The Relationship Between Child’s Attitude toward Parent and the Symptoms of Histrionic Personality: The Mediating Role of Defense Mechanisms

Abstract

Histrionic personality is a personality disorder in the international classification of disease and diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. The present study aims to Explaining model of Signs of histrionic personality on the basis of Child’s Attitude toward Parent and defense mechanisms. The research method was descriptive and correlational. The statistical population of the study consisted of all undergraduate students of University in Tehran in the school year they were in 2022-2023. For this purpose, 508 of these students were selected using multi-stage cluster random sampling. In order to collect data, the brief histrionic personality symptoms (BHPS), The Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40), Child’s Attitude toward Father Scale (CAFS) were used to analyze the data. A structural equation modeling was used. The results showed that the attitude towards parents directly explains 0.30% and through defense mechanisms 0.57% of the symptoms of histrionic personality. In total, the estimation of the structural model in which the child's attitude towards the parents was entered into the model as a predictor variable and the defense mechanism as a mediator variable, showed that this model explains 0.52% of the symptoms of histrionic personality. Therefore, it can be concluded that the signs of histrionic personality are explained positively both indirectly and directly through primary defense mechanisms, by the attitude towards parents.