(PS7-B31) Concordance of Sexual and Gender Minority Young Adults’ Early Emotion Socialization by Caregivers and Their Experiences with Identity Disclosure: A Mixed Methods Exploration

Introduction: Sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals are at greater risk for mental and behavioral health challenges including anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and substance use compared to their cisgender, heterosexual peers. Support from caregivers around sexual and gender identity can serve as a protective factor for SGM young adults against such health outcomes; however, SGM individuals receive a variety of initial reactions from caregivers in response to coming out. Influences on caregivers’ initial responses, or how responses to identity disclosure change over time, are not well understood. We sought to explore the consistency between caregivers’ tendencies toward validating or invalidating emotions and their response to their child coming out, and how initial responses may change over time.

Method: As part of a mixed methods study investigating emotion efficacy in SGM young adults (μ_age = 26.3, σ_age = 1.93), we conducted remote, semi-structured individual interviews with SGM young adults (N=28) across the U.S. Interview guides probed identity, family dynamics, early emotion socialization, and social support, including responses to identity disclosures. These interviews were transcribed verbatim and double-coded. Key themes were derived using applied thematic analysis (Guest et al., 2012). Participants also completed a demographic questionnaire and the Invalidating Childhood Experiences questionnaire (Mountford et al., 2007), a measure of early emotion invalidation. Systematic qualitative coding is ongoing, and preliminary results are presented below. Quantitative data will be used to stratify qualitative data as a secondary aim of this poster.

Results: Two themes emerged related to participants’ describing supportive responses to identity disclosure by caregivers: caregivers’ early emotion validation, and caregivers modeling open communication and expression of emotion. In contrast, participants describing more unsupportive responses tended to discuss early emotional invalidation from caregivers and caregivers’ low tolerance for both their child’s unpleasant emotions and their own. Additionally, three trajectories of change over time were identified: initial positive responses tended to remain positive, and initial negative responses either shifted positively or remained negative.

Conclusions: Early emotion socialization and modeling (including invalidation or absent emotion modeling) tended to be concordant with caregiver responses, in that caregivers who reportedly used supportive emotion socialization strategies were also reported to have reacted affirmingly to identity disclosures, whereas caregivers who already tended to invalidate or ignore emotions also tended to react negatively to identity disclosures. Given the evidence that support from caregivers promotes well-being in SGM individuals, further research is needed to determine whether targeting caregiver emotion socialization practices, including their own distress tolerance and emotion validation skills, can help caregivers respond supportively to identity disclosures from their SGM children.