Sensitization in Situ: Identifying Individual Differences in Adolescents’ Intra-individual Reactivity to Daily Conflict

• In Event: Individual Differences in Individual’s Subjective Experiences of Interparental Conflict: Examining Heterogeniety in Developmental Risk Pathways

Abstract

Interparental conflict (IPC) is a well-documented risk factor for child and adolescent maladjustment. Theory and research guided by Cognitive Contextual Framework (Grych & Fincham, 1990) underscores youth appraisals of IPC – threat and self-blame – as key mediators linking exposure to IPC and subsequent maladjustment (Fosco & Feinberg, 2015; Gerard et al, 2006; Grych, Harold, & Miles, 2003). Moreover, adolescents experiencing elevated threat and self-blame are also at risk in other domains, including problematic dating peer relationships (Weymouth et al., 2019), substance misuse (Fosco & Feinberg, 2018), and poor academic achievement (Fosco & Bray, 2016).

Youth who are exposed to high levels of frequent, intense, and unresolved IPC appear to become more reactive to future conflicts, rather than habituating to them (Cummings & Davies, 2002. This process – sensitization – can help explain why some youth are more adversely affected by IPC than others, leading to increasingly negative threat and self-blame appraisals of IPC. However, no studies have tested sensitization using intensive within-person methods to examine whether children’s reactivity to conflict in everyday life is influenced by their more general perceptions of exposure to IPC (a key tenet of the sensitization hypothesis). In this study, we hypothesized that adolescents with greater past exposure to IPC may exhibit more pronounced tendencies to attribute threat and self-blame day-to-day conflicts than adolescents in families with less frequent and hostile IPC (see Figure 1 for a conceptual model).

We analyzed data from 150 adolescents in two-caregiver families (61.3% female; MAge = 14.61, SDAge = .83) who completed up to 21 consecutive daily surveys (average compliance: 90.4%). Multilevel models were estimated to examine whether adolescents with greater historical exposure to frequent, intense, and poorly resolved IPC exhibited greater within-person reactivity to daily IPC episodes.

Results for four multilevel models are presented in Table 1, indicating robust, converging findings. First, on days when interparental conflict was higher than usual, adolescents experienced elevated threat appraisals, compared to other days (threat: β_1i = .17, p<.001; self-blame: β_1i = .13, p<.001). Regarding sensitization, adolescents who had greater exposure to historical conflicts at home exhibited a stronger within-person association between daily IPC and threat (γ_11 = 0.12, p = .003). Sensitivity analyses revealed that all three aspects of IPC history: frequency (γ_11 = 0.09, p = .009), intensity (γ_11 = 0.09, p = .005), and poor resolution (γ_11 = 0.08, p = .019) each amplified adolescents daily appraisal responses to IPC, consistent with a sensitization hypothesis. Models run to evaluate whether sensitization was evident for self-blame did not support a self-blame sensitization hypothesis (γ_11 = 0.05, p = .228).

Our findings support the sensitization hypothesis and point to a specific underlying process in which prior exposure to frequent, intense, and poorly resolved IPC can amplify adolescents’ perception of subsequent conflicts as more threatening to them or their family. However, self-blame appraisals did not evidence susceptibility to sensitization. Additional implications for prevention science and for the study of the sensitization hypothesis are discussed.

Authors

• Carlie Sloan, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Gregory M Fosco, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author