The Relationship Between Parental Control And Parent-Child Conflict Among Junior High School Students: The Mediating Role Of Empathy

There are many reasons that influent parent-child conflict,and one of the important factors is parental control.As a negative parenting pattern,parental control will increase the misunderstanding between parents and children,resulting in conflict.One of the ways to eliminate misunderstanding and conflict is empathy.Therefore,this study designed two studies to examine the role of empathy between parental control and parent-child conflict.In the first study,748 junior high school students from two middle schools in a certain place were tested with Parental Control Questionnaire,Chinese Youth Version of the Cognition and Affective Empathy Questionnaire,and Parent-Child Conflict Questionnaire.The results revealed that:(1)Parental control was positively correlated with Parent-child conflict;there was a significant negative correlation between empathy and parental control and parent-child conflict.(2)Empathy plays a part of the mediating role between parental control and parent-child conflict.In the second study,in order to verify the research-relationship path,and to investigate whether empathic priming could reduce the participants’ hostile attentional bias,32 students in the high parental control subgroup and 30 students in the low parental control subgroup were selected,and the subject’s hostile attention bias was used as a measure of parent-child conflict.The task were asked to watch positive and negative Chinese neutral words related to the parent-child relationship by manipulating empathy,and emotional videos were used as empathy initiational materials.Eye-tracking technology was used to collect eye movement indicators in the process.The results revealed that:(1)Hostile attention bias is present in the subgroup with the high-level of parental control and absent in the low-level of parental control subgroup;(2)The initiation of empathy could reduce the hostile attentional bias of the subjects.In conclusion,parental control can affect their parent-child conflict through empathy,and individuals with high parental control have a hostile attention bias toward parent-child conflict,and this hostile attention bias disappears when empathy is activated.