College Students Spiritual And Psychosocial Struggles With Parental Psychological Aggression

This cross-sectional study examines the relations among college students' experiences of parental psychological aggression, spiritual and psychosocial coping, psychological adjustment, and parent-offspring relationship satisfaction. Separate analyses were conducted to examine participants' relationships with their current mother (N = 307) and father (N = 210) figures. Parental psychological aggression (PPA) is relatively common, with 59% and 40% of students reporting at least one incident of some type of non-physical aggression from mothers and fathers, respectively, over the past year. Higher levels of PPA with both parents were consistently correlated with less relationship satisfaction and greater depression, anxiety, trauma-related distress, and use of coping strategies. Spiritual struggles in coping consistently predicted greater psychological maladjustment, with unique effects on anxiety (father dataset) and trauma-related distress (mother dataset) that persisted after controlling for PPA and psychosocial struggles. Interestingly, spiritual struggles in coping also uniquely predicted greater mother-offspring relationship satisfaction. In accordance with stress mobilization, spiritual resources were also uniquely predictive of greater anxiety (father dataset), trauma-related distress (both datasets), and mother-offspring relationship satisfaction, after controlling for PPA and psychosocial resources.