Poster #57 - Evaluating Positive Well-Being as a Protective Factor for Interparental Conflict Exposure in Adolescence

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

The manner in which youth appraise interparental conflict (IPC) as threatening their well-being or that of the family (i.e., threat appraisals), or believe they are responsible for causing or resolving IPC (i.e., self-blame appraisals) are key mediating processes for subsequent maladjustment (Fosco & Feinberg, 2015; Grych et al., 2003). Moreover, adolescents experiencing elevated threat and self-blame are also at risk for problematic dating and poor peer relationships (Fosco et al 2016; Weymouth et al., 2019), substance misuse (Fosco & Feinberg, 2018), and poor academic achievement (Fosco & Bray, 2016).

It is now time to identify malleable factors that explain individual differences in adolescents’ propensity to experience threat or self-blame in relation to IPC (MacNeill & Fosco, 2022). One promising direction for this work is positive well-being. Recent work documents that adults exhibit dampened emotional reactivity to daily stressors if they are higher in positive well-being (Hill et al, 2018). Because appraisals have emotional qualities to them, such as fear/worry in threat appraisals and shame in self-blaming attributions, we evaluated whether adolescents’ positive well-being would dampen their propensity to form threat or self-blame appraisals in relation to daily IPC.

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%). Adolescents and parents reported daily IPC; adolescents reported daily threat and self-blame appraisals; and adolescents provided global reports of their flourishing, purpose in life, and life satisfaction.

Two-level multilevel models predicted daily threat appraisals from either adolescent or parent reports of IPC. Flourishing, purpose, and life satisfaction were tested as moderators of this daily association in separate models, for two sets of three models (see Table 1). Our results revealed a consistent pattern in which positive well-being moderated the within-person relation between daily variation in IPC and adolescent threat appraisals. As shown in Figure 1, adolescents who were higher in well-being had a dampened propensity to appraise daily IPC as threatening.

We repeated these analyses to predict adolescent self-blame appraisals. No evidence of moderation was found in any of the six multilevel models, all ps > .10.

These findings highlight adolescent positive well-being as an asset that may support resilience by dampening adolescents’ tendency to appraise IPC as threatening; but no benefits were evident for self-blame appraisals. It is possible that, positive well-being functions to dampen emotional reactions such as fear, anxiety that are more salient features in threat appraisals, but less effective in dampening self-attributions and feelings of shame that are salient features of self-blame. Implications for health promotion programs that can bolster adolescents’ life satisfaction, purpose in life, and flourishing will be discussed.

Authors

• Carolyn Albright, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Danny Rahal, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Gregory M Fosco, Pennsylvania State University, University Park