Poster #146 - Parental Conditional Regard Helps Explain Links from Parental Anxiety and Verbal Immediacy to Child Anxiety

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Past studies demonstrate that parental overcontrol is associated with child anxiety, one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders among children (Affrunti & Ginsburg, 2012; Chorpita, 1998). Theorists posit that parents who are emotionally reactive and anxious may employ overcontrolling behaviors to regulate their own anxiety (Borelli, Hong, Rasmussen, Smiley, 2017), which in turn may confer risk for child anxiety.
Parental conditional regard (CR) is a form of overcontrolling parenting in which the affection that parents express towards their children is contingent upon their children’s performance and actions (Assor, Roth, & Deci, 2004). As with other forms of overcontrol, parental CR regarding children’s emotions and academic performance is associated with poorer psychological functioning in children, including greater internalizing symptoms and lower self-esteem (Assor & Tal, 2012). However, unlike with OC, no studies have demonstrated the link between CR and parental anxiety.
The present study investigates associations among parental CR (i.e., the conditional provision of affection and love withdrawal), two measures of parental anxiety – self-reported anxiety symptoms and high levels of anxious discourse in response to a threat – and child anxiety. We examine parental CR as an indirect link between parental anxiety and child anxiety, as well as between parental anxious discourse and child anxiety. We operationalize anxious discourse using verbal immediacy, a linguistic indicator capturing the degree to which individuals describe experiences from a here-and-now, present-focused perspective. High verbal immediacy is associated with greater physiological dysregulation when discussing stressful events (Lee et al., 2011) and with insecure attachment, which itself is associated with poorer emotion regulation (Borelli et al., 2011).
A diverse sample of mothers (N = 95; Mage= 39.80 years; SDage= 7.15) with children aged 8 to 12 years old (Mage = 10.25; SDage = 1.09; 48.4% female) participated. Mothers reported their use of CR and their anxiety. Verbal immediacy was measured from transcripts of mothers imagining they were speaking to their children about two failures experienced by the child (e.g., rejected from a sports team, and received a bad report card) and two potential failures (e.g., taking a standardized test soon, and giving an oral presentation at school). Children reported on their anxiety.
Parental anxiety and parental CR were positively associated, ΔR22=.08, b=.28, SE=.11, p=.02. Parental CR also had a significant indirect effect between mothers’ anxiety and children’s anxiety, b=0.82, 95% CI [0.03, 2.31], and between mothers’ verbal immediacy across all the failure scenarios and children’s anxiety, b=0.42, 95% CI [0.06, 1.09] (see Fig. 1). Upon further analysis, the significant indirect effect of CR was found for the association between mothers’ immediacy in potential failure scenarios and child anxiety, b=0.43, 95% CI [0.07, 1.04], but not for the association between immediacy in actual failure scenarios and child anxiety, b=0.27, 95% CI [-0.02, 0.88]. The findings show 1) that the use of CR may be one pathway through which maternal anxiety is transmitted to children; and 2) that the use of CR helps explain how maternal reactivity in the anticipation of potential threat is linked to children’s anxiety.

Authors

• Jung Soo Yoon, University of California, Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Kajung Hong, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sameen Boparai, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chamee Vang Moua, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christina Marquez, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Krikor Andrew Balian, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Frances Li, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Meve Paj Hnub Burton, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Arpna Ghanshani, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah F. Rasmussen, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia A Smiley, Pomona Colege
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica Borelli, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author