Study of Parental Ac-
ceptance and Rejection (Rohner and Khaleque 2005a). Here we simply
provide a broad overview of these measures.
Three versions of the PARQ and PARQ/Control exist. One is used to
assess children’s perceptions of the degree of acceptance or rejection (and
behavioral control) they receive at the hands of their mothers, fathers, or
other caregivers. Another assesses adults’ recollections of their childhood
experiences of maternal or paternal acceptance-rejection (and control).
The third asks parents to reflect on their own current accepting-rejecting
and controlling behaviors. The PAQ, on the other hand, assesses individ-
uals’ (adults’ or children’s) self-perceptions of overall psychological ad-
justment as defined by the seven personality dispositions central to per-
sonality subtheory, as described earlier. Details about the reliability and
validity of the PARQ, PARQ/Control, and PAQ for use in cross-cultural
research as well as among American ethnic groups is provided in Rohner
and Khaleque (2005a), Rohner (1986, 1990), and in Khaleque and Rohner
(2002b). References to several hundred quantitative psychological studies
using these techniques may be found in Rohner (2005). Meta-analysis, the
second type of study in this cluster, summarizes and synthesizes results of
a collection of these discrete psychological studies. The work of Khaleque
and Rohner (2002a) illustrates this method.
The second cluster consists of three methods or types of studies based
on ethnographic research. The first is the ethnographic case study such
as that done by Rohner and Chaki-Sircar (1988) in a peasant farming vil-
lage of West Bengal, India. Ethnographic case studies employ long-term
(e.g., six months to several years) participant observation procedures
within a specific culturally organized community, along with structured
and unstructured observations, interviews, and other such procedures.
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 321

Such ethnographic studies produce a context-rich account of the lifeway

of a people. A second method within this cluster is the controlled compar-
ison or concomitant variation study (Naroll 1968; Rohner 1977). In these
studies investigators usually locate two or more culture-bearing popula-
tions in which one of two conditions is true: 1) relevant variables in the
sampled populations vary, but other sociocultural factors remain constant;
or 2) relevant variables in the sample population remain constant while
other sociocultural factors are free to vary. Rohner’s (1960) comparative
study of parental rejection in three Pacific societies (a Maori community of
New Zealand, a traditional highland community of Bali, and the Alorese of
Indonesia) illustrates the second type of study in this cluster. Finally, the
holocultural method (often called the cross-cultural survey method) is the
third approach within this cluster (Naroll et al. 1980; Rohner et al. 1978).
This method is a research design for statistically measuring the relation
between two or more theoretically defined and operationalized variables
in a random, stratified sample of the world’s adequately described socio-
cultural systems. The sources of data are ethnographic reports rather than
direct observations, self-report questionnaires, interviews, or other such
procedures. Rohner’s 1975 study of 101 well-described nonindustrial so-
cieties distributed widely throughout the major geographic regions and
culture areas of the world illustrates this type of study.
Each of these five types of studies contains unique strengths and
weaknesses. The strengths of the psychological-study cluster, for example,
are several—including valid, reliable, and precise descriptions of phenom-
ena. Estimates of both central tendency and variability in data generated
in this cluster of methods allow sensitive and complex statistical proce-
dures to be employed to tease out subtle effects. A potential weakness of
these studies, however, is the fact that rich contextual data is often miss-
ing. Special strengths of the methods in the ethnographic research cluster
are validity and groundedness. That is, ethnographic studies produce ac-
counts that are rich in cultural detail and context. Derived as they are
from ethnography, holocultural studies are also grounded, but they have
an important additional strength in that they allow for truly species-wide
sampling that takes into account the full range of known sociocultural
variation. A weakness of this paradigm of research, however, is the fact
that measures coded from ethnography are sometimes imprecise, and
therefore may be low in reliability.

EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THE MAIN FEATURES OF PARTHEORY

Overwhelmingly, the most highly developed portion of PARTheory is
its personality subtheory. Evidence bearing on that subtheory comes from
all five types of studies described above. Because of their robustness and
322 ● ETHOS

simplicity, however, dozens of researchers internationally have chosen to

use the PARQ, PARQ/Control, and the PAQ with thousands of children and
adults in many ethnic groups and societies throughout the world. More
evidence has been compiled from these studies than from studies using
any other set of measures. Accordingly, results of these studies are given
greatest attention here.
Virtually every study that has used these measures—regardless of
racial, cultural, linguistic, geographic, and other such variations—has
reached the same conclusion: The experience of parental acceptance (or
rejection) tends to be associated with the form of psychological adjustment
(or maladjustment) postulated in personality subtheory. A meta-analysis
of 43 studies drawing from 7,563 respondents worldwide using the PARQ
and PAQ, for example, showed that 3,433 additional studies, all with non-
significant results, would be required to disconfirm the conclusion that
perceived acceptance-rejection is panculturally associated with children’s
psychological adjustment; 941 such studies would be required to discon-
firm the conclusion among adults (Khaleque and Rohner 2002a). All effect
sizes reported in the meta-analysis were statistically significant. Addition-
ally, results showed no significant heterogeneity in effect sizes in different
samples cross-culturally or within U.S. ethnic groups.
The meta-analysis also showed that regardless of culture, ethnicity,
or geographic location, approximately 26 percent of the variability in
children’s psychological adjustment and 21 percent of that in adults is
accounted for by parental (paternal as well at maternal) acceptance-
rejection. These results support PARTheory’s expectation that the magni-
tude of the relation between perceived acceptance-rejection and psycho-
logical adjustment is likely to be stronger in childhood—while children
are still under the direct influences of parents—than in adulthood (Rohner
1986, 1999). Obviously, a substantial amount of variance in children’s and
adults’ adjustment remains to be accounted for by factors so far unmea-
sured in this program of research. No doubt a variety of cultural, behavioral
genetic, and other learning factors are implicated in this variance.
One class of factors, mentioned earlier, is already known to be asso-
ciated with variability in adults’ psychological adjustment. These factors
have to do with the quality of adults’ perceived relationships with their
intimate partners (attachment figures). Fourteen cross-cultural studies
are now underway on the link between adults’ psychological adjustment
and their relationships with current intimate partners, possibly as me-
diated or moderated by remembered relationships with mothers and fa-
thers in childhood. Four of the studies have been developed sufficiently
to briefly summarize here. All of them concluded—as PARTheory’s per-
sonality subtheory predicts—that adults’ perceptions of the quality of re-
lationships with their intimate partners (in terms of perceived partner
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 323

acceptance-rejection) is strongly associated with adults’ self-reported psy-

chological adjustment. This is true even after controlling for the influence
of remembered parental acceptance-rejection in childhood. These stud-
ies represent very disparate populations, including heterosexual adult fe-
males in the United States (Rohner and Khaleque 2005b); married and
dating college students (males and females) in India (Parmar and Rohner
2005); married and dating women in Finland (Khaleque et al. 2005); and
adults (males and females) from all segments of society in Turkey (Varan et
al. 2005). These and other studies (e.g., Gibson 2005) provide promising
support for PARTheory’s postulate that perceived acceptance-rejection
in attachment relationships at any point in the lifespan is likely every-
where to have the same consequences as perceived parental acceptance-
rejection in childhood.
As we said above, three other classes of data also support the ma-
jor postulates of PARTheory’s personality subtheory. These are cross-
cultural survey (holocultural) studies, ethnographic case studies, and
controlled comparison (concomitant variation) studies. Regarding the
first, results of a major holocultural study (Rohner 1975) of 101 well-
described nonindustrial societies confirmed the conclusion that parental
acceptance-rejection is associated panculturally with the psychological
(mal)adjustment of children and adults. Additionally, the controlled com-
parison of three sociocultural groups in the Pacific mentioned earlier
(Rohner 1960) also supported this conclusion, as did an ethnographic
and psychological community study in West Bengal, India (Rohner and
Chaki-Sircar 1988). Additionally, an ethnographic and psychological case
study of 349 9–16-year-old youths in St. Kitts, West Indies (Rohner 1987)
along with an ethnographic and psychological case study of 281 9–18-
year-old youths and their parents in a poor, biracial (African American
and European American) community in southeast Georgia, USA (Rohner
1994; Veneziano and Rohner 1998) also confirmed the conclusion that
perceived parental acceptance-rejection is associated with youths’ psy-
chological adjustment.
In addition to issues of psychological adjustment described in per-
sonality subtheory, evidence also strongly implicates at least three other
mental health issues as likely universal correlates of parental acceptance-
rejection. These issues are: 1) depression and depressed affect; 2) behavior
problems, including conduct disorders, externalizing behaviors, and delin-
quency; and 3) substance (drug and alcohol) abuse (Rohner and Britner
2002). Evidence regarding each of these topics is briefly amplified below.

