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The effect of parental organismic trust on parental anxiety: The moderating role of perceived adolescents’ coping styles

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Abstract

Parental organismic trust facilitates an autonomy-supportive parenting style whereas parental anxiety hinders it. However, few studies have explored the relationship among organismic trust, parental anxiety, and protective situational factors. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the main effect of organismic trust on parental anxiety and the moderating effect of adolescents’ coping styles on the relationship between organismic trust and parental anxiety. Based on Trait Activation Theory, it was hypothesized that the effect of organismic trust on parental anxiety was dependent on contextual cues. This study adopted a quasi-experimental between-subject design to manipulate the moderator with four conditions (adolescents’ coping styles: task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping, avoidance-oriented coping, and no coping). A total of 284 participants with at least one school child aged 12 ~ 18 were recruited for this study. Results of hierarchical linear regression revealed that the negative relationship between organismic trust and parental anxiety was stronger when parents perceived adolescents’ using task-oriented coping than emotion-oriented and avoidance-oriented coping. This study suggested that the programs aimed at adolescents and parents that combine adolescents’ task-oriented coping with the enhancement of parental organismic trust may be more effective in alleviating parental anxiety.

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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants who took part in the study, and the lab members who offered invaluable feedback.

Funding

This work was supported by the fellowship of the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2021M703467) and the Special Research Assistant Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. E2CX0114).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, 100101, Beijing, China

    Xiaojun Pan, Yuan Fang & Zhiyan Chen

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 101408, China

    Xiaojun Pan

  3. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Yutong Wu

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Contributions

Xiaojun Pan contributed to the Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data Curation, and Writing-Original Draft. Yuan Fang contributed to the Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-Review & Editing. Yutong Wu contributed to the Conceptualization, Writing-Review & Editing. Zhiyan Chen contributed to the Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-Review & Editing, and Supervision. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhiyan Chen.

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Pan, X., Fang, Y., Wu, Y. et al. The effect of parental organismic trust on parental anxiety: The moderating role of perceived adolescents’ coping styles. Curr Psychol 43, 7785–7793 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04879-5

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