Abstract
People who did not have a good relationship with their parents in their childhood, have difficulty establishing interpersonal connections, and this events can cause psychiatric disorders in adolescence. The objective of this research is to evaluate youths in their relationship to their parents using the Internal Working Model (IWM). We examined eighty-seven healthy subjects with a mean age of 21.7 (10 men and 77 women). The subjects were assessed for their relationship with their parents using IWM, and divided into 3 groups: the secure, the avoidant, and the ambivalent groups. The subjects were also evaluated for their mood states and their psychosomatic states using the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and the Cornell Medical Index (CMI), respectively. We compared the mean scores among the items of POMS in each group of IWM using ANOVA, an analysis of variance. We compared the mean score of the psychosomatic symptoms in CMI among 3 groups in IWM using ANOVA. Using IWM, 49, 9, and 29 subjects were categorized into secure, avoidant, and ambivalent groups, respectively. The results in POMS showed that the mood states were stable in the secure groups, the negative feeling was dominant in the ambivalent groups, and there was no significant difference in the avoidant groups. The mean score of the mental states in CMI in the ambivalent group was significantly higher than the score in the secure group. The mean score of the physical states in CMI in the avoidant group was significantly higher than the score in the secure group. Our results showed that the relationships between the children and their parents in adolescence regulate whether children are mentally and physically healthy, or not. Early findings on the parents' attachment to their child in childhood will help to restore the parent-child relationship and prevent the child from psychosomatic disorders in adolescence.
