Parental listening when adolescents self-disclose: A preregistered experimental study
Introduction
“Listening is where love begins.”
Fred (Mister) Rogers, 2006
In the humanistic tradition, parental listening is seen as an important factor of parent–child interactions that shape ensuing children’s emotional and psychosocial well-being (Rogers, 1962, Rogers, 1967, Rogers, 2006). Feeling listened to may be especially important for adolescents, who are less likely to share personal experiences (Smetana, Metzger, Gettman, & Campione-Barr, 2006) as they explore and assert their independence from parents (Hoffman, 1984, Smetana et al., 2005). Yet, despite the important role parental listening may play in facilitating development and well-being, little empirical work has been conducted to isolate its effects. In this study, we experimentally manipulated parental listening behaviors (either good or moderate) in videotaped interactions between a parent and an adolescent and elicited reactions to the listening parent from 1001 adolescents aged 13–16 years.
Although speakers perceive listening holistically (Kluger et al., 2020; Lipetz et al., 2020), listening is a multifaceted construct that entails a safe receptive space for a speaker’s expression (also known as positive intention) and active attention (Itzchakov and Kluger, 2017, Worthington and Bodie, 2018). Listening is conveyed through largely nonverbal strategies termed back-channeling (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002). For example, the listener shows attention through consistent eye contact (Bavelas et al., 2002) and body language such as leaning toward the speaker with an inclined head, head-nodding, and minimal sounds such as “umm” and “ahh” that express openness and receptivity (Geerts, Bouhuys, & Bloem, 1997). To demonstrate positive intention, listeners may use intermittent verbal responses, for example, “Thank you for sharing that experience with me, I assume it wasn’t easy for you.” When done well, this form of listening expresses positive regard, validation, and nonjudgment during the conversation (Rogers, 1980) even when the listener does not agree with the speaker (Rogers, 1962).
Although to our knowledge no research has isolated parental listening to understand its impacts on adolescents, indirect evidence for the importance of parental listening for youngsters’ well-being is offered through research on parents’ perspective-taking (Mageau, Sherman, Grusec, Koestner, & Bureau, 2017), parental responses to adolescent self-disclosures (Disla, Main, Kashi, & Boyajian, 2019), and parental scaffolding of children’s stories (McLean & Jennings, 2012). Furthermore, training programs designed to improve parents’ acceptance of children’s emotions (Katz & Hunter, 2007), and their ability to support youngsters in the service of children’s agentic functioning and mental health (Joussemet, Mageau, & Koestner, 2014), recognize but do not isolate the role of listening. For example, scaffolding (McLean & Jennings, 2012) also involves conversational behaviors such as confirming versus disagreeing with stated views, and parental training involves using informational versus evaluative verbal responses (Joussemet et al., 2014). Thus, various forms of supportive parenting (e.g., autonomy-supportive parenting that facilitates choiceful and volitional action and self-congruent expression through acceptance, supporting agency, or taking adolescents’ perspectives; Ryan & Deci, 2017) suppose that listening is an important strategy that can be used alongside other actions and words to provide support. In sum, existing studies assume that listening may promote adolescent well-being, but they do not directly test listening in isolation from other characteristics of supportive parent–child interactions.
Alongside benefiting well-being, listening may influence adolescents’ intention to disclose in the future because it improves the relationship between the parent and adolescent (Darling and Steinberg, 1993, Vieno et al., 2009). For example, parents’ nonsupportive behaviors, such as acting disappointed, acting sad, and lecturing, can inhibit adolescents’ future self-disclosure (Soenens et al., 2006, Tokić and Pećnik, 2011). Bearing this in mind, the current study aimed to bridge this gap in understanding by testing the effects of perceived parental listening—either good or moderate quality—on adolescents’ expectations of their own well-being and intention to self-disclose in the future.
Digging deeper, although adolescents may self-disclose any (trivial or meaningful) experience to parents, we focused on two examples of meaningful disclosure situations that involve negative emotions that might be met with different expectations for parents. The first—feeling hurt—we explored in terms of the adolescent sharing alienation from peers who were engaging in an illicit behavior, namely vaping. The second—transgression—we explored in terms of the adolescent expressing remorse for having done something wrong, namely having engaged in the illicit behavior of vaping. In the case of transgression, parents are challenged to listen nonjudgmentally despite wrongful behavior on the part of their adolescents, and so adolescents seek clear indication that disclosing a transgression will not elicit negative reactions from their parents (Smetana et al., 2006, Soenens et al., 2006). Although adolescents tend to disclose their hurt more than their transgressions (Chaparro & Grusec, 2015), both disclosure situations are laden with negative emotions that must be well-received by parents. Thus, a priori, we anticipated that listening would be important in both contexts, showing generalizability of effects, despite their specific qualities.
Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2017) is useful for understanding why good parental listening may foster well-being and adolescents’ self-disclosure intentions. SDT argues that people have basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence that can be satisfied through supportive interpersonal encounters (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Our study focused on autonomy and relatedness as two psychological needs that should be especially influenced by parental listening during self-disclosure conversations; we did not measure competence because listening was depicted during a disclosure conversation with no concrete activity or goal involved to produce a sense of efficacy in youngsters. We expected that being listened to would satisfy the psychological need for autonomy—for being in touch and true to oneself through self-expression, self-congruence, and self-volition—because speakers feel validated, free to express, and supported in having their genuine experiences (Deci and Ryan, 1995, Scholl et al., 2014). In addition, good listening is likely to satisfy the need for relatedness—feeling close and connected to others (La Guardia & Ryan, 2002) because speakers feel a sense of connection and intimacy with listeners (Kluger et al., 2020). Indeed, the humanistic tradition has highlighted the roles of both psychological needs in the context of listening, namely that individuals feel their self is validated and fortified by others and simultaneously that they continue to be loved despite their self-disclosures (Kahn, 1998, Rogers, 1980). Within SDT, theorists also discuss the role of listening as one way to provide support but have not tested this assertion (Lietaert et al., 2015, Reeve and Jang, 2006, Vansteenkiste and Sheldon, 2006), and more recently experimental studies with young adult strangers have shown that manipulated in-lab listening fosters autonomy and relatedness need satisfaction for speakers (Itzchakov & Weinstein, in press).
In turn, autonomy and relatedness need satisfaction promote well-being and youngsters’ willingness to be further vulnerable in the relationship (Costa et al., 2016, Deci and Ryan, 2014). For example, adolescents’ psychological need satisfaction predicts more positive affect and less negative affect in the short term (Kocayoruk, 2012, Véronneau et al., 2005) and more positive affect and self-esteem over time (Gagné, 2003, Kipp and Weiss, 2015). In addition, perceiving mothers’ autonomy support—support for feeling choiceful and understood—when rules are set to regulate technology use predicts more self-disclosure intention related to adolescents’ technology use (Weinstein & Przybylski, 2019) when discussing friendships in a lab setting (Wuyts, Soenens, Vansteenkiste, & Van Petegem, 2018), when disclosing stigmatized identities (Ryan, Legate, & Weinstein, 2015), and after making mistakes (Roth, Ron, & Benita, 2009). Taking this body of work together, we might anticipate that being listened to during an important self-disclosure satisfies the basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness of adolescents, which in turn explains why listening is beneficial to well-being and self-disclosure intention (see Fig. 1).
We designed an experimental study to provide a first causal test isolating the effects of listening quality in parent–adolescent relationships on anticipated autonomy and relatedness psychological need satisfaction, well-being, and future self-disclosure intention. To achieve this, we carefully developed experimental stimuli consisting of videotaped vignettes of an adolescent speaker and a parent listener and randomly assigned adolescent participants aged 13–16 years to receive one of four videos in a 2 (Listening: good vs. moderate) × 2 (Disclosure Situation: transgression vs. hurt) design. Video vignettes were validated through multiple rounds of preliminary data collection (10.17605/OSF.IO/VSCAU) to ensure that they directly and effectively manipulated listening behaviors. Vignettes offered four advantages. First, to enrich experimental realism (Aguinis & Bradley, 2014), adolescents reflected on how they, themselves, would feel in the given situations, and by viewing videos they could readily imagine themselves in visualized interactions with parents and envisage their own responses in real time (rather than retrospectively). Second, vignettes carefully manipulated listening without concurrently changing aspects of the interaction that clearly involve supportive speech and nonlistening behaviors (e.g., hugs). Third, vignettes isolated the causal effect of listening on downstream outcomes from cumulative and reciprocal effects that are characteristic of parent–child relationships (Darling, Cumsille, Caldwell, & Dowdy, 2006). Finally, vignettes were useful for reducing bias by social desirability and halo effects (Steiner, Atzmüller, & Su, 2016), both of which are likely to influence reports of the specific listening behaviors under study, which take place in the larger context of a meaningful and complex relationship with one’s parent.
The experiment was preregistered prior to data collection, and confirmatory hypotheses (H1–H7; Fig. 1) building on the literature reviewed above were as follows. Participants assigned to the good versus moderate listening conditions would report greater autonomy need satisfaction (H1), relatedness need satisfaction (H2), well-being (H3), and self-disclosure intention (H4). The main effects would be present across both disclosure situations: transgression and hurt (H5). Furthermore, we anticipated that across transgression and hurt disclosure situations, the effects of listening condition on (a) well-being and (b) self-disclosure intention would be mediated by autonomy need satisfaction (H6) and relatedness need satisfaction (H7).
Section snippets
Participants and procedure
Participants were recruited in collaboration with a research company, ICM Unlimited (https://www.icmunlimited.com), for a procedure approved through the University of Reading ethics committee. No hard quota controls were set. However, ICM set soft quotas to ensure a good spread of respondents by age (13-, 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds), gender, and region across the United Kingdom. Because the study asked participants to put themselves in an adolescent’s shoes interacting with his mother, those
Correlations
Table 1 presents descriptive information and Pearson correlations between all study variables, including the lower-order subscales that comprised our well-being composite. See also Fig. 2, which depicts correlations between perceived listening and study outcomes. In short, perceived good listening was a robust correlate of listening outcomes, whereas the perceived disclosure situation was not.
Analytic strategy for condition effects
Following the preregistered analytic plan, we conducted a 2 × 2 analysis of variance (ANOVA) with
Discussion
The current study underscored the importance of good parental listening to adolescents using vignettes that isolated listening from other supportive parental behaviors. These vignettes, delivered through carefully developed interactions recorded on video, depicted good and moderate listening, each in response to two disclosure situations.
As hypothesized, adolescents anticipated greater well-being—positive affect and self-esteem and less negative affect—when imagining self-disclosing to a parent
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Weinstein: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Andrew Huo: Conceptualizatoin, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Guy Itzchakov: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgment
This project was funded by the research team, and supported, in part, by an Israel Science Foundation grant awarded to the third author (num. 460/18).
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