Poster #78 - Parental Autonomy Support and the Effectiveness of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation for Emerging Adults

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Emerging adulthood is a complex and unique phase of development. While legally considered adults, many youths remain reliant on and highly sensitive to the effects of their parents’ socialization. The goal of this study was to examine young adults’ perceptions of parental autonomy support and its relation to the quality of their social emotion regulation experiences with parents. Autonomy support includes parents expressing that they accept and support their children for who they are and what they are experiencing. Past research on the links between social support and well-being highlights autonomy support as a moderator, such that social support is most effective in conditions of high autonomy support. Here, we sought to apply an interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) perspective to these relations, in which IER was operationalized as the management of emotions through social channels. Our framework of IER delineates specific strategies that individuals may use when aiming to regulate the emotions of others. We expected that certain beneficial IER strategies (i.e., parents utilizing cognitive support, responsiveness, and being physically present) would be moderated by perceptions of parental autonomy support, such that at lower levels of parental autonomy support, youth would perceive adaptive IER strategies as less effective, compared to youth with more autonomy supportive parents.

Our sample consisted of 195 college students (51.8% male, ages 18-25, M = 19.6, SD = 1.3) who reported about a recent instance of receiving emotional support from a parent. Using the Interpersonal Regulation Interaction Scale (Swerdlow & Johnson, 2020), youth reported on what their parent did when giving emotional support, as well as how effective this support was. They also reported on how generally autonomy supportive their parent was (Perceived Parental Autonomy Support Scale; Mageau et al., 2015). In support of our hypotheses, beneficial IER strategies (cognitive support, responsiveness, and physical presence) were positively related to perceived effectiveness of parental IER (rs(193) > .48, p < .01), whereas hostility was negatively correlated (r(193) = -.33, p < .01). There were also positive relations between parental autonomy support and the beneficial IER strategies (rs(193) > .48, p < .01), and a negative correlation with hostility (r(193) = -.33, p < .01). As expected, parental autonomy support moderated the relations between parental IER and its perceived effectiveness, such that at high levels of parental autonomy support, increased reports of cognitive support and responsiveness related to increased ability to cope with emotions, ΔR2 = .02, ΔF(1, 190) = 6.17, p = .01, b = .07, t(190) = 2.43, p = .02. A simple slope plot (Figure 1) revealed that the relation between beneficial IER and IER effectiveness was weakened at lower levels of parental autonomy support. These findings are important because they suggest that youth who perceive their parents as lacking in autonomy support likely benefit less from parent-youth IER interactions. Our study provides a strong incentive to explore the mechanisms of parental IER effectiveness, particularly during the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Authors

• Madeline J Newman, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth L Davis, University of California - Riverside