Anxiety Explains Self-Differentiation: Implications for Bowenian Approaches to Marriage and Family Therapy

Abstract

This study examined the Bowenian construct of Self-Differentiation (SD), defined as the degree to which a person can think according to their personal beliefs while remaining emotionally connected to the family. This study examined the degree to which negative emotionality accounted for the relationship between SD and Relationship Satisfaction (RS). Emotional Cutoff (EC) emerged as the sole predictor of RS. When Trait Anxiety (TA) was entered into the model it mediated between EC and RS. We discuss the importance of treating anxiety of the individual in family therapy and that SD may best be understood when taking anxiety into account.

Keywords:

• Bowen
• anxiety
• self-differentiation
• couples
• dyadic adjustment scale

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Holm-Bonferroni Method (also called Holm’s Sequential Bonferroni Procedure) is a way to deal with Family Wise Error rates (FWE) for multiple hypothesis tests (Holms, 1979). It is a modification of the Bonferroni correction. The Bonferroni correction reduces the possibility of getting a statistically significant result (i.e. a Type I error) when performing multiple tests. Although the Bonferroni is simple to calculate, it suffers from a lack of statistical power. The Holm-Bonferroni method is also fairly simple to calculate, but it is more powerful than the single-step Bonferroni. The results of this technique are shown in Table 2 below. Of the 55 unique correlations, 36 are actually significant when controlling for FWE. This indicates that our initial correlation matrix had a false discovery rate of 55/19 or 34.5%. All of the correlations presented in green, ending with EC – COH are significant, and all those below are non-significant.