Tags
2014, Acceptance-Rejection, Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Developmental Psychology, Interpersonal Anxiety, psychology, research, SpARC, SpARC 2014, State Anxiety, Trait Anxiety, Undergraduate Research
Another Developmental Psychology research presentation focuses specifically on the role of the father when it comes to a person’s anxiety levels. Brittany Williams and Jessica Teare focused on three levels of anxiety in their experiment: Interpersonal Anxiety, State Anxiety, and Trait Anxiety. Interpersonal Anxiety is social anxiety in general, not necessarily romantic. State Anxiety is a person’s temporary emotional state. Trait anxiety refers to a person’s baseline anxiety level. Their hypotheses were:
– Interpersonal Anxiety is higher with more rejection from the father than the mother.
– State Anxiety is higher with more rejection from the father than the mother.
– Trait Anxiety is higher with more rejection from the father than the mother
With a sample size of 114 females averaging about 29.56 years in age, Brittany and Julia administered the Adult Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire: father/mother, the Interpersonal Anxiety Questionnaire, and the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Questionnaire to all participants. Their results managed to support the opposite of all three hypotheses. The results showed that participants felt higher anxiety of all levels when rejection is higher from the mother than the father.
Brittany and Julia concluded that mothers perhaps have a higher effect on their daughter’s anxiety level than fathers. Some weaknesses that they found in this study were that that most of their participants were fairly young and not particularly diverse. On the other hand, because these questionnaires were administered online there was no bias. Because of these interesting results, Brittany and Julia are interested in testing out other factors such as: the father/son relationship, differences between races and cultures, and specific changes between the number of children and their birth order.