Associations between parental emotion socialization and Cameroonian adolescents' openness: Mother– and father–adolescent relationship quality as moderators

Parental emotion socialization is critical for positive individual development, yet little is known about whether mothers' and fathers' socialization of positive emotions play similar or different roles in majority world contexts. Using a sample of 250 Cameroonian adolescents ( M age = 16.18 years; 51.6% female), this study examined associations between two parental socialization strategies of positive emotions (i.e., savoring and dampening) and adolescents' openness (i.e., an individual's tendency characterized by curiosity, imagination, receptivity to novelty, and cognitive flexibility), as well as the moderating role of parent–adolescent relationship quality, using two sets of structural equation models for mothers and fathers, respectively. Results revealed that both mothers' and fathers' savoring (but not dampening) were positively associated with adolescents' openness. Regarding moderation, associations between mothers' emotion socialization strategies and adolescents' openness did not significantly differ by mother–adolescent relationship quality, whereas fathers' emotion socialization effects were conditional on father–adolescent relationship quality. Specifically, fathers' savoring was positively associated with adolescents' openness and fathers' dampening was negatively associated with openness only when the quality of father–adolescent relationship was high. Taken together, these findings highlighted savoring as an effective parental emotion socialization strategy for cultivating adolescent openness and underscored the importance of father–adolescent relationship quality in shaping the effectiveness of paternal emotion socialization in the Cameroonian context.