A longitudinal study on the intergenerational transmission mechanism of music preference on adolescents' emotion regulation

This study employs a three-wave longitudinal design over two years, focusing on 362 pairs of seventh-grade students and their parents, to systematically explore the longitudinal associative pattern of intergenerational transmission of music preferences and its longitudinal predictive pathways with adolescent emotion regulation strategy use. The findings indicate that parents' music preferences significantly and positively predict adolescents' music preferences in the cross-lagged panel model (β = 0.24, p < 0.001), while the direct effect in the moderated mediation model was β = 0.18 ( p < 0.01), confirming the presence of intergenerational transmission in this sample. Further analysis reveals modest but meaningful longitudinal associative patterns of this transmission process: parent-child music interaction partially mediates in intergenerational transmission (indirect effect = 0.12, 95%CI [0.06, 0.19]), Adolescents' beliefs about music-based emotion regulation partially mediate the relationship between music preferences and emotion regulation strategy use (indirect effect = 0.09, 95% CI [0.04, 0.15]), forming a preliminary sequential predictive pathway consistent with the proposed theoretical model. Additionally, parents' emotion regulation strategies significantly moderate the relationship between parent-child music interaction and adolescents' music preferences (β = 0.16, p < 0.01), indicating that parents with stronger emotion regulation abilities is more strongly associated with adolescents' music preferences via parent-child music interaction in this cultural context. By constructing a moderated mediation model, this study identifies modest but meaningful longitudinal associations rather than a complete or intrinsic mechanism, providing preliminary longitudinal evidence for tentative pathways linking family music environment and adolescent emotional development through parent-child interaction and cognitive beliefs, and offers tentative theoretical and practical implications for fostering adolescent emotional health via family music education in Chinese cultural contexts.