Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

Abstract

Parent-adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent-adolescent conflict (i.e., conflict discussion tasks) is hindered by task design. This limitation may stem from how conflict topics are assessed and selected for discussion. Within a sample of 47 adolescents (ages 14–17) and parents, we investigated whether a modified version of a conflict discussion task could elicit physiological (i.e., arousal) and behavioral (i.e., hostility) displays of adolescents’ conflict-related stress responses. We assessed parent-adolescent conflict via structured interview to identify topics for dyads to discuss during the task. We randomly assigned dyads to complete a 5-minute task to discuss either a putatively benign topic (i.e., control condition) or a conflict topic while undergoing direct assessments of continuous arousal. Trained raters coded dyad members’ hostile behavior during the task. Adolescents in the conflict condition exhibited significantly greater levels of arousal than adolescents in the control condition. We observed an interaction between discussion condition and baseline conflict. Specifically, higher baseline conflict predicted greater hostile behavior for adolescents in the conflict condition, yet we observed the inverse relation for adolescents in the control condition. Our modified laboratory discussion task successfully elicited both physiological and behavioral displays of adolescent conflict-related stress. These findings have important implications for leveraging experimental paradigms to understand causal links between parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent psychopathology, and their underlying mechanisms.

Moderated Mediation of the Link between Parent-Adolescent Conflict and Adolescent Risk-Taking: the Role of Physiological Regulation and Hostile Behavior in an Experimentally Controlled Investigation

“…At baseline, conditions did not significantly differ on demographic variables, HF-HRV, or BART performance. As previously reported, the two conditions did significantly differ on HR, providing evidence as a manipulation check that the conflict condition elicited greater adolescent physiological arousal than the control condition (Thomas et al 2017). Table 3 presents a correlation table by condition, controlling for pre-task BART.…”

“…As described in the initial results demonstrating feasibility of our modified discussion task (Thomas et al 2017), we used dyadic data analysis to confirm that our task performed as designed: only adolescents, not parents, evidenced expressions of hostile behavior significantly related to the conflict condition. Therefore, we did not include parental variables in our analyses.…”

“…Parents and adolescents engaged in a widely used 5-minute discussion task to resolve the assigned topic (Donenberg and Weisz 1997;Gottman 1979). As described elsewhere (Thomas et al 2017), to include factors known to elicit a stress response (unpredictability, uncontrollability, and social evaluation; Dickerson and Kemeny 2004;Gunnar et al 2009), we modified the task such that: a) families did not know when the discussion task would occur, b) families did not choose the discussion topic, and c) families were informed that staff would be monitoring them through a two-way mirror so they did not have to keep track of time. In the between-subjects design, families randomized to the control condition (n = 19) were assigned the discussion topic of planning a vacation; families randomized to the conflict condition (n = 21) were assigned the discussion of a conflict topic, based on previously identified topics from the TTI.…”

“…The coders were four research assistants; the training process has been described elsewhere (Thomas et al 2017). Forty percent of adolescent videos were randomly selected as reliability cases (i.e., assigned to two coders) to check that coders rated behaviors similarly.…”

Social attention in the real world

“…This submissive role is reflected in children speaking less in the conflict discussion. Moreover, the conflict discussion likely elicits more tension and uncomfortable feelings in children than in the cooperation scenario (Thomas et al, 2017), which might be an additional explanation for their smaller contribution to the conflict discussion with parents. As the nature of parent-child conflicts changes significantly across various stages of development (Dunn & Slomkowski, 1992;Laursen & Collins, 2009;Steinberg, 2001), one may expect that patterns gaze and speech behavior are different for parent-child conflicts in early or late childhood, or in early adolescence and late adolescence.…”