1 - (SYM 58) Gender Differences in Adolescent Friend Emotion Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination

Unlike parent-child relationships, adolescent friendships are voluntary and egalitarian (Vitaro et al., 2009), and as such, friends prominently exert their influence on adolescent behaviors and emotions (Criss et al., 2016). Friend socialization of discrete negative emotions (sadness, worry, anger) is thought to differ from parent-child emotion socialization (ES) and by child gender. Generally, friends display more supportive ES when compared to parents, and girls typically display more supportive ES to sadness and worry than boys (Hale et al., 2023). Despite these distinctions in friend ES that vary by gender, research needs to examine whether these relations persist over adolescence. 

Participants were 209 adolescents (52.5% girls; M_age = 12.66 years, 75.7% White) who participated with a caregiver (94.5% mothers) in two data collections (T1, T2), four years apart. To assess friend ES of sadness, worry, and anger, adolescents completed the 54-item You and Your Friends questionnaire (YYF, Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014). The YYF yields five subscales per emotion: reward, override, magnify, neglect, and aggression. Sadness and worry were combined into one variable representing internalizing emotions.

Two time (2) x socialization strategy (5) x gender (2) multivariate analyses of variance were conducted to examine differences in socialization strategies. Regarding the sadness/worry findings, two significant two-way interactions were found. Regarding the time x socialization interaction, differences for each strategy by time point were examined. Greater reward and fewer magnify, neglect, and aggression strategies were reported at T2 than T1. Regarding the socialization x gender interaction, gender differences for each strategy were examined. Boys reported more neglect and aggression than girls. Regarding anger findings, two significant two-way interactions emerged. For time x socialization strategy interaction, adolescents endorsed higher levels of reward and magnification at T2 than T1 and higher neglect at T1 than T2. Regarding the socialization x gender interaction, boys reported receiving more aggressive responses than girls. 

Results highlight the use of more supportive strategies to negative emotions with increasing age, and replicate research validating the need to consider gender and emotion type in examinations of ES.