The Dark Side of the Self: When Family is Highly Related to Mental Health Deterioration.

Abstract

This study aims to empirically test whether family has a unique significance for the self that cannot be captured by the social self alone. Specifically, it examines whether family self-concept, compared to social self-concept, is more closely related to family-specific indicators (i.e., parent-child communication and family functioning) as well as to indicators of emotional maladjustment like mental health deterioration (i.e., psychological distress and depressive symptoms). The sample comprised 4,953 Mexican adolescents, including 2,551 men (51.5%) and 2,402 women, aged 14-17 years (M = 15.60, SD = 0.92). Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to evaluate the proposed big five-dimensional self-concept model. Cohen's d confidence intervals, derived from the shared variance of Pearson's r correlations, were analyzed to relate self-concept dimensions to parent-child communication, family functioning, and mental health deterioration. Results from factorial confirmatory analysis showed that the five-dimensional oblique model (i.e., academic, social, emotional, physical, and family, as different from social) provided a better fit than competing unidimensional and orthogonal models. Correlation analyses showed that family self-concept was significantly associated with both parent-child communication and family functioning, as well as with psychological distress (d = -1.10, confidence interval [CI] -1.21 to -1.02) and depressive symptoms (d = -1.24, CI -1.31 to -1.22). These findings add evidence that family is not accurately represented within the social self-concept. Furthermore, perceiving oneself as unloved and undervalued at home (i.e., low family self-concept) is strongly associated not only with dysfunctional family processes but also with mental health deterioration.