Longitudinal Relationships between Three Types of Parental Psychological Control and Social Anxiety and the Mediating Role of Intolerance of Uncertainty in Middle Adolescents.

Abstract

Several prior studies have investigated the within-person bidirectional associations between parental psychological control and adolescent social anxiety, yet the findings remain inconsistent. Furthermore, few studies have differentiated the unique effects of different types of parental psychological control strategies, despite the potential for variations in their associative patterns and underlying mechanisms with adolescent social anxiety. To address these gaps, the present study employed Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models to separately examine the within-person bidirectional associations between three types of parental psychological control (i.e., guilt induction, love withdrawal, and authority assertion) and social anxiety, as well as the potential mediating role of intolerance of uncertainty. A total of 1,374 Chinese high school students (52.6% girls; M_age = 15.40 years, SD = 0.63) participated in this four-wave longitudinal survey with six-month intervals. The results revealed that all three types of parental psychological control were directly associated with subsequent increases in social anxiety. However, only guilt induction and love withdrawal had an indirect within-person effect on social anxiety via intolerance of uncertainty. Conversely, adolescent social anxiety was directly associated with subsequent increases in love withdrawal and authority assertion, while social anxiety, through an increase in intolerance of uncertainty, predicted only the exacerbation of guilt induction. These findings underscore the importance of reducing all types of parental psychological control in the mitigation of adolescent social anxiety symptoms. Crucially, the results suggest that interventions aimed at reducing intolerance of uncertainty may be beneficial in breaking this vicious cycle during adolescence, particularly for those strategies that compromise adolescents' emotional security and autonomy, such as guilt induction and love withdrawal.