This study focuses on family predictors of conflict behavior in adolescent dating relationships, drawing on family systems and socialization perspectives. Mother-adolescent, father-adolescent, and triadic relationships each was examined as predictors of adolescent dating outcomes that hold importance for developmental and prevention science (positive conflict resolution, verbal abuse, and physi...

The genetic conflict between parents and their offspring is a cornerstone of kin selection theory and the gene-centred view of evolution, but whether it actually occurs in natural systems remains an open question. Conflict operates only if parenting is driven by genetic trade-offs between offspring performance and the parent's ability to raise additional offspring, and its expression critically...

Evolutionary conflicts of interest arise whenever genetically different individuals interact and their routes to fitness maximization differ. Sexual selection favors traits that increase an individual's competitiveness to acquire mates and fertilizations. Sexual conflict occurs if an individual of sex A's relative fitness would increase if it had a "tool" that could alter what an individual of ...

This study investigated how discrepancies between adolescents' and parents' endorsement of parental control contribute to adolescent depressive symptoms. Family conflict was hypothesized to mediate the link between parent-adolescent discrepancies and depressive symptoms. The sample consisted of 166 pairs of Chinese American adolescents and their parents. The results indicated that, as predicted...

Childhood parental divorce has been linked with negative physical and psychological health in adulthood, potentially due to alterations in adrenocortical activity resulting from chronic stress. The current study evaluated cortisol in 94 young adults (mean age 19.9) from families characterized by parental divorce (n=43) or intact parental marriages (n=51). Salivary cortisol was assessed prior to...

According to classical parental care theory males are expected to provide less parental care when offspring in a brood are less likely to be their own, but empirical evidence in support of this relationship is equivocal. Recent work predicts that social interactions between the sexes can modify co-evolution between traits involved in mating and parental care as a result of costs associated with...

Emotional, cognitive, and family systems processes have been identified as mediators of the association between interparental conflict and children's adjustment. However, little is known about how they function in relation to one another because they have not all been assessed in the same study. This investigation examined the relations among children's exposure to parental conflict, their appr...

This research examines longitudinally associations between family risk factors and child and parent depression in 302 urban, low-income, African American adolescents (ages 9-15) and their parents across 2 waves of data collection. Diagnostic data revealed that 7.3% of parents and 3.0% of children at Time 1 and 5.4% of parents and 2.8% of children at Time 2 were clinically depressed. Regression ...

Adolescents' evaluations of family functioning may have a significant impact on their subjective well-being and adjustment. The aim of the study was to investigate the degree to which genetic and environmental influences affect variation in evaluations of general family functioning, family conflict, and quality of life and the overlap between them. We assessed whether genetic and environmental ...