Discrepancies Between Parent and Adolescent Beliefs About Daily Life Topics and Performance on an Emotion Recognition Task

Abstract

Parents and children and adolescents commonly disagree in their perceptions of a variety of behaviors, including the family relationship and environment, and child and adolescent psychopathology. To this end, numerous studies have examined to what extent increased discrepant perceptions—particularly with regard to perceptions of the family relationship and environment—predict increased child and adolescent psychopathology. Parents’ and children and adolescents’ abilities to decode and identify others’ emotions (i.e., emotion recognition) may play a role in the link between discrepant perceptions and child and adolescent psychopathology. We examined parents’ and adolescents’ emotion recognition abilities in relation to discrepancies between parent and adolescent perceptions of daily life topics. In a sample of 50 parents and adolescents ages 14-to-17 years (M = 15.4 years, 20 males, 54% African-American), parents and adolescents were each administered a widely used performance-based measure of emotion recognition. Parents and adolescents were also administered a structured interview designed to directly assess each of their perceptions of the extent to which discrepancies existed in their beliefs about daily life topics (e.g., whether adolescents should complete their homework and carry out household chores). Interestingly, lower parent and adolescent emotion recognition performance significantly related to greater parent and adolescent perceived discrepant beliefs about daily life topics. We observed this relation whilst accounting for adolescent age and gender and levels of parent-adolescent conflict. These findings have important implications for understanding and using informant discrepancies in both basic developmental psychopathology research and applied research in clinic settings (e.g., discrepant views on therapeutic goals).

Introduction to the Special Issue: Discrepancies in Adolescent–Parent Perceptions of the Family and Adolescent Adjustment

“…This research supports the idea that convergence between adolescent and parent reports reflects their consonance in understanding of family dynamics or their relationship (De Los Reyes et al 2013c;Goodman et al 2010). In support of this interpretation, consider that low adolescent-parent discrepant views about the family relate to high performance on objective indices of emotion recognition (De Los Reyes et al 2013c). As such, sometimes convergence may serve as a marker for factors that buffer against the development of adolescent maladjustment, such as parental acceptance of the adolescent or general consonance in understanding of family dynamics.…”

“…For instance, research indicates that Pearson correlations between indices of adolescent-parent discrepant views and adolescent-parent conflict hover in the .10 s-.60 s range depending on the measurement method and informant (De Los Reyes et al 2012). Further, whereas indices of adolescent-parent discrepant views uniquely predict scores on performance-based measures of interpersonal perception (i.e., emotion recognition), indices of adolescent-parent conflict do not (De Los Reyes et al 2013c). Taken together, these findings indicate that adolescent-parent discrepancies and conflict, though related, provide distinct information about family functioning and interpersonal perception.…”

“…To begin, consider that when adolescents and parents provide researchers with reports about family functioning domains (e.g., conflict, parenting, relationship quality), they are providing their impressions of features of their lives that may matter a great deal to them (see also De Los Reyes 2011;De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2006a). Thus, patterns of convergence and divergence between adolescents' and parents' reports of such functioning may reflect important aspects of their interactions and how they relate to one another (De Los Reyes et al 2013c;Goodman et al 2010). In line with this view, recent work indicates that both the convergence between adolescents' and parents' reports, as well as the divergence between these reports, longitudinally predicts psychosocial outcomes among adolescents (e.g., De Los Reyes 2011; Laird and De Los Reyes 2013;Lippold et al 2013;Ohannessian and De Los Reyes 2014).…”

Subjective – Objective Sleep Comparisons and Discrepancies Among Clinically-Anxious and Healthy Children

“…In the presence of a significant interaction, we conducted univariate tests. As in prior work (De Los Reyes et al 2013a;Lipton et al 2014), we calculated pseudo-R 2 figures by dividing each Wald χ2 estimate by the summation of the three estimates in the GEE model (i.e., 119.58). Lastly, we conducted tests of the relation between children's group status and actigraphy estimates of children's sleep using independent samples t-tests.…”

Relacionamento entre pai e mãe e consumo de álcool segundo relato de escolares de 12 a 14 anos do sul do Brasil

“…O desfecho relacionamento negativo entre os pais apresentou estimativa média de efeito de delineamento segundo a variável escola igual a 0,303, justificando-se o controle desse efeito nas análises subsequentes. A análise foi ajustada para as variáveis idade em anos completos 21 (variável discreta obtida pelo cálculo do tempo transcorrido entre ano e mês de nascimento e a data da aplicação do protocolo), sexo 16,21,22 (variável dicotômica, composta pelas categorias masculino e feminino) e escolaridade do principal responsável 23,24 , identificado como a pessoa que mais ganha dinheiro em casa, não importando se é pai, mãe ou outra pessoa [variável categórica ordinal, composta pelas categorias: analfabeto ou no máximo até a quarta série do ensino fundamental (EF); entre a quinta e a sétima série do EF; EF completo; ensino médio (EM) completo; ensino superior (ES) completo].…”