Psychosomatic Medicine 21:8-22 (1959)
© 1959 American Psychosomatic Society

Some Psychological Characteristics of Children of Multiple Sclerotics

¹ Arsenal Family and Children's Center and Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa.

On the basis of theoretic expectations, buttressed by a preliminary investigation, the individual Rorschach records of 60 children of MS patients were compared with those of 221 control children to determine the relative incidence of certain psychological characteristics, each of which was defined in terms of a number of Rorschach indices.

The children were of both sexes and ranged in age from 7 to 16 years. The affected parents were 20 men and 16 women who had suffered MS in moderate to severe degree from 3 to 17 years; the experimental children had been exposed to the parental illness for a mean of 7.2 years (SD 2.5).

As had been hypothesized, children of multiple sclerotics scored higher than children from homes without chronic illness in the following categories: body concern (P < .01), dysphoric feelings (P < .01), hostility (P < .01), constraint in interpersonal relations (P < .01), and dependency longings (P < .001); and they showed a higher incidence of a pattern of false maturity (P < .01). In the category of general (diffuse) anxiety, the scores of the MS children were significantly higher than those of the controls between the ages of 7 and 12 years (P < .05), but when the adolescent group was included the differences fell to nonsignificance (P < .10). Among 9-to 16-year-old children of multiple sclerotics, the false-maturity pattern tended to be accompanied by enhanced dependency longings (P < .01) and to occur more often in girls than in boys (P < .05).

Age and sex differences in how these variables were manifested appear consistent with certain aspects of general psychologic and psychoanalytic theory.

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