Emotion socialization, social connectedness and internalizing symptoms in emerging adults

Abstract

Internalizing disorders represent a substantial public health burden in the United States, and recent studies have focused on identifying factors related to internalizing symptoms (IS) in emerging adults (EA). The current study utilizes Structural Equation Modeling to examine the associations between parental psychopathology, recalled parent emotion socialization (ES), EA perception of social connectedness (SC), and EA IS in a comprehensive model with a single informant EA sample (N = 249). The current investigation considers the impact of parent gender on the models predicting EA IS. Results suggest that parental psychopathology is associated with specific ES behaviors, and SC serves as a mediator of the relation between some parental ES responses (i.e., paternal neglect) and EA IS. By incorporating these important elements in a parsimonious model, this study has identified potentially malleable factors related to EA IS, which have important implications for intervention and prevention programming in the family context.