Mother-Adolescent Emotion Dynamics during Conflicts: Associations with Perspective Taking

Parent-adolescent emotion dynamics are central to psychosocial adjustment during this developmental period. Perspective taking—the ability to take another’s point of view into consideration—develops significantly during adolescence and is important for successful interpersonal functioning in contexts such as conflicts between family members. We used grid-sequence analysis (Brinberg et al., 2017) to examine inter-dyad differences in mother-adolescent emotion dynamics during a conflict discussion, and whether inter-dyad differences were associated with maternal and adolescent perspective taking. Mothers and their typically-developing adolescents (N = 49, Mage = 14.84 years) were video-recorded during a 10-minute conflict discussion. We identified patterns of multi-step chains of expressed emotions that unfolded during the conflict and how interdyad differences in those patterns were associated with maternal and adolescent perspective taking. Dyads differed with respect to whether they showed turn-taking in validation and interest behaviors, or whether they showed patterns of reciprocated negative affect. Higher adolescent but not maternal perspective taking was associated with dyadic turn-taking of validation and interest. Maternal and adolescent perspective taking were not associated with the pattern of reciprocated negative affect. Taken together, results highlight the importance of examining the complex process of emotion dynamics in parent-adolescent interactions.