Abstract / Summary
Objective: Parents’ emotions shape children’s understanding of emotions and their management. Children of parents with borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which anger dysregulation is a cardinal symptom, are at elevated risk of psychopathology, which tends to onset in adolescence. The nature of anger dysregulation associated with parental BPD symptom severity and how it relates to adolescents’ psychopathology is not well understood. We characterized parents’ anger dysregulation multimodally and examined how concordance across emotion channels (e.g., subjective, and physiological) predicted both parent BPD symptoms and child psychopathology symptoms.
Method: Participants were 162 parents (Mage =40.37 years; 93% women; 47% racial/ethnic minority) of young adolescents oversampled for emotion dysregulation (Mage=12.59 years; 47% women; 60% racial/ethnic minority). Parents’ BPD symptom severity was clinician-rated using semi-structured interview, and adolescents’ psychopathology symptoms were assessed by parent- and adolescent-report on a well-known, validated questionnaire. During a dyadic, parent-child conflict interaction, parents’ anger responses were measured in two ways, using respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA; low values indicating stress-like responding) and self-reported anger.
Results: Using polynomial response surface modeling, we found that parental BPD feature severity (Model 1) and child psychopathology severity (Model 2) were each related to greater numerical misalignment between parental anger responses, primarily manifesting in this sample as a combination of low RSA and high subjective anger, or anger concordance.
Conclusions: Findings help show which forms of parental anger dysregulation are related to psychopathology in parents and adolescents, which could have implications for understanding the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.