Parental representations, object relations and their relationship to Depressive Personality Disorder and Dysthymia Steven K. Huprich a, * , John H. Porcerelli b , Juliann Binienda b , Dunia Karana c , Ray Kamoo d a Department of Psychology, Eastern Michigan University, 501 Mark Jefferson Building, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, United States b Wayne State University, School of Medicine, United States c University of Detroit Mercy, United States d Private Practice, Birmingham, MI, United States Received 6 February 2007; received in revised form 18 June 2007; accepted 28 June 2007 Available online 13 August 2007 Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which DPD is associated with poorer quality of parental representations and object relations in patients meeting criteria for either Depressive Personality Disorder (DPD) or Dysthymia. One-hundred ten, primary care, African–American women completed mea- sures of DPD, Dysthymia, parental descriptions of their mother and father (Blatt, Chevron, Quinlan, Schaffer, & Wein, 1992), and provided stories to two pictures that were scored with the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (Westen, 1993, 1995). Results indicated that Dysthymia could be predicted by all object relations dimensions except Aggression. DPD was uniquely associated with problems of man- aging aggression, maternal punitiveness, and low paternal benevolence. Ongoing investigation into the bio- genetic underpinnings of these disorders appears warranted, as is examination of the differences between them. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 0191-8869/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2007.06.030 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 734 487 2037; fax: +1 734 487 6553. E-mail address: shuprich@emich.edu (S.K. Huprich). www.elsevier.com/locate/paid Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 2171–2181