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Parent and Friend Emotion Socialization in Early Adolescence: Their Unique and Interactive Contributions to Emotion Regulation Ability

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Abstract

During early adolescence, parental influence diminishes, whereas friends’ influence increases in shaping emotion regulation abilities. However, it is unclear how parents and friends jointly contribute to emotion regulation abilities and how their joint effects vary by gender. This study examines fathers, mothers, and friends as simultaneous emotional socializers and considers the young adolescents’ gender. The analysis drew on 438 young Chinese adolescents (55.7% girls, Mage = 11.39, SD = 1.28) who participated in a longitudinal survey over one year. Results showed that parental and friend emotion socialization have both distinct and joint effects. Friends’ responses provided a unique contribution to emotion regulation abilities across gender, whereas parents’ responses displayed unique contributions among girls. In predicting girls’ emotion regulation abilities, mothers’ supportive responses explained the additional variance beyond friends’ responses, whereas fathers’ unsupportive responses moderated the predictive power of friends’ responses. These findings clarify emotion-related socialization theories and emphasize the importance of gender specific prevention programs focusing on emotion socialization from both parents and friends in early adolescence.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the undergraduate research assistants and teachers who helped carry out this study. We are especially indebted to the adolescents and their parents whose participation made this research possible. We also thank Panpan Yang (Department of Psychology, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China) for suggestion in revising the manuscript.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (National Education Sciences Planning, Young Scholar Project) named “Parents’ social comparison in families with education anxiety: influential factors, consequences, and mechanisms” (Grant No. CKA210283).

Data Sharing and Declaration

The dataset analyzed during the current study is not publicly available but is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Developmental Psychology, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Juan Wang & Hong Zou

  2. Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Juan Wang

  3. Faculty of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China

    Mingzhu Wang

  4. Department of Psychology, School of Sociology and Psychology, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Xiaopeng Du

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Karine Maria Porpino Viana

  6. Journal of Beijing Normal University, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Ke Hou

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  1. Juan Wang
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Contributions

J.W. conceived of the study, leaded the design, investigation, analysis, and writing of original draft; M.Z.W. participated in the analysis and design, and helped to edit and revise the draft; X.P.D. participated in interpretation of the data, contributed to editing and revising the draft; K.M.P.V. supported the writing of review and editing; K.H. supported the statistical analysis and interpretation; H.Z. supervised the conceive, design, measurement, and analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xiaopeng Du or Hong Zou.

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All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of Beijing Normal University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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All participants and their parents in this study provided informed consent.

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Wang, J., Wang, M., Du, X. et al. Parent and Friend Emotion Socialization in Early Adolescence: Their Unique and Interactive Contributions to Emotion Regulation Ability. J. Youth Adolescence 53, 53–66 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01855-x

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