Day-to-day spillover and long-term transmission of interparental conflict to adolescent–mother conflict: The role of mood.

Abstract

Conflicts may drift from one family dyad to another. Short-term spillover and long-term transmission processes suggest that interparental conflict will cause parent–adolescent conflict, and vice versa, as well as that negative mood of parents and adolescents may be one of the transferring mechanisms. This multi-informant daily diary study is among the first to test the day-to-day and year-to-year cross-lagged effects between interparental conflict and later parent–child conflict at the level of individual families (as compared to between-family studies). Also, this study investigated the mediating role of negative mood. Data came from 443 Dutch adolescents (M = 13.02, 44.5% girls) and their mothers. A total of 75 daily diaries regarding conflict and negative mood were completed across 15 weeks spread over 5 years. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models were applied to investigate long-term year-to-year transmission, and Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling was used to investigate short-term day-to-day spillover. Overall, we found neither short-term spillover, nor long-term transmission, as the reciprocal cross-lagged effects between interparental conflict and adolescent–mother conflict were nonsignificant. Even though we found direct and reciprocal cross-lagged effects between negative mood and both interparental and adolescent–mother conflict on both the day-to-day and year-to-year timescales, both the direct and the indirect effects between interparental and adolescent–mother conflict were nonsignificant. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)