Adolescent-perceived family-level parenting profiles in response to adolescents’ negative emotions: Longitudinal links to adolescent psychological problems and the mediating mechanisms in China

Abstract Emerging research has emphasized the crucial roles of parental responses to adolescents’ negative emotions in adolescent socioemotional development. Parental responses to adolescents’ negative emotions are multidimensional and often interconnected; however, prior research has primarily adopted a variable-centered approach, which may obscure the complex ways in which different parental responses co-occur within families. Moreover, existing research using latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify patterns of parental responses to adolescents’ negative emotions has largely focused on mothers and been conducted predominantly in Western cultural contexts. To address these gaps, the present study employed LPA to examine profiles of adolescent-reported parental responses to adolescents’ negative emotions at the family level, incorporating both fathers’ and mothers’ responses, in China. A total of 1,004 adolescents (53.5% female; aged 14–17 years, M age = 15.25 years, SD age = 0.50) participated in the study at two time points, spaced eight months apart. The results identified three family-level profiles: Disengaged , Harsh and Dogmatic , and Nurturing . Adolescents exposed to non-nurturing parenting profiles were more likely to experience psychological problems compared with those in the Nurturing profile, with girls showing higher levels of psychological problems in the Disengaged profile and boys exhibiting higher levels of difficulties in the Harsh and Dogmatic profile. Both emotion regulation difficulties and parent–child relationship quality mediated the associations between parenting profiles and adolescent psychological outcomes, although the patterns of mediation varied by gender. In conclusion, this study provides longitudinal evidence linking family-level profiles of parental responses to adolescents’ negative emotions to adolescent psychological outcomes.