Abstract
This paper describes the relationship between retrospective communication difficulties and current depressive symptomatology. A total of 143 deaf/hard-of-hearing late adolescents and adults (64 % White; 55 % female) completed questionnaires related to parent communication, language history and current psychological functioning. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the likelihood of having depression that is associated with understanding parents’ communication after controlling for gender, hearing level, and language history. Significant odds ratio indicated that the difficulties in understanding basic communication with parents increased the odds of depression symptomatology. The odds ratio indicates that when holding all other variables constant, the odds of reporting depression were at least 8 times higher for those who reported being able to understand some to none of what the same-sex parent said. For the different-gender parent, only the mother’s communication with the male individual was associated with depression. Although our study findings suggest that DHH men and women with history of communication difficulties at home are at risk for depression in adulthood, they do not provide information on the causal mechanisms linking communication difficulties early in life and depression later in life. Greater attention should be given to promoting healthy communication between DHH girls and their mothers as well as DHH boys and their fathers, which might reduce the impact on later emergence of depression in the DHH individual.
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This work was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health [1R01DC014463-01 A1 to P.K. and 3R01DC014463-01A1S1 diversity supplement to support S.B.]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
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Author K declares that she has no conflict of interest. Author B declares that she has no conflict of interest. Author S declares that she has no conflict of interest. Author L declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Kushalnagar, P., Bruce, S., Sutton, T. et al. Retrospective Basic Parent-Child Communication Difficulties and Risk of Depression in Deaf Adults. J Dev Phys Disabil 29, 25–34 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-016-9501-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-016-9501-5