Cohesion and enmeshment revisited : Differentiation, identity, and well-being in two european cultures

By Claudia Manzi, Vivian L. Vignoles, Camillo Regalia, E. Scabini. 2006

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the nature and implications of family differentiation among adolescents facing a life transition in 2 European countries with differing family cultures. One hundred and twenty-four Italian and 109 U.K. adolescents completed measures of family differentiation (cohesion and enmeshment), identity threat (perception of threat to the self associated with finishing school), life satisfaction, depressive symptoms, and anxiety. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that cohesion and enmeshment were distinguishable in both countries, orthogonal in the U.K. but positively correlated in Italy. Family cohesion was associated with better psychological well-being in both countries; enmeshment was associated with poorer psychological well-being in the U.K. but not in Italy. Structural equation models showed that effects on well-being were fully mediated by identity threat in both cultures.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/887b32b93ded969c760e19d9293db67898dc7225

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Citations in the corpus

The Mediating Role of Experiences of Need Satisfaction in Associations Between Parental Psychological Control and Internalizing Problems: A Study Among Italian College Students (2015, background): “Given the Mediterranean family climate in Italy—where interdependence and family loyalty are highly valued (Manzi et al. 2006; Scabini et al. 2006)—one might argue that psychological control is less detrimental in Italy than in Western Europe and the US.”
PARENTAL ALIENATION AND THE DYNAMICS OF THE ENMESHED PARENT–CHILD DYAD: ADULTIFICATION, PARENTIFICATION, AND INFANTILIZATION (2011, background): “2 The breakdown of healthy intrafamilial and intergenerational boundaries is often associated with parent-child enmeshment (Johnston, 1990; Manzi, Vignoles, Regalia, & Scabini, 2006; Mayseless & Scharf, 2009; Werner et al., 2001) and “role reversal.””