Psychology
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Item Links Between Parental Responses to Adolescent Distress and Adolescent Risk Behavior: The Mediating Role of Thought/Emotion Suppression(2015) Jones, Jason Daniel; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rates of substance use and unsafe sexual practices among America's youth are a major public health concern. The goal of this study was to examine novel inter- and intrapersonal predictors of adolescent risk behavior. Aim 1 of this study was to examine how supportive and unsupportive parental responses to adolescents' negative emotions relate to adolescent substance use and sexual behavior, and to test whether the tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions mediates this link. Aim 2 was to further explore the putative link between suppression and adolescent risk behavior by testing whether physiological arousal when viewing negative emotional stimuli mediates this link. Participants included 115 adolescents (mean age = 17.19 years, SD = 1.27; 48% female) and 109 mothers. Aim 1 analyses revealed limited support for the hypothesized links: (a) adolescent-reported unsupportive maternal responses were associated with greater self-reported suppression (but not the other two measures of suppression), which in turn was related to more frequent sexual behavior in the past year and (b) adolescent-reported supportive maternal responses were negatively associated with adolescent substance use in the past year. Aim 2 analyses did not support any links between suppression and physiological arousal or between physiological arousal and adolescent risk behavior. Overall, these results suggest some potential links among parents' responses to their adolescents' negative emotions, suppression, and adolescent risk behavior. However, the hypothesized links that were significant in the path models were between variables measured by adolescent self-reports; therefore, the findings should be viewed as preliminary. I discuss these findings in the context of the available literature on parental emotion socialization, suppression, and adolescent risk behavior, and suggest directions for future research that could move this area of inquiry forward.Item The Effects of Experimentally Induced Attachment Security on Children's Fear Reactions(2012) Stupica, Brandi Shawn; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The feeling that an attachment figure is available and responsive when needed (also referred to as attachment security) is an important factor in the activation of the fear system such that attachment security is thought to decrease fearfulness. To date, no study has examined whether attachment security causes decreased fearfulness. Adult attachment researchers have used priming techniques to investigate whether increased security causes improvement in various adult psychosocial outcomes (for a review see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) and priming techniques have been useful in research with children. As such, attachment security priming may be a valuable research tool to determine whether attachment security reduces children's fear reactions. In addition, mothers' negative and unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions are associated with poor socio-emotional outcomes for children (Eisenberg et al., 1998). As such, maternal negative and unsupportive responses may be linked to children's fear responses. Child temperament is also an important factor in children's fear reactions such that temperamentally more fearful children may be more influenced by the effects of attachment security and maternal responses to child distress. The present study was designed to extend attachment security priming methods to research with children between 6- and 7-years-of-age by employing a multi-method experimental approach to examine (a) whether experimentally induced attachment security causes less fearful reactions to fear-inducing tasks in children, and (b) whether maternal emotion socialization is associated with the fear reactivity of children randomly assigned to the neutral control group. Additionally, the present study also seeks to examine (a) whether the effects of experimentally-induced attachment security on children's fear reactions vary as a function of children's temperamental fearfulness, and (b) whether the link between maternal emotion socialization and children's fear reactivity is moderated by children's temperament fearfulness. After having been exposed to subliminally presented attachment security picture primes, six- and seven-year-old children had lower physiological fear reactions during observations of fear-inducing pictures than children exposed to subliminally presented happy or neutral picture primes. There were no links between maternal responses to child distress and children's fear-reactions. Results did not differ as a function of child temperamental fearfulness.