摘要：The goal of this study is to verify the relationship between adult children’s perception about their parents’ conjugality and these children’s conjugal skills today, as married people. Participants in the study were 472 married Brazilians (217 men and 255 women, M = 41.32 years old, SD = 12.78), with average time of marriage of 14.41 years, SD = 14.95, who responded the self-reported instruments Perception of Parents as a Couple Scale—PPCS and Marital Social Skills Inventory— MSSI. To study the relation between instruments, first a two-factor measurement model for the PPCS and a five-factor measurement model for the MSSI were examined in confirmatory factor analyses. Then, the hypothesized, theoretically derived structural model was tested, depicting path coefficients estimates for regressions from factors of the PPCS onto factors of the MSSI. The overall model presented satisfactory fit indices. Seven out of ten structural path coefficient regression estimates were statistically significant, as well as all item reflective regression estimates for both instruments. Pairs of same-item opposite sign loadings, simultaneously correlated to both PPCS factors were considered logical contradictories. The explicit-implicit concept from cognitive psychology was chosen to account for them, given the theoretically meaningful cross-loading of items between the first factor (“explicit”) and the second one (“implicit”). This is interpreted as indicative of psychological ambivalence in sons and daughters’ perception of parents as a couple. It is concluded that, among a number of aspects the perception of father and mother as a couple the PPCS accounts for, ambivalence is the source of a major influence in current marital social skills.
