New Paths for Parental Warmth and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediator Roles of Automatic Negative Thoughts

Abstract

A growing number of studies have pointed out that parental acceptance-rejection, which is the degree of warmth in parenting, is an important factor that influences not only children’s but also adults’ subjective well-being. However, few studies have analyzed subjective well-being in adulthood based on the emergence of cognitive automatic thinking processes that are triggered by the level of parental warmth. Specifically, the mediator role of negative automatic thoughts in the relationship between parental warmth and subjective well-being is still under debate. This present study extended the parental acceptance and rejection theory by integrating automatic negative thoughts into the core concept of cognitive behavioral theory. The present study attempts to examine the mediator role of negative automatic thoughts in the relationship between retrospective reports of emerging adults’ parental warmth and their subjective well-being. The participants consist of 680 of 49.4% women and 50.6% men Turkish-speaking emerging adults. The Adult Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire Short-Form was used to measure parental warmth for their past experience, the negative automatic thoughts measured by the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, and life satisfaction, negative and positive emotions of participants were measured by the Subjective Well-being Scale for their present level. Mediation analysis through the bootstrap sampling method via indirect custom dialog was used to examine data. The models supported the hypotheses, the retrospective reports of parental warmth in childhood predict the subjective well-being of emerging adults. The automatic negative thoughts had competitive mediation on this relationship. The perceived parental warmth in childhood decreases automatic negative thoughts, then turns to affect greater subjective well-being in adulthood. The current study results contribute to the counselling practice by suggesting that decreasing negative automatic thoughts could benefit the subjective well-being of emerging adults. Further, parental warmth interventions and family counselling have the potential to enhance these benefits.