Both parents and close friends are central figures in adolescents' emotional and psychological adjustment. However, little is known about how close friends socialize adolescents' emotions or how friends' socialization messages compare to those from parents in adolescence. The present study will explore how parents and friends discuss negative emotions with adolescents in relation to adolescents' emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms. Participants were 30 parent-adolescent-friend triads from a community sample. Parent and friend emotion socialization was observed during two discourse tasks (one with the parent, one with the friend) regarding a past negative event. Adolescents also reported parent and friend emotion socialization responses. Adolescents' emotion regulation was measured via heart rate variability during a baseline task (i.e., watching an animal and nature video) and via a parent-report questionnaire. Lastly, adolescents reported their internalizing symptoms on a standard questionnaire. Correlations showed that the two methods for emotion socialization (observations, questionnaires) were largely not concordant, and the different measurements of emotion regulation were also not concordant. Repeated measures MANOVAs showed that parents and friends differed in their use of various emotion socialization responses, as parents were observed to be higher in emotion coaching and co-rumination. Adolescents reported that parents were higher in emotion coaching and emotion dismissing, and friends were higher in co-rumination. These differences were not moderated by adolescent sex. Contrary to hypotheses, adolescent emotion regulation was not correlated with adolescent internalizing symptoms and did not mediate the association of parents' and friends' socialization of negative emotions with adolescent internalizing symptoms. This study unites the parent and friend literatures on emotion socialization and indicates that parents and friends are distinct socialization agents during adolescence. This study also offers insight into methodological approaches for measuring emotion socialization and emotion regulation, particularly that emotion socialization measurements need to be sensitive to the structural differences of family relationships and friendships. Future directions include exploring a wider range of socialization agents and how they may interact to influence adolescent development, amongst other topics. / Ph. D. / Parents and friends are important influences during adolescence, especially with respect to emotional and psychological adjustment. The present study examined how parents and friends discuss upsetting events with adolescents, and how these discussions relate to adolescent emotion regulation and psychological adjustment. Parents and friends were observed for their use of emotion coaching, which is validating the emotion and offering guidance about the upsetting event; emotion dismissing, which is ignoring and discouraging the emotion; and co-rumination, which is rehashing the details and dwelling on negative emotion. Adolescents also reported on parents’ and friends’ responses through standard questionnaires. Emotion regulation was measured by adolescent heart rate variability and a parent-report questionnaire, and adolescents reported on their psychological adjustment. Findings indicate that the observations of parents and friends did not align with adolescent-report of how parents and friends respond to their emotions. Parent-report of adolescent emotion regulation did not align with adolescent heart rate variability. Parents were observed to provide more coaching and dismissing of adolescents’ negative emotions. Parents were observed to co-ruminate more than friends, though adolescents reported that friends co-ruminate more than parents. Moreover, parents’ and friends’ responses were unrelated to adolescent emotion regulation and psychological adjustment, for both observations and adolescent-report. These results indicate that parents and friends discuss negative emotions with adolescents in distinct ways, and that different measurements of these behaviors offer unique perspectives. Future research should examine how these discussions influence adolescent development and how these relationships may interact in their influence on adolescents.

This study explored children’s experiences and perceptions of adults and child-adult relations and relationships. Child-adult relations involve the conceptualisation of adults and children as distinct social groups and child-adult relationships are inter-personal relationships between individuals that cross the boundary between these groups. The focus of this study was children’s contacts and relationships with adults and how these relationships informed children’s constructions of child-adult relations. The study took place in the context of concern about distance between child and adult worlds generating negative stereotypes and distrust between the two social groups and an interest in children’s perspectives. A multi-stage, multi-method study was undertaken with children aged 10/11 years living in the relatively deprived, ‘Social Inclusion Partnership’ (SIP), areas of a Scottish city. A period of familiarisation, through participant observation, was undertaken with Year 6 children in one school, followed by paired and individual interviews with 17 children. A survey was then conducted with 375 children in primary schools across the SIP areas. In general it seemed that ‘relationships’ with individual adults, other than with parents, were not particularly important to the children, who, with a few exceptions, did not seek out such adults and generally indicated a preference for spending time with other children. However, knowing and being able to identify adults within and beyond their families was very important to children’s sense of self and to their feelings of belonging to a family and within a neighbourhood. The children did experience their worlds and those of adults as separate. Mobility beyond their neighbourhood without adult accompaniment, to visit swimming pools, cinemas, and retail facilities, provided children with opportunities to observe and experience a range of ‘unknown’ adults, and particularly ‘public workers’. This experientially confirmed their conceptualisations of adults as a separate social group occupying a higher status than children. The research process in itself indicated that in some circumstances children did have an interest in interacting with adults, and that time, negotiation, testing and trusting were part of the relationship forming process. The child-adult relationships formed in this study through engagement in ‘joint enterprises’, of play and research project, provide evidence for the possibilities of positive ‘generational proximity’ between children and adults.

The purpose of this study was to determine if selected perceived parent-child relationships were differentially associated with an individual's capacity to demonstrate the intellectual processes of creativity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the retrospective perceptions of parent-child relations as measured by the Roe-Siegelman Parent-Child Relations Questionnaire (PCR), personality characteristics as they appear on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and types of crimes of prison inmates, specifically divided into aggressive and non-aggressive crimes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2001. / "December 2001." Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-120). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [80]-85).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-84). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.