Adolescent effects on mothers' bedtime cortisol: Cognitive interference as a mediating mechanism
The findings provide insight into the mechanisms by which adolescent stress physiology impacts parents, especially mothers, and highlights the role of parental cognitions.
This has implications for developing interventions, such as mindfulness training, to help mothers detach from worries triggered by their teen's stress and prevent the intergenerational transmission of unhealthy stress patterns.
More broadly, it advances understanding of the interdependence and reciprocal influences between children and parents during adolescence.
It also suggests the need to study fathers further to clarify potential gender differences in these physiological and cognitive dynamics.
College of Health researcher(s)
Highlights
- Mothers' cognitive interference (i.e. intrusive, ruminating thoughts) partially mediates the day-to-day associations between adolescent and mother bedtime cortisol levels. When adolescents had high bedtime cortisol, mothers experienced more cognitive interference the next day, which in turn predicted higher bedtime cortisol levels in mothers that same day. This suggests that mothers' cognitions play an important role in the physiological transmission of stress from adolescents to mothers.
- These mediating effects of cognitive interference were found for mothers but not fathers. This points to potential gender differences in how parents are affected by their adolescent's stress physiology, with mothers appearing more susceptible.
- Parental warmth did not moderate these associations, indicating the effects occur regardless of parent-child relationship quality.
- No evidence was found that parents' cognitive interference mediated the relationship between adolescent and parent cortisol awakening response (CAR) or area under the curve (AUC).
Abstract
Prior studies have shown that parent and adolescent cortisol are associated across days and that this covariation may be adolescent-driven. This study extends this literature by (a) testing whether parents' cognitive interference (i.e., distracting and ruminative thoughts potentially due to worry) mediates the linkages between adolescent and next-day parent cortisol and (b) whether these linkages were moderated by parent gender or warmth. Daily diary data, including bedtime cortisol, were collected on two samples of employees and their adolescent-aged children (N = 318 dyads, Myouth age = 13.18 years, 74% mothers). We tested mediation with autoregressive cross-lagged models. Moderated mediation by parent gender was found in our bedtime cortisol models. Higher adolescent bedtime cortisol levels were associated with higher next-day levels of mothers' cognitive interference. In turn, higher levels of mothers' cognitive interference were linked to higher mothers' same-day bedtime cortisol levels. These linkages were not significant for fathers. Cognitive interference did not mediate the associations between child and parent area under the curve or cortisol awakening response. No moderation was evident for parental warmth. Results suggest that mothers' cognitions play a key role in the transmission of elevated bedtime cortisol levels from adolescents to their mothers.