Longitudinal Associations Among Family Irritability Expressiveness, Harsh Parenting, And Adolescents’ Socioemotional Functioning In Nine Countries

This paper focuses on the associations between novel aspects related to parents’ expression of emotion (parent irritability expressiveness as one of the factors associated with parental socialization of emotion; Eisenberg et al., 1998) and socioemotional functioning of their adolescent children. Harsh parenting (which includes both physical and verbal forms of discipline) can be considered proxy of parental socialization of emotion in terms of “behaviors enacted by socializers that influence a child’s learning regarding the experience, expression, and regulation of emotion” (Eisenberg et al., 1998; p. 317). Parents’ tendency to react aversively at the slightest frustration (irritability; Caprara et al., 1984), as well as parents’ lack of self-efficacy beliefs in managing anger in response to frustrating events (Caprara et al., 2008), were hypothesized to be associated with both harsh parenting and adolescent irritability, which in turn predict (inversely) adolescents’ socioemotional competence. There is some support for both variation and similarities among cultures in the emotional significance given to the manner in which emotions are conveyed from one person to another and the manner in which people deal with situations that elicit emotion (Mesuita, 2001). More cross- cultural studies, especially from countries other than Western industrialized ones (Henrich et al., 2010), are needed to fully understand how the relations among parents’ and adolescents’ emotion regulation-related mechanisms and adolescent adjustment might vary cross-culturally. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,116 families) from 12 cultural groups in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States) were interviewed when children were about 13 years old, and again one and two years later. The longitudinal associations among parents’ irritability (Caprara et al., 1984) and self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation (Caprara et al., 2008), harsh parenting (Lansford et al., 2014), adolescents’ irritability (Capaldi & Rothbart, 1992) and internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Achenbach, 1991) were examined. Prediction by maternal and paternal socialization of emotions on adolescent adjustment was examined in separate path analyses. Within the overall sample, mothers with lower self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation and higher irritability were more prone to use harsh parenting and had adolescent children who were also high in irritability, which in turn were associated with adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems. Similar associations emerged for fathers, except nonsignificant associations that emerged between paternal use of harsh parenting and adolescents’ internalizing problems, and between paternal self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation and adolescent irritability All aforementioned associations held across cultural groups. Specifically, a partially constrained model best fit the data for mother and father models. Only 3.3% and 1.6% of the paths tested needed to be freed for the mother and father models to fit well, respectively. Mothers’ self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation and irritability had significant indirect effects on internalizing and externalizing problems through harsh parenting and through adolescent irritability. Fathers’ self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation and irritability had significant indirect effects on externalizing problems through harsh parenting. Moreover, fathers’ irritability had a significant indirect effect on externalizing problems through adolescent irritability.