Dominance as part of self-concept mediates the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety among adolescents under residential care Yaakov Roitman * , Eva Gilboa-Schechtman Psychology Department and the Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Keywords: At-risk adolescents Social anxiety Depression Maternal psychopathology Dominance Self-perception abstract According to Rapee (1997), maternal social anxiety (SA) is directly associated with adolescent SA because maternal SA causes overprotective and controlling parental behavior. A total of 127 adolescents who were in the process of transitioning to a boarding school for at-risk youth as well as their mothers participated in the current study, 30% of the adolescents had experienced at least one depressive episode; 17.5% had been diag- nosed with SA. We analyzed an expanding model of mediation, of maternal SA and depression in which specifically, adolescent self-perception was constructed as a latent factor that was formed by self-reported dominance and self-criticism. The results supported our hypotheses that maternal SA is not directly associated with adolescent SA. Rather, these relationships are mediated by adolescents’ self-perception (i.e., dominance and self-criticism). The results call into question Rapee’s theoretical ar- guments and support Gilbert’s evolutionary theory. Ó 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Rapee (1997) argued that maternal social anxiety (SA) directly influences the development of SA in offspring. He claimed that socially anxious mothers behave in a controlling and overprotective fashion that denies their children crucial exposure to different social situations, including conflict and stress. In turn, this lack of exposure lays the foundation for the children to develop SA. Extensive research has supported this theory. Socially anxious parents experience difficulty in tolerating their children’s negative emotions and, thus, engage in anxiogenic parenting practices (Cheron, Ehrenreich, & Pincus, 2009; Tiwari et al., 2008). Furthermore, anxious mothers are more likely than non-anxious mothers to rate their own emotions negatively during a laboratory social task and to make lower estimations of the degree to which they have control over their child’s responses. Anxious mothers display higher levels of anxiety and intrusiveness and generally have poorer quality relation- ships. It is plausible that if a mother responds to her child’s expressions of fear or anxiety with her own feelings of fear, intrusiveness, and negativity, she may inhibit the child’s reaction and successful exposure to social fear-inducing stimuli (a key element of cognitive-behavioral treatments for childhood anxiety; Kendall, 2011). Empirical research has supported this account (McLeod, Wood, & Weisz, 2007). Furthermore, there is experimental and longitudinal evidence that maternal anxiety plays a role in maintaining child anxiety (De Rosnay, Cooper, Tsigaras, & Murray, 2006; Thirlwall & Creswell, 2010). Gallagher and Cartwright-Hatton (2009) reported that “socially anxious mothers may erroneously identify sadness in their * Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel. E-mail address: roitmany@gmail.com (Y. Roitman). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2014.04.014 0140-1971/Ó 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 577e586