| An experimental multiple baseline design was utilized to study the influence of different parent behaviors on youth anxiety. Parents and youths engaged in an impossible word task, while parents enacted four behaviors (encouragement, problem-solving, catastrophizing, and provision of escape), commonly connected to youth anxiety. Parents completed five consecutive conditions, including a natural baseline phase and four experimental phases enacting the parenting behaviors, counter-balanced for order. Study measures included youth and parent distress and performance evaluation, youth heart rate, task performance, and willingness to continue with task. Main findings indicate that parents naturally exhibit encouragement significantly less than problem-solving and escape behaviors, while youth preferred encouragement more than other investigated behaviors. Surprisingly, youth reports of distress negatively correlated with youth heart rate, which raised questions about their ability to report. Finally, parent reports of youth distress were highly influenced by parental experience of distress and were in fact opposite from actual reports of youth distress. Similarly, youth reports of parent distress were influenced by their experiential distress and negatively connected to parent-reported distress. In conclusion, further research on the role of parenting behaviors is needed, but these results provide important indications for youth and family treatment, as well as future research. |
