Emotional Reactivity to Daily Family Conflicts: Testing the Within‐Person Sensitization

Although the sensitization hypothesis posits that heightened reactivity to interparental conflict is linked to adolescent psychopathology, limited studies tested whether sensitization would emerge in parent‐adolescent conflict and across ethnicity or culture. This study revisits the sensitization hypothesis by examining adolescent emotional reactivity to interparental and parent‐adolescent conflicts on a daily timescale. The sample included 163 adolescents (55% girls; Mage = 12.79) and their parents (78% females; Mage = 45.46) who completed a 10‐day reports in Taiwan. Multilevel modeling results showed that, instead of interparental conflict, adolescents with greater histories of parent‐adolescent conflict exhibited higher emotional reactivity when parent‐adolescent conflict was higher. The findings underscore the importance of parent‐adolescent conflict in evaluating adolescent developmental risk.