Effects of Marital Conflict on Children
Cummings & Davies highlight that factors like age, temperament, and parenting quality influence how strongly conflict affects a child. These factors are known as ____.
Moderators
This mediating mechanism links marital conflict to children's later adjustment problems.
Emotional Security
This biological stress response moderated the strength of the relationship between emotional insecurity and children's adjustment problems.
Adrenocortical reactivity
The sample in this study consisted of adolescents in these two types of family structures, allowing the authors to examine how family configuration affects emotional security and adjustment.
Married/Cohabitating Parents and Divorced/Separated Parents
This type of marital conflict involves cooperation, affection, and problem-solving, and was linked to greater emotional security and prosocial behavior in children.
Constructive Marital Conflict
When children form stable mental models about whether conflict threatens family stability, Cummings & Davies refer to these frameworks as ___.
Internal Representations
Interparental conflict was first measured in this grade level.
Kindergarten
Bergman et al. (2014) noted that exposure to interparental violence contributes to both of these broad categories of adolescent adjustment problems.
Internalizing and Externalizing Problems
O’Hara et al. (2024) used this type of study design to compare emotional security processes across married and divorced family structures.
Cross-Sectional
This type of conflict, characterized by hostility and aggression, was linked to lower emotional security and reduced prosocial behavior in children.
Destructive Marital Conflict
These parental behaviors are classified as “destructive” by children in analogue studies. (List at least 3 behaviors.)
Yelling, insulting, threatening separation, physical aggression, and withdrawal/stonewalling
Did gender moderate the model?
No :)
The authors emphasize studying not just risk factors like IPV, but also these types of processes that explain how maladaptation occurs.
Mediating and Moderating Mechanisms
Findings from O’Hara et al. suggest that interventions for divorced families should focus on reducing this variable, which was consistently linked to emotional insecurity and adjustment problems.
Interparental Conflict
McCoy et al. (2009) were among the first to examine how marital conflict influences this positive form of children’s social functioning, rather than just maladjustment.
Prosocial Behavior
The Spillover Hypothesis suggests that marital conflict spills over into parenting in these ways:
Parents become less patient, more irritable, inconsistent, or withdrawn
Cummings et al. (2012) used this measure to assess child symptoms at T2.
Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL)
In Bergman et al. (2014), this psychological construct was proposed as the mediator linking interparental aggression to adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems.
Emotional Insecurity
Emotional Security Theory posits that these three primary forms of emotional insecurity are critical explanatory mechanisms in risk models of interparental conflict.
Parent-Child, Interparental, and Family Emotional Insecurity
McCoy et al. (2009) used this type of study design to test the pathways between marital conflict, emotional security, and children’s prosocial behavior.
Longitudinal (across 3 timepoints)
What role do physiological responses play in understanding children’s reactivity to conflict?
Heightened heart rate, blood pressure, or cortisol reflect stress-system activation and correlate with emotional insecurity.
This family behavior scale measured conflict in the Cummings et al. (2012) study.
CPS (Conflict and Problem-Solving Scales)
The authors proposed that atypical cortisol pattern (either excessively high or low) reflect this broader difficulty in managing stress and emotion in response to family conflict.
Poor Stress Regulation Capacity or Physiological Dysregulation
Contrary to expectations, this protective mechanism did not significantly buffer the effects of interparental conflict on adolescents’ emotional insecurity.
Parent-Child Relationship Quality
McCoy et al. proposed that this type of family organization, characterized by blurred boundaries and overinvolvement, may explain why some high-conflict families still show warmth in parenting.
Enmeshment