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Abstract
This article is a response to comments by Mercer (2021), who criticized Bernet, Gregory, Rohner, and Reay (Citation2020) regarding their research on parental alienation and the use of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ). Here we respond to Mercer’s claims that the work of Bernet et al. is pseudoscience, that parental alienation theory involves false assumptions, that the extreme degree of psychological splitting observed by Bernet et al. is age-appropriate for adolescents, and that conclusions drawn by Bernet et al. are exaggerated and misstated.