Spillover in the Home: The Effects of Family Conflict on Parents' Behavior

Conflict with a spouse or child may generate spillover , defined as short‐term affective changes in parents that affect their behavior with other family members. In a diverse sample of 86 parents, this 56‐day diary study examined daily bidirectional spillover between conflict in the marital or parent–child dyad and parents' irritable, frictional behavior with their child or spouse, respectively. Tests of daily associations between conflict and parent behavior revealed robust spillover effects according to parent as well as spouse and child reports. Parents' daily negative mood and child externalizing behavior contributed to several but not all of these associations. Daily spillover findings were largely unaffected by parents' neuroticism, suggesting that parents' day‐to‐day fluctuations in negative mood, not average levels of negative affectivity, promoted spillover. Significant direct effects of conflict on parent behavior even when controlling for negative mood, however, implicate additional cognitive or social processes as contributors to conflict spillover in families.