Depression. Parental rejection has been found to be consistently related

to both clinical and nonclinical depression and depressed affect within
major ethnic groups in the United States, including African Americans
324 ● ETHOS

(Crook et al. 1981), Asian Americans (Greenberger and Chen 1996),

European Americans (Belsky and Pensky 1988; Whitbeck et al. 1993), and
Hispanic Americans (Dumka et al. 1997). In addition, parental rejection
has been found to be linked with depression in many countries worldwide,
including Australia (Parker 1983a; Parker et al. 1987), China (Chen et al.
1995), Egypt (Fattah 1996; Hassab-Allah 1996; Salama 1990), Germany
(Richter 1994), Hungary (Richter 1994), Italy (Richter 1994), Sweden
(Perris et al. 1986; Richter 1994), and Turkey (Erkman 1992). Moreover,
a number of longitudinal studies show that perceived parental rejection
in childhood tends to precede the development of depressive symptoms
in adolescence and adulthood (Chen et al. 1995; Ge et al. 1996; Lefkowitz
and Tesiny 1984).

Behavior Problems. Rohner and Britner also found that parental rejec-
tion appears to be a major predictor of almost all forms of behavior
problems, including conduct disorders, externalizing behavior, and delin-
quency. Cross-cultural findings that support this conclusion come from
Bahrain (Al-Falaij 1991), China (Chen, Rubin, and Li 1997), Croatia
(Ajdukovic 1990), Egypt (Salama 1984), England (Maughan et al. 1995),
India (Saxena 1992), and Norway (Pedersen 1994). Studies also support
this conclusion among American ethnic groups, including African Amer-
icans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and Hispanic Americans
(Chen et al. 1998; Marcus and Gray 1998; Rothbaum and Weis 1994).
Finally, a number of longitudinal studies in the United States (Ge et al.
1996; Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber 1986; Simons et al. 1989), and glob-
ally (Chen et al. 1997) show that parental rejection tends to precede the
development of behavior problems.

Substance Abuse. Support for the worldwide correlation between parental

acceptance-rejection and substance abuse comes from studies conducted
in Australia (Rosenberg 1971), Canada (Hundleby and Mercer 1987),
England (Merry 1972), the Netherlands (Emmelkamp and Heeres 1988),
and Sweden (Vrasti et al. 1990). Some of these studies clearly suggest that
parental rejection is causally connected with both drug abuse and alcohol
abuse. Parental rejection has also been found to be connected with sub-
stance abuse in major ethnic groups in the U.S., including among African
Americans (Myers et al. 1997; Shedler and Block 1990), Asian Americans
(Shedler and Block 1990), and Hispanic Americans (Coombs et al. 1991).
Moreover, Rohner and Britner found a number of studies providing evi-
dence about the relation between parental rejection and substance abuse
among middle class and working class European Americans.

The Importance of Father Love. Substantial evidence in all these types

of study supports the conclusion that father love (acceptance-rejection)
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 325

