Examining characteristics of mother-daughter relationships and adolescent self-injury

This dissertation investigated factors that contribute to adolescent self-inflicted injury (SII) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) characteristics. Specifically, this study investigated the relation between maternal behavior and adolescent self-injury. I examined literature surrounding familial risk factors for self-injury, psychological models of self-injury. The analysis was framed in coercion theory and biosocial theory; both theories describe how adverse environmental factors influence the tendency toward self-injury. I used linear regression and multilevel modeling with two planned contrasts for orthogonal group comparison. The first contrast compared typical controls to the combined self-injuring and depressed groups; the second contrast compared the self-injuring group to the depressed group. The self-injuring group looked very similar to the depressed group in most self-report measures. In the conflict discussion, mothers of SII adolescents showed a significant increase in aversiveness over time relative to the depressed group and (in an exploratory analysis) relative to the control group. Only mothers of SII adolescents increased aversiveness over time during conflict discussion. This is consistent with literature illustrating mothers of SII adolescents were more likely than nonclinical controls to match or escalate conflict (Crowell et al., 2013).