Parental Rejection Leaves a Measurable imprint on Teenagers’ Exam Nerves, Chinese Study Finds

For millions of teenagers, the approach of a major examination brings more than a busy revision schedule. It brings racing hearts, sleepless nights, and the gnawing conviction that failure will define them. Psychologists call this cluster of cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses test anxiety, and decades of research have shown that it is not distributed randomly among adolescents. Family life, and in particular the quality of the parent-child relationship, is one of its most reliable predictors. A new study from China now adds an unusually fine-grained picture of how parental rejection shapes exam-related fear, and it points to a single psychological mechanism — the child’s sense of security — that appears to carry much of the effect.

The research, conducted by Junsong Qian and Guiping Wang of Hebei Normal University and published in the journal Current Psychology, surveyed 1,203 adolescents from three Chinese provinces: Henan, Hebei, and Fujian. The sample included 49.3 percent boys and spanned both junior high school students, who made up 68.9 percent of participants, and senior high school students, who accounted for 31.1 percent. Data were collected in 2025, with ethical approval from the researchers’ university and informed consent obtained from school administrators and parents before questionnaires were administered anonymously. The breadth of the sample matters, because previous work on parental rejection and test anxiety in China has often relied on smaller or more localized groups.

What distinguishes the new study methodologically is its use of latent profile analysis, a statistical technique that sorts individuals into unobserved subgroups based on their patterns of responses. Traditional variable-centered approaches — correlations and regressions — ask whether parental rejection, averaged across a whole sample, predicts test anxiety on average. Latent profile analysis instead asks whether different configurations of rejection exist within the same population. A teenager might perceive both parents as rejecting, neither, or one but not the other, and those configurations could have different psychological consequences. Rooted theoretically in John Bowlby’s attachment theory and in Rohner’s parental acceptance-rejection theory, the analysis treated maternal and paternal behavior as potentially separable streams of influence rather than a single undifferentiated family climate.

The results revealed four distinct profiles. The largest, containing 66.67 percent of adolescents, was labeled Low Parental Rejection: these teenagers perceived generally accepting behavior from both parents. Three smaller groups followed. The High Paternal-Low Maternal Rejection profile, comprising 13.30 percent of the sample, captured adolescents who experienced their fathers as substantially more rejecting than their mothers. The mirror image, Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection, included 11.97 percent. Finally, 8.06 percent of adolescents fell into the High Parental Rejection group, perceiving rejection from both parents. Each of these profiles differed significantly from the others in both test anxiety and sense of security, confirming that the configuration of rejection — not merely its presence or absence — tracks emotional outcomes.

One demographic pattern stood out. Girls were significantly more likely than boys to be classified into the Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profile, suggesting that in these Chinese families, daughters disproportionately shoulder the experience of a rejecting mother alongside a comparatively warmer father. The researchers note that this aligns with a broader literature on gendered parenting dynamics in Chinese societies, where fathers’ involvement has historically been thinner and mothers often serve as the primary — and sometimes the harshest — daily disciplinarians. Intriguingly, however, the pathways linking profile membership to test anxiety did not differ by gender, indicating that whatever a teenager’s sex, the underlying psychological route from rejection to exam fear appears to operate in much the same way.

That route runs through the sense of security. Using the Low Parental Rejection group as the statistical reference, the researchers tested whether each of the other three profiles influenced test anxiety indirectly by eroding adolescents’ feelings of safety and predictability in the world. The mediation analyses confirmed this pattern for all three elevated-rejection profiles: adolescents in these groups reported lower sense of security, and lower security in turn predicted higher test anxiety. The concept of sense of security, as measured in Chinese psychological research, reflects a stable inner confidence that one’s environment is dependable and that one can cope with its demands. When parents — the earliest and most powerful guarantors of that dependability — communicate coldness, hostility, or indifference, the child’s basic assumption of safety is undermined.

The consequences surface acutely in examination settings. Test anxiety involves worry components, such as intrusive catastrophic thoughts about failure, and emotionality components, such as physiological arousal. A secure adolescent can frame an exam as a challenge to be met; an insecure one may experience it as a threat to an already fragile sense of worth. Attachment theory offers a coherent account of why. Early caregiving experiences are internalized as working models of self and others, and those models shape how ambiguous, high-stakes situations are appraised. A rejection-based model primes threat appraisals, and threat appraisals are precisely the cognitive engine of anxiety before and during tests.

Equally notable were the comparisons the mediation analysis did not find. There were no significant differences between the mediating pathways of the High Paternal-Low Maternal and Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profiles. In other words, from the adolescent’s perspective, rejection by a father appears roughly as damaging to security — and thus to exam composure — as rejection by a mother. This finding challenges any assumption that maternal warmth is uniquely decisive and adds weight to the parental acceptance-rejection tradition, which holds that rejection from either attachment figure carries comparable developmental costs. For family systems theorists, it also underscores that children integrate parental behavior configurally: what matters is the overall pattern of acceptance and rejection, not which parent supplies it.

The authors draw a practical conclusion that departs from much conventional advice. Interventions aimed at reducing adolescent test anxiety, they argue, should not target one parent in isolation. Instead, they should promote coordinated parenting patterns in which both mother and father provide acceptance, and they should explicitly work to strengthen the adolescent’s sense of security. In the Chinese context, where high-stakes examinations such as the zhongkao and gaokao exert enormous pressure on families, this reframing is significant. It suggests that counseling services and school-based programs may achieve more by treating the family’s relational climate as a unit — and by building teenagers’ inner confidence in the dependability of their world — than by addressing the mother’s or the father’s behavior separately.

The study’s limitations invite cautious interpretation. Its cross-sectional design, with all measures collected in a single wave in 2025, cannot prove the direction of causality: anxious adolescents may also perceive their parents more negatively, or insecurity may color both perceptions of rejection and exam fear. Self-report questionnaires remain vulnerable to shared-method bias, and the sample, though large, was drawn from three provinces and may not generalize to all Chinese regions or to other cultures. The data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, subject to privacy and ethical restrictions, allowing qualified researchers to scrutinize the analyses. Even with these caveats, the latent profile approach offers a valuable refinement: instead of asking whether parental rejection matters for test anxiety, it maps the specific shapes rejection takes in real families — and shows that whichever shape it takes, the erosion of a child’s sense of security is the channel through which exam-room dread follows.

Subject of Research: Latent profiles of parental rejection and their association with test anxiety mediated by sense of security in Chinese adolescents

Article Title: The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security

Article References: Qian, J., & Wang, G. (2026). The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Keywords: parental rejection, test anxiety, adolescents, sense of security, latent profile analysis, attachment theory, Chinese families, mediation analysis, parenting, mental health, educational psychology, relationship