is often as strongly implicated as mother love in the development of

behavioral and psychological problems, as well as in the development
of offspring’s sense of health and well-being (Rohner 1998; Rohner and
Veneziano 2001; Veneziano 2000, 2003). Studies supporting this conclu-
sion tend to deal with the following six issues among children, adolescents,
and adults: 1) personality and psychological adjustment problems (Amato
1994; Dominy et al. 2000); 2) mental illness (Barrera et al. 1992; Lefkowitz
and Tesiny 1984); 3) psychological health and well-being (Amato 1994);
4) conduct disorder (Eron et al. 1961); 5) substance abuse (Brook and
Brook 1988; Emmelkamp and Heeres 1988); and 6) delinquency (Andry
1962).
Some of these studies, especially those carried out in the 1990s and
later, used multiple regression, structural equation modeling, and other
powerful statistical procedures that allow investigators to estimate the rel-
ative contribution of each parent’s behavior to youth outcomes. Many of
these studies conclude that paternal love (acceptance-rejection) explains
a unique and independent portion of the variance in specific child out-
comes over and above the portion explained by maternal love (Veneziano
2003). Other studies conclude that paternal love is sometimes the sole
significant predictor of specific child outcomes (Rohner and Veneziano
2001). Studies in this latter category tend to address one or more of the
following issues: 1) personality and psychological adjustment problems
(Barnett et al. 1992; Dickie et al. 1997); 2) conduct and delinquency prob-
lems (Kroupa 1988); and 3) substance abuse (Brook et al. 1981).

IMPLICATIONS OF PARTHEORY EVIDENCE

The search in PARTheory for cross-culturally valid principles of be-
havior is based on the assumption that with a scientific understand-
ing of the worldwide antecedents, consequences, and other correlates of
acceptance-rejection comes the possibility of formulating culture-fair and
practicable programs, policies, and interventions affecting families and
children everywhere. This research contributes to the goal of culture-fair
programs and policies in that it asks practitioners to look beyond differ-
ences in cultural beliefs, language, and custom when making judgments
about the adequacy of parenting, and to focus instead on whether individ-
uals’ basic needs (e.g., need for positive response) are being met. Social
policies and programs of prevention, intervention, and treatment based on
idiosyncratic beliefs at a particular point in history are likely to prove un-
workable for some, and probably even prejudicial for many minority popu-
lations. Policies and programs based on demonstrable principles of human
behavior such as those now emerging from this research, however, stand
326 ● ETHOS

a good chance of working as nations and people change. The values and
customs of a particular sociocultural group, therefore, are not—according
to PARTheory—the most important criteria to be used to evaluate the
adequacy of parenting in that group. Rather, the most important question
becomes how loved (accepted) children perceive themselves to be. Inso-
far as children perceive their parents to be accepting, then—according to
both theory and evidence presented here—it probably makes little differ-
ence for children’s developmental outcome how external reporters view
parents’ behavior.
It is thoughts such as these that have motivated a great part of
PARTheory research. Now, after four-and-a-half decades of research with
thousands of individuals in many cultures worldwide and with members
of every major American ethnic group, at least two conclusions seem war-
ranted. First, the same classes of behaviors appear universally to convey
the symbolic message that “my parent . . . ” (or other attachment figure)
“loves me” (or does not love me, care about me, want me—i.e., rejects me).
These classes of behavior include the perception of warmth/affection (or
its opposite, coldness and lack of affection), hostility/aggression, indiffer-
ence/neglect, and undifferentiated rejection, as defined at the beginning
of this article. Second, differences in culture, ethnicity, social class, race,
gender, and other such factors do not exert enough influence to override
the apparently universal tendency for children and adults everywhere to
respond in essentially the same way when they perceive themselves to be
accepted or rejected by the people most important to them. Having said
this, however, we must also stress that the association between perceived
acceptance-rejection and psychological outcomes for youths and adults
is far from perfect. Indeed, even though perceived parental acceptance-
rejection appears to account universally for an average of about 25 percent
of the variance in the psychological adjustment of youths and adults,
75 percent of the variance is yet to be accounted for by other factors.
No doubt behavior genetics, sociocultural, and other experiential factors
are among these influences. Nonetheless, results of research completed so
far are so robust and stable cross-culturally that we believe professionals
should feel confident developing policies and practice-applications based
on the central tenets of PARTheory—especially PARTheory’s personal-
ity subtheory—despite the fact that much is yet to be learned about the
causes, effects, and other correlates of perceived acceptance-rejection.

RONALD P. ROHNER is Professor Emeritus and Director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of
Parental Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut.
ABDUL KHALEQUE is a Senior Scientist in the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Parental Acceptance
and Rejection at the University of Connecticut.
 Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory ● 327

DAVID E. COURNOYER is Associate Dean of Social Work and Associate Director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner
Center for Parental Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut.

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