Poster #55 - Mother-adolescent storytelling and adolescent psychosocial functioning: Emotion regulation as a moderating influence of socialization

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

Family storytelling is a natural and important setting for parental emotion socialization. While parents’ emotion socialization toward children is important into adolescence, less work has addressed the forms socialization may take and the associations between types of socialization, emotion regulation, and functioning in adolescence. Differences in certain competencies, like emotion regulation, may shape the extent youth are influenced by emotion socialization approaches (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Greene & Doyle, 1999). While greater emotion regulation difficulties in youth are tied to poorer psychological and social well-being, use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies promotes healthy psychological, social, and emotional development (Bierman et al., 2015; Chervonsky & Hunt, 2019; Zeman et al., 2006). Previous work with children has found that those with greater emotion regulation difficulties benefit from parents’ use of increased supportive socialization strategies (e.g., Dunsmore et al., 2016). Therefore, we were interested in whether the effects of mothers’ socialization behaviors were moderated by adolescents’ emotion regulation (as reported by mothers). We hypothesized that adolescents lower in emotion regulation would show larger benefits of supportive emotion socialization behaviors (i.e., structure, emotion communication, factual communication) in relation to functioning and adjustment.
We recruited 45 mothers and adolescents (Mean age 13.6 years; 51.1% girls) to complete joint conversations about important life events and family stories, and to provide information on adolescent depressive symptoms, academic motivation, and perceived familial support. Interactions were coded for mothers’ global (i.e., displayed egocentrism, emotion communication) socialization behaviors. Mothers also reported on adolescents’ emotion regulation.
We used multiple linear regressions to test two-way interactions between mothers’ socialization behaviors and reports of adolescents’ emotion regulation difficulties. There was a significant interaction between adolescent emotion regulation and mothers’ use of factual communication for adolescents’ depressive symptoms (β = -.14, SE = .06, partial R2 = .13, p = .023). When mothers used more factual communication and adolescents had fewer emotion regulation difficulties, adolescents reported highest depressive symptoms (see Figure 1). There was also a significant interaction between adolescent emotion regulation and mothers’ use of egocentrism when considering adolescents’ perceived familial social support (β = -.26, SE = .14, partial R2 = .09, p = .071). When mothers used more egocentrism and adolescents had fewer emotion regulation difficulties, adolescents reported lower family support (see Figure 2).
Results indicate adolescents with fewer emotion regulation difficulties reported more depressive symptoms, particularly when mothers used more factual communication. It is possible mothers who use more factual communication may do so at the cost of emotion-focused strategies. There were not any differences in perceived social support for adolescents whose mothers used less egocentric behaviors, regardless of emotion regulation difficulties. These adolescents also reported the highest levels of perceived familial support. This is unsurprising, as it fits with past research and evidence that parents’ egocentric behaviors negatively impact adolescents (e.g., Hendrickson et al., 2020). However, with mothers who used more egocentrism, adolescents with greater emotion regulation difficulties reported more support than adolescents with fewer difficulties. Implications of these findings, along with strengths and limitations, are further discussed.

Authors

• Mikayla Arda Ell, University of Missouri - Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Jordan Ashton Booker, University of Missouri - Columbia