Paternal-maternal congruence in emotional abuse and adolescent depressive symptoms: A moderated polynomial regression with response surface analyses

Background

Adolescent depressive symptoms are a significant concern around the world. Existing research has found that parental emotional abuse is an important risk factor for adolescent depressive symptoms. However, these studies typically treated parental emotional abuse as a whole, without distinguishing differential effects of paternal and maternal emotional abuse. Thus, this conceptual and empirical work was designed to explore the unique and joint effects of paternal and maternal emotional abuse on adolescent depressive symptoms. Moreover, we further explored whether this relation could be moderated by social support.

Methods

Participants were 1639 Chinese adolescents (52.50 % girls, M_age = 14.49, SD = 1.11 at baseline). They completed questionnaires regarding demographics, paternal and maternal emotional abuse, social support, and internalizing problems at Time 1. After 7 months, they finished the measure of depressive symptoms at Time 2.

Results

Results showed that paternal emotional abuse and maternal emotional abuse were both positively and significantly associated with adolescent depressive symptoms. Additionally, when paternal and maternal emotional abuse were congruent, the link between high parental emotional abuse and adolescent depressive symptoms was stronger than that between low parental emotional abuse and adolescent depressive symptoms. Compared to extreme levels of emotional abuse, moderate levels of emotional abuse were most strongly related to adolescent depressive symptoms. When paternal and maternal emotional abuse were incongruent, compared to low paternal-high maternal emotional abuse, the link between high paternal-low maternal emotional abuse and adolescent depressive symptoms was significantly stronger. Adolescent depressive symptoms increased with the growing discrepancy in parental emotional abuse. Additionally, social support moderated the congruent and incongruent effects of paternal-maternal emotional abuse on adolescent depressive symptoms.

Conclusion

Parental congruence and incongruence in emotional abuse are risk factors for adolescent depressive symptoms, and social support plays a moderating role in this relation.