Adolescent Disclosure Mediates the Transmission of Parent Empathic Concern to Their Offspring

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Sensitivity to social cues equips adolescents with the potential to develop salient social skills (Blakemore & Mills, 2014), such as empathy, which provides adolescents with the competency to form and maintain lasting social bonds (Preston & Waal, 2002). Connectedness and openness in parent-child relationships can help adolescents develop their social competence outside of the family context (Steinberg & Silk, 2002), specifically through learning social skills and receiving emotional resources from parents for social exploration (Hartup, 1989). Social learning theory posits that observing behavior from salient models, like parents, can provide opportunities for learning salient behaviors (Bandura, 1971), and as such, parenting practices that display and encourage prosocial behavior likely play a role in the development of offspring empathy (Farrant et al. 2011). This study examined whether adolescent disclosure to their parent affords the opportunity for the transmission of empathic concern from parents to their adolescent offspring.

This longitudinal study of 45 families included one participating parent (Mage=42.34; female=36) and two adolescent offspring who completed questionnaires at three time points. Of the 71 adolescents with complete longitudinal data, the younger adolescent was between 11-13 years old (Mage=12.15; female=19) and the older adolescent (Mage=14.55; female=18) was up to four years older than the younger adolescent. Parents completed the empathic concern subscale from the interpersonal reactivity index (Davis, 1980) at Time 1 (α=.71). Both adolescents reported on disclosure to their parent using the child disclosure scale (Stattin & Kerr, 2000) at Time 2 (α=.86), approximately two weeks following Time 1, and the empathic concern subscale at Time 3 (α=.76) about one year later.

Adolescent empathic concern was significantly and positively correlated with parent empathic concern (see Table 1). Child disclosure was also significantly and positively correlated with adolescent and parent empathic concern. Using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018) in SPSS, mediation regression analysis was conducted to model adolescent disclosure as a mediator between parent empathic concern and later adolescent empathic concern. The age and sex of adolescents were included as covariates. Results indicated a significant, positive indirect effect of parent empathic concern on teen empathic concern through adolescent disclosure to their parents (see Figure 1; indirect effect=.09; SE=.0597, 95% CI [.0026, .2335]). In addition, being female was associated with higher empathic concern compared to being male (b=4.76; p<.001).

These findings suggest that greater adolescent disclosure to parents may provide opportunities for the transmission of empathic abilities from parents to their adolescent offspring. And consistent with previous work (Van der Graaff et al., 2014), teenage girls, compared to boys, were found to experience greater empathic concern. Promoting both empathic concern in parents and closeness in parent-adolescent relationships may provide strategies for parents to model empathic concern and facilitate the transmission of this salient social ability during adolescence, particularly for boys. Future steps include using multi-level modeling to examine these processes within families.

Authors

• Madison Kathleen Trotter, Texas Tech University
  Presenting Author

• Eva H Telzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christy Rae Rogers, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author