“That’s Not What I Heard!”: Adolescent Internalizing Impacts Teen Perceptions of Conversations with Mothers

• In Event: 3-222 - Is it a Six or a Nine? Quantifying Parent-Adolescent Perspectives in Dynamic Interpersonal Interactions

Integrative Statement

Harsh or hostile parenting practices are consistently associated with youth internalizing problems (Yap et al., 2013). These links are often described unidirectionally, with poorer parenting behaviors promoting youth depression and anxiety (e.g., Smokowski et al., 2015) or bidirectionally, with children’s internalizing symptoms also eliciting more hostile parenting (e.g., Lewis et al., 2014). However, there may be a third contributing factor to these associations that is often ignored: adolescents with internalizing problems may also perceive parenting practices as more negative than they actually are, which in turn may further contribute to their adjustment issues.
Depressed and anxious individuals are more likely to attend to negatively valanced stimuli and perceive ambiguous interactions more negatively (Gotlib et al 2004; Platt et al., 2015; Sanchez et al., 2017). They respond with more guilt and shame to parental guilt induction (Rote & Smetana, 2014) and feel worse about their behaviors generally (Webb et al., 2007), with feelings of shame (feeling bad about oneself) particularly linked with depression (Stuewig & McCloskey, 2005; Tangney et al., 2002). The current study examined whether adolescent internalizing symptoms predicted adolescent reports of more maternal guilt induction (controlling for mother reports) and experienced guilt and shame in two discussion tasks, and whether these associations were mediated by adolescent perceptions of more maternal negativity in the discussion task, controlling for mother’s reports of their own negative communication behaviors.

Participants were 122 relatively diverse (52.5% White) U.S. mother-adolescent dyads (M teen age = 13.99 years, SD = .1.59, 54% female). Dyads participated in two 8-minute discussion tasks, focusing respectively on issues of conflict and guilt within the relationship, and rated their own and their partners’ behaviors (maternal hostility, whining, and lecturing), feelings (feeling bad about oneself and one’s behavior), and outcomes (whether the mother made the teen feel guilty) on 5-point scales. Teens also reported on their internalizing symptoms using anxiety and depression subscales of the DASS (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). Ratings from the discussion tasks were strongly correlated across task type and were combined.

Structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.0 with Bayesian estimation indicated that a mediation model fit the data acceptably (posterior predictive p-value = .198; <.05 is problematic, Gelman et al., 2004). See Figure 1. Adolescent internalizing symptoms predicted more teen-reported guilt, shame, and maternal guilt induction (controlling for mother reports) in the discussion tasks. For feelings of shame (but not guilt) and perceived guilt induction, these processes operated indirectly through teen perceptions of more maternal negativity (controlling for mother reports). Findings indicate that biased perceptions of maternal communication behavior may account for some of the association between teen-reported hostile parenting and adolescent internalizing symptoms.

Authors

• Wendy Meredith Rote, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
  Presenting Author

• Claire Kinney, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
  Non-Presenting Author