Communication Patterns of Adolescents' Emotions between Mothers and Adolescents: (In)Congruence in Positive and Negative Emotions and their Predictive Roles in Adolescent Psychosocial Problems.

Adolescents’ communication of emotions with parents represents a core mechanism of family socialization that has close relevance to adolescent development, yet prior work has primarily emphasized family communication on negative emotions while neglecting positive ones. The present study examined how adolescents’ perceptions of mother-adolescent communication patterns across both positive and negative emotions (i.e., open communication patterns such as active and reactive emotion sharing; problematic communication patterns including lack of response by adolescents and lack of solicitation by mothers) uniquely and jointly predict psychosocial adjustment. A two-wave longitudinal design was employed with 668 Chinese adolescents (Mage = 15.09 years; 43.3% male). Results showed that adolescents communicated positive emotions more frequently than negative emotions, and girls reported higher active sharing and perceived less maternal lack of solicitation than boys. Response surface analysis documented that communication patterns about negative emotions, but not positive emotions, uniquely predict adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems. Moreover, when communication of positive and negative emotions was congruent, higher levels of open communication predicted fewer adolescent problems, whereas more problematic communication predicted more adolescent problems. Incongruence in family communication, especially openly communicating more negative emotion than positive emotions, tended to predict adolescents’ fewer internalizing/externalizing problems; whereas more problematic communication negative emotions than positive emotions predicted more internalizing problems. Findings underscore the importance of integrating both positive and negative emotions in research on family emotion socialization and highlight how the balance of emotional exchanges contributes to adolescent mental health.