THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL EXPERIENTIAL AVOIDANCE AND PARENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS EMOTIONS ON ADOLESCENT MENTAL HEALTH

Abstract

Experiential avoidance (EA), which refers to the unwillingness to experience distress, has emerged in recent years as a critical transdiagnostic factor in the maintenance of adolescent psychopathology (Papachristou et al., 2018, Mellick et al., 2017). Parental EA, the phenomenon in which parents are unable to cope with witnessing their child’s distress and seek to control the form or frequency of their child’s internal experiences in emotionally arousing situations (Cheron et al., 2009), has been linked to increased mental health difficulties (e.g., Fulton et al., 2014). However, literature on the underlying mechanisms is still nascent. Thus, this study aims to examine whether the association between parent’s negative attitudes towards emotion expression and parental EA and adolescent mental health difficulties could be serially mediated by adolescents’ negative beliefs about emotion expression and adolescent EA. Using a path analysis model, we found that parental EA, but not parents’ attitudes towards emotions, positively predicted adolescents’ attitudes emotions. Adolescents’ attitudes towards emotions positively predicted their own levels of EA. Adolescents’ levels of EA positively predicted internalising and externalising symptoms. Importantly, adolescents’ attitudes towards emotions and EA serially mediated the association between parental EA and adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. We discuss the implications of these findings on clinical practice with parents and their adolescents.