A Moment of Autonomy Support Brightens Adolescents’ Mood: Autonomy Support, Psychological Control and Adolescent Affect in Everyday Life

Abstract

This experience sampling study examined whether autonomy-supportive and psychologically controlling interactions with parents are intertwined with adolescents’ momentary affect. For 7 days, 143 adolescents (Mage = 15.82; SDage = 1.75; 64% girls; 71 Belgian, 72 Dutch) reported 5 or 6 times a day how they felt and how interactions with parents were experienced. Preregistered dynamic structural equation models on 1,439 parent-adolescent interactions revealed significant within-family associations: Adolescents experienced more positive affect during and following autonomy-supportive interactions, and vice versa. Adolescents felt more negative affect during and 3 hours before psychologically controlling interactions. Between-family associations showed significant linkages between parenting and affect. Overall, these findings show that a moment of autonomy support can alter adolescents’ well-being in everyday live.

Home‐based video assessment of children's autism‐related behaviours: Psychometric analysis and linkages with parental responsiveness and context

“…Similarly, the most common method in this research tradition is a cross-sectional, correlational design, with a minority of studies in a multiyear longitudinal format. Almost no studies in either research tradition have taken a daily, short-term longitudinal approach (but see van der Kaap-Deeder et al, 2022, for a parent-report-based exception in a study in the general population). Yet, in comparison with other research designs, short-term daily studies of this sort can reveal potential impacts of parental communication and caregiving on children's behaviour at a molecular level, more closely modelling the near-immediate impact on children's deportment that changes in parental responsiveness are hypothesized to have (Repetti et al, 2015).…”