Implications of interparental conflict for adolescents’ peer relationships: A longitudinal pathway through threat appraisals and social anxiety symptoms.

Abstract

The goal of this study was to broaden the developmental understanding of the implications of interparental conflict (IPC) and threat appraisals of conflict for adolescents’ relationships with peers. Guided by the cognitive contextual framework and evolutionary perspectives, we evaluated a developmental model in which adolescents who are exposed to IPC perceive these conflicts as threatening to their well-being or that of their family. In turn, threat appraisals of IPC increase risk that adolescents experience worries and fears about the peer context (i.e., social anxiety), leading to decreased support from friends and increased feelings of loneliness and engagement with antisocial peers. Autoregressive analyses were conducted with a sample of 768 two-parent families across four measurement occasions. Exposure to IPC was related to increases in youths’ perceived threat, which increased their risk for social anxiety symptoms. Consistent with our hypothesis, heightened social anxiety symptoms undermined youths’ subsequent functioning in the peer context. Specifically, youth with greater adolescent social anxiety symptoms experienced increased feelings of loneliness and decreased perceptions of friendship support. Significant indirect effects were substantiated for adolescent loneliness and friendship support. Findings did not vary as a function of adolescent gender. The findings highlight the enduring implications of IPC and threat appraisals of IPC for youths’ functioning, which can be expanded beyond broad measures of youth psychopathology, and the critical role of social anxiety symptoms as an explanatory mechanism in this process.

Children’s attentional biases to emotions as sources of variability in their vulnerability to interparental conflict.

“…We also specified the five covariates (i.e., child gender and race, household income, parent education, marital status) as predictors of Wave 2 emotional insecurity and Wave 3 psychological problems. However, consistent with previous approaches (e.g., Weymouth et al, 2019), the structural paths for the covariates are not shown in the Figures for clarity in presentation. All the predictors were meancentered prior to the creation of the two interaction terms.…”

Family Processes and Children's and Adolescents' Well‐Being

“…One of the most common tests for moderation that occurred in this literature on family processes was the comparison of associations across sons and daughters. For example, in a large purposive sample of mostly two‐parent families (PROSPER data), interparental conflict during early adolescence was associated with increases in loneliness and decreases in friendship support (but not with affiliations with antisocial peers) through changes in perceived threat associated with conflict and youth's social anxiety (Weymouth et al, ). These patterns did not differ across daughters and sons.…”

Family-of-origin ties and relationships and how they affect dealing with one’s own marital conflicts

“…The effects of children's involvement in marital conflicts (both active and passive) are extensive and their effects can be direct and long term. Observed in research the sense of threat by conflicts with peers, diminished openness to their support, increased symptoms of social anxiety and a sense of loneliness as a result of observing conflicts between parents by adolescents (Weymouth, Fosco, Mak, Mayfield, LoBraico, Feinberg, 2019), can, at a later time, be a factor impairing psychosocial abilities to deal with relational difficulties. After several years of the observation of children who in their infancy passively participated in parental conflicts, researchers noticed a strong surge of aggression in 7% of a studies sample, and a weak surge of aggression in 19%, while they did not notice any in children growing up in good family environments (Jambon, Madigan, Plamondon, Jenkins, 2019).…”