Attachment Behavior and Hostility as Explanatory Factors Linking Parent-Adolescent Conflict and Adolescent Adjustment

This study examined whether adolescents' behavior in a support-seeking context helped to explain associations between increases in mother-adolescent conflict during early adolescence and changes in adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms. A sample of 194 adolescents aged 12 to 14 (51% female) and their mothers were followed over 1 year. Mother-adolescent pairs participated in a speech task introducing an external social stressor into the parent-child relationship. Using a latent difference score model, adolescents' observed attachment behavior and hostility were compared as potential explanatory processes. Analyses suggest specificity in the spillover process from conflict to adolescent behavior in a nonconflictual parent-child interaction context, with hostility uniquely linking increasing mother-adolescent conflict and externalizing problems, and disruptions in adolescent attachment behavior uniquely explaining the link with internalizing problems.