Poster #50 - Callous–Unemotional Traits Moderating the Association Between Adolescent Social Connectedness and Adult Romantic Relationships

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Developmental Psychopathology

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Adolescence marks a significant period during the life course where individuals enhance the psychosocial competencies that lay the foundation for achieving developmental tasks in young adulthood, such as forming and maintaining romantic relationships (Johnson & Galambos, 2014). Through the social affiliations they form, adolescents acquire their unique understanding of skills associated with the internal workings of close relationships (Seiffge-Krenke et al., 2010), such as communication and conflict resolution (Seiffge-Krenke et al., 2010).
Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, which denote a lack of empathic concern, an absence of guilt, and poverty in emotional expression, (Waller et al., 2014), signify vulnerability in interpersonal processes. Prior literature states that while everyone benefits from the presence of environmental enrichment, vulnerable individuals, such as individuals with high CU traits, may stand to benefit the most (Belsky & Pluess, 2009). However, there has not been any research investigating the moderating effect of CU traits on the positive association between social connectedness in adolescence and romantic relationship quality in young adulthood.
While aiming to assess this gap in literature, we predicted that level of CU traits significantly moderates the association between adolescent social connectedness and adult romantic relationship quality. Specifically, we expected that that the benefit of strong adolescent social connectedness on adult romantic relationship quality is magnified in individuals with high CU traits than individuals with low CU traits.

Method
Participants. This study consisted of 4,653 individuals (54.2% male) who were part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which assesses health-related behaviors in adolescents and their outcomes in young adulthood. The current sample includes individuals who participated in Waves I (M = 15.45 years, SD = 1.7) and IV (M = 28.35 years, SD = 1.76) of the study.

Measures. CU traits (Wave IV) were measured using the Callous-Unemotional Traits scale (0 = low CU, 1 = high CU) (Markowitz et al., 2014). Measures evaluating adolescent social connectedness included mother-child relationship quality (Ehrlich et al., 2015), school connectedness (Vogel et al., 2015), religiosity (Cook et al., 2017), and neighborhood connectedness (Bazaco et al., 2016) in Wave I. The dependent variables assessed relationship quality in Wave IV (i.e., relationship satisfaction (Taggart et al., 2016) and intimate partner violence victimization/perpetration (Renner & Whitney, 2011)). All measures were self-reports.

Results and Discussion
Descriptive statistics are depicted in Table 1. Results indicate that higher mother-child relationship quality in adolescence predicted lower intimate partner violence victimization in young adulthood for both low CU and high CU groups, but significantly more strongly for high CU groups ((χ2 (1) = 4.119, p = 0.042; low CU: b = -0.021, high CU: b = -0.086). There were no other significant differences between CU groups in the association between adolescent social connectedness factors and adult romantic relationship quality. Findings highlight that good relationships with mothers in adolescence can be especially helpful for young adults with elevated CU traits in the nurturance of adult romantic relationships. Further research should explore other potential social connectedness factors that may be effective for high CU individuals.

Authors

• Agnes Mary Varghese, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Misaki N Natsuaki, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author