Daily diary study reveals that maladaptive emotion regulation impairs empathic accuracy in parent–adolescent dyads, highlighting target emotion management in mutual understanding.
Key Points
To investigate whether daily emotion regulation strategies employed by targets and perceivers relate to empathic accuracy within parent–adolescent relationships.
Analyzed 28-day daily diary reports from 112 parent–adolescent dyads assessing daily emotions, regulation strategies, and inferred partner emotions.
Calculated empathic accuracy as the correlation between inferred and actual partner-reported daily emotions.
Applied Actor–Partner Interdependence Models to examine between-person and within-person associations.
Greater target use of maladaptive regulation strategies for negative and positive emotions was associated with lower perceiver empathic accuracy at both between-person and within-person levels.
Targets' greater use of adaptive strategies for positive emotions was linked to higher empathic accuracy for both perceivers and targets at the within-person level only.