Bidirectional Relationships Between Family Communication Patterns of Adolescents' Negative Emotions and Problematic...

Despite evidence linking parenting with adolescent technology use, research has seldom examined their bidirectional longitudinal associations and the specific role of emotion-related communication-a key aspect of family communication central to adolescent adjustment-in adolescents' technology use remains under-examined. To address these gaps, this study explored the relationships between adolescents' problematic social media use and internet gaming and parent-adolescent communication patterns regarding adolescents' negative emotions.

Adolescents were recruited from an urban city in China (n = 564, 37.65% boys, M_age = 15.78 years, SD = 0.60), who provided reports at three time points, each spaced approximately 8 months apart. Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model was conducted to examine the reciprocal relationships between communication patterns, problematic social media use, and internet gaming.

At the between-person level, both active and reactive emotion sharing (i.e., adolescents' spontaneous or reactive disclosure of their negative emotions to parents) were negatively associated with problematic social media use and internet gaming, while lack of parental solicitation (i.e., parental limited attempts to inquire about or engage with adolescents' emotions) and lack of adolescent response (i.e., adolescents' reluctance to respond to parental inquiries of emotions) were positively associated with these behaviors. At the within-person level, lack of adolescent response predicted increased problematic social media use, and there were reciprocal effects between lack of adolescent response and problematic internet gaming. No gender differences were observed.

This study enriches the theoretical understanding of adolescent addiction from a family emotion communication perspective and offers practical guidance for preventing and intervening in digital addiction among adolescents.