Japanese Young Adults’ Disrespectful Forms of Address for Fathers Predict Feelings of Rejection and Depression

Abstract

Japanese young adults’ forms of address for their parents (e.g., Dad) reportedly demonstrate their respect for their parents. Such respect has been linked to young adults’ interpersonal attitudes as well as depressive symptoms. Given these relationships, the present study identified possible links between young adults’ forms of address for their parents, perceived parent-child relationships, interpersonal attitudes, and depressive symptoms. Participants were 226 Japanese college students. Young adults’ disrespectful forms of address for parents were positively correlated with feelings of rejection and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, young adults’ disrespectful forms of address for fathers predicted the adults’ feelings of rejection and depressive symptoms, although there were no such relationships for disrespectful forms of address for mothers. These findings indicated that young adults’ disrespectful forms of address for parents, especially fathers, were linked to their negative interpersonal attitudes and depressive symptoms.

Keywords:

• Japan
• kinship terms
• psychology
• honorifics
• child
• depression

Notes

1. This limited sample enhances the risk of type 2 error in the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, which could overlook the abnormal distributions (Lilliefors, 1967). Hence, I did not conduct this test on this sample.

2. These scales were also used to study Japanese couple relationships. Husbands’ disrespectful forms of address for wives were linked to negative forms of constructive communication (Yokotani, 2013b) and their physical violence against wives (Yokotani, 2014b).

3. The present study was funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) [24792597]). I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Kosuke Ishii, Prof. Seiya Mitani, and Prof. Masako Saito for providing the participants and Dr. Tai Kurosawa for his helpful feedback.