Adjustment trade-offs and negative emotion reciprocation in adolescent-mother dyads during COVID-19

Abstract

AbstractAdolescents may benefit socially from family members’ negative emotional reciprocation (e.g., having levels of concern about a certain thing that match with another family member), but excessive focus on their own anxiety can lead to negative outcomes. To date, implications of this ‘trade-off’ in adolescent-parent dyads (e.g., Rose in Child Development Perspectives 15(3):176–181 2021) for youth adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic remain largely unexplored. During the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Hong Kong (September 2020 to April 2021), 349 first-year university students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds and following diverse study majors (T1 Madolescent age = 18.2 years, 60.3% female) and their mothers gave bi-weekly reports of COVID-related preoccupation, negative affect, and perceived relational support from their dyad partner (5183 observations over 16 assessments). Multilevel response surface analyses tested whether congruence in COVID preoccupation between mothers and adolescents predicted relationship quality and negative affect over time. Results suggested that negative emotion reciprocation had ‘trade-off’ effects for adolescents’ adjustment. Youth who matched high levels of COVID preoccupation with mothers reported the most relational support but also reported higher negative affect than youth with lower levels of COVID preoccupation. Mothers’ reported support from adolescents was not related to either mothers’ or adolescents’ preoccupation. Mothers’ negative affect was only associated with their own COVID preoccupation. Our findings suggest that adolescents may have derived some benefit from adolescent-mother negative emotion reciprocation, whereas mothers did not. The absence of trade-off effects in mothers may be linked to Chinese cultural norms of preserving the hierarchical family structure, such that the negative emotion reciprocation process in Chinese adolescent-mother dyads might be more adolescent-focused, i.e., revolving around the adolescents’ distress rather than the parents’.