Longitudinal Examination of Bidirectional Links between Parent Emotion Socialization and Youth Internalizing Symptoms

• In Event: Diverse Mechanisms in the Development of Internalized Distress and Self-Harm

Abstract

Parent socialization of emotion, particularly responses to child distress, is associated with youth social, emotional, and behavioral development. For example, insensitive and unsupportive parental responses to children’s negative emotions are associated with lower social and emotional competence, less prosocial behavior, more difficulties with emotion regulation, and increased risk for psychopathology. By contrast, sensitive and supportive parental responses tend to be associated with more positive developmental outcomes (e.g., secure attachment and greater social and emotional competence). Much of the extant research has focused on younger children; less is known about the developmental consequences of parent emotion socialization during adolescence. Further, the majority of research on parent emotion socialization has focused on the effects of parenting on youth development. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no examination of transactional developmental processes in which adolescent characteristics influence parental emotion socialization over time. The aim of the present study is to prospectively examine bidirectional associations between parent emotion socialization and youth internalizing symptoms over a 5-year period during adolescence.

A diverse sample of 245 adolescents (44% female; 51% racial/ethnic minority) and a caregiver were followed prospectively for 5 years (6 annual assessments) starting at age 13. At each time point adolescents completed the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) to assess internalizing symptoms, and parents completed the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale-Adolescent Version (CCNES-A) to assess emotion socialization. The RCADS yields a total internalizing symptoms score as well as scores for the depression and anxiety subscales. The CCNES-A measures supportive (e.g., expressive encouragement) and unsupportive (e.g., punitive) responses to adolescents’ negative emotion expressions. We used latent growth curve models with structured residuals to estimate the trajectories of parent emotion socialization and youth internalizing symptoms. This allowed us to estimate the associations between the starting values of the trajectories for these variables (correlated intercepts), associations in long-term changes for these variables (correlated slopes), and associations in the short-term deviations for these variables (i.e., correlated residuals).

The intercepts of total internalizing symptoms (cov[Iy,Sx]=.39, p=.017) and anxiety symptoms (cov[Iy,Sx]=.43, p=.010) were positively associated with the slopes of unsupportive parental responses. Similarly, the intercepts of anxiety symptoms were negatively associated with the slopes of supportive parental responses at a trend level (cov[Iy,Sx]=-.58, p=.099). No other significant associations were observed. Covarying for adolescent gender did not alter main study findings.

The significant intercept-slope covariances indicate that youth with more internalizing symptoms, particularly anxiety symptoms, in early adolescence elicit increasingly unsupportive responses from parents over time. A similar trend was observed for anxiety symptoms and supportive responses such that youth with higher anxiety symptoms at the first assessment elicit increasingly less supportive responses from parents over time. Interestingly, parental emotion socialization did not predict levels of or changes in youth internalizing symptoms. This pattern of findings supports developmental models of youth as active agents in the shaping of their developmental context. Highly anxious youth in early adolescence elicit an increasingly unsupportive emotion socialization context that may have detrimental consequences for various aspects of development.

Authors

• Jason Daniel Jones, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  Presenting Author

• R. Chris Fraley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica A Stern, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carl Lejuez, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jude A. Cassidy, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author