(PS9-D92) Examining Worry Severity and Its Relationship to Parenting Behaviors Among a Sample of Adolescents

Worry involves anticipatory, repetitive, primarily verbal thought activity related to potential threat. At its most severe, worry is intrusive, perseverative, and uncontrollable. Severe worry is also transdiagnostic, occurring throughout anxiety and depressive disorders. Worries begin in childhood and become more elaborated during adolescence, while rates of generalized anxiety disorder, a condition characterized by chronic worry, increase markedly. Previous research has provided inconsistent evidence that specific parenting behaviors may be associated with the development of anxiety symptoms among youth. In this study, we employed a sample of adolescents enriched for the presence of severe worry. Each adolescent participated in a parent-adolescent interaction, during which the dyads were given an open-ended prompt (“For the next five minutes we would like you to talk about [participant’s] future”), and left alone while being video recorded. These videos were then coded by an independent, trained coder for the presence of three specific parenting behaviors that have previously been linked to youth anxiety: denial of autonomy, criticism, and modeling of anxiety/worry. We then examined relationships between these parenting behaviors and teen-reported worry and anxiety severity, as well as parent self-reported worry and anxiety severity. Adolescent self-report worry severity was marginally associated with higher parental anxiety/worry behaviors, r (76) = .198, p = .082. Parents with higher levels of anxiety demonstrated more frequent modeling of anxiety/worry during the interaction with their adolescent, r (79) = .246, p = .027. Overall, we found little support for the hypothesis that adolescent worry or anxiety severity is linked to these three parenting behaviors.