The prospective impact of parents’ interpretation biases on adolescent anxiety and depressive symptoms

Anxiety and depression often emerge during adolescence and are more prevalent among youth with parents who experience these conditions, highlighting the important role of parental influences in shaping adolescent mental health. Cognitive theories suggest that negative interpretation biases (IBs) – the tendency to interpret ambiguous information negatively – may serve as a key cognitive vulnerability for anxiety and depression. However, the prospective association of parents’ IBs on adolescents’ mental health remains underexplored. This longitudinal study examined whether parental IBs predict changes in adolescents’ anxiety and depressive symptoms, and whether this association is mediated by adolescents’ own IBs. A community sample of 11- to 14-year-olds and their parents (N = 88 dyads) completed the Scrambled Sentences Task (SST) to assess interpretation biases. Both adolescents and parents completed self-report measures at baseline, with adolescents providing follow-up data on anxiety and depressive symptoms one year later. Path analysis indicated that more negative parental IBs predicted significant increases in both youth anxiety and depressive symptoms over time, with comparable effect sizes, even after controlling for parental internalizing symptoms. Contrary to hypotheses, youth IBs did not significantly mediate the association between parental IBs and youth symptom changes. These findings suggest that parental cognitive biases may represent a transdiagnostic risk factor in the development of adolescent internalizing symptoms, independent of parental symptomatology. They also point to the theoretical relevance of parental IBs in intergenerational transmission processes and suggest that targeting these biases could be a promising direction for family-centered prevention efforts.