Rejection Sensitivity and Internalising Symptoms in Youth: A Focus on Parenting and Self-Regulation

Abstract

There is abundant evidence supporting the importance of accepting and autonomy-supportive parenting rather than rejecting and autonomy-restrictive or controlling parenting for development. This is especially relevant for adolescent and young adult (youth) adaptive development, including the development of relational schemas, coping skills and emotional health. Moreover, the impact of the quality of parent-child (and other) relationships on youth’s emotional health has been described as mediated via relational schemas, with schemas defined as beliefs, biases, and expectations that arise out of social experiences. For example, rejection sensitivity (RS) theory (Downey & Feldman, 1996) is one influential perspective that explicitly identifies how social experiences of rejection, victimisation, or isolation gives rise to a cognitive-affective bias of anxious expectation, biased perceptions, and defensive overreactions to ambiguous or overt cues of rejection. These cognitive affective biases in turn, are implicated in the development and maintenance of negative outcomes, such as internalising symptoms. However, components of this model, when applied to older adolescents and young adults, have rarely examined the mechanisms that help account for the associations of parental experiences, RS, and internalising symptoms. To this end, the aim of the four empirical studies conducted for this thesis was to apply the RS framework to test a model that specifically accounts for how interpersonal experiences (in the form of parenting behaviours), biased perceptions and beliefs regarding interpersonal exchanges (i.e., RS), and intrapersonal vulnerabilities (i.e., maladaptive socio-emotional responses) all play roles in elevated internalising symptoms for older adolescents and young adults. A parallel aim was to identify protective factors (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and coping flexibility) that may modify the risk of these interpersonal and intrapersonal factors for older adolescents and young adults. To achieve these aims, the four studies utilized either cross-sectional or two waves of longitudinal data collected from older adolescents and young adults over a 1-year period. Study 1 tested a comprehensive RS-model among a sample of 628 older adolescents and young adults. Structural equation models (SEMs) were used to identify serial-mediation pathways of risk stemming from parenting practices and RS onto higher depressive and anxious symptoms. Study 2 examined the temporal risk that RS plays for increased internalising symptoms over a one-year time span via heightened emotional dysregulation, expressive suppression, and social avoidance among 402 longitudinal participants from Study 1. Further, in Study 2, bi-directional relations between socio-emotional responses and internalising symptoms were tested, with results supporting bi-directional associations over time. Study 3 drew upon the cross-sectional sample from Study 1 (N = 643) to examine the moderating effects of three related, but distinct, components of the self-perceived capacity for flexibly coping with stress (i.e., multiple coping strategy use, situational coping, and coping rigidity). More specifically, these three capacities were examined as potential moderators of the relations between several regulatory strategies (emotion dysregulation, suppression, social avoidance, and cognitive reappraisal) and internalising symptoms. Finally, making use of the longitudinal sample, Study 4 (N = 394) examined the moderating effects of cognitive reappraisal and coping flexibility (i.e., multiple coping strategy use) on the concurrent and temporal associations of parenting, RS, and internalising symptoms over a 1-year period. Altogether, three general conclusions from these studies are described. First, though parenting practices are correlates of youths’ internalising symptoms, it is RS that is the most salient risk of symptoms over time. Second, emotional dysregulation, suppression, and social avoidance are key mechanisms that independently confer risk for more elevated symptoms and partially account for the increased risk of elevated perceptions of RS and greater symptoms over time. Additionally, cognitive reppraisal played a unique and buffering role in cross-sectional associations. Third, coping flexibility appears to be an important resource for youth, but further research is needed to examine the interplay of flexible coping capacities with parenting, ER, ways of coping, and internalising symptoms among youth. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, along with recommendations for future research. Taken together, the current research identifies multiple interpersonal and intrapersonal risk and protective factors that are relevant for understanding increases in internalising symptomology during late adolescence and young adulthood. Furthermore, these factors, in particular, could be targeted as avenues for intervention to help youth cope with interpersonal stressors of rejecting and autonomy-restrictive parenting and RS.