Van Lissa Caspar J, Hawk Skyler T, Koot Hans M, Branje Susan, Meeus Wim H J
Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Department of Educational Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Dev Psychol. 2017 Sep;53(9):1722-1737. doi: 10.1037/dev0000361. Epub 2017 Jul 10.
Empathy plays a key role in maintaining close relationships and promoting prosocial conflict resolution. However, research has not addressed the potential emotional cost of adolescents' high empathy, particularly when relationships are characterized by more frequent conflict. The present 6-year longitudinal study (N = 467) investigated whether conflict with parents predicted emotion dysregulation more strongly for high-empathy adolescents than for lower-empathy adolescents. Emotion dysregulation was operationalized at both the experiential level, using mood diary data collected for 3 weeks each year, and at the dispositional level, using annual self-report measures. In line with predictions, we found that more frequent adolescent-parent conflict predicted greater day-to-day mood variability and dispositional difficulties in emotion regulation for high-empathy adolescents, but not for average- and low-empathy adolescents. Mood variability and difficulties in emotion regulation, in turn, also predicted increased conflict with parents. These links were not moderated by empathy. Moreover, our research allowed for a novel investigation of the interplay between experiential and dispositional emotion dysregulation. Day-to-day mood variability predicted increasing dispositional difficulties in emotion regulation over time, which suggests that experiential dysregulation becomes consolidated into dispositional difficulties in emotion regulation. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that, for high-empathy adolescents, conflict was a driver of this dysregulation consolidation process. Finally, emotion dysregulation played a role in overtime conflict maintenance for high-empathy adolescents. This suggests that, through emotion dysregulation, high empathy may paradoxically also contribute to maintaining negative adolescent-parent interactions. Our research indicates that high empathy comes at a cost when adolescent-parent relationships are characterized by greater negativity. (PsycINFO Database Record
同理心在维持亲密关系和促进亲社会冲突解决方面发挥着关键作用。然而，研究尚未探讨青少年高同理心可能带来的情感代价，尤其是当人际关系中冲突更为频繁时。本为期6年的纵向研究（N = 467）调查了与父母发生冲突对高同理心青少年情绪失调的预测作用是否比对低同理心青少年更强。情绪失调在体验层面通过每年收集3周的情绪日记数据进行衡量，在特质层面则通过年度自我报告测量来衡量。与预测一致，我们发现青少年与父母之间更频繁的冲突预示着高同理心青少年日常情绪变异性更大以及在情绪调节方面存在特质困难，但对中等同理心和低同理心青少年则不然。情绪变异性和情绪调节困难反过来也预示着与父母冲突的增加。这些联系不受同理心的调节。此外，我们的研究还对体验性和特质性情绪失调之间的相互作用进行了新颖的调查。日常情绪变异性预示着随着时间推移情绪调节方面的特质困难会增加，这表明体验性失调会巩固为情绪调节方面的特质困难。调节中介分析表明，对于高同理心青少年来说，冲突是这种失调巩固过程的驱动因素。最后，情绪失调在高同理心青少年的长期冲突维持中起到了作用。这表明，通过情绪失调，高同理心可能反常地也有助于维持青少年与父母之间的负面互动。我们的研究表明，当青少年与父母的关系以更大的负面性为特征时，高同理心是有代价的。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
