Kaia Schomburg

Parents not only impact their child’s genetic make-up, but they often mediate important environmental experiences. The present study aims to isolate and compare key variables that inform and constitute parent and child personality. Adolescent (N = 129) and adult participants from Minneapolis and Pittsburgh completed the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire, and a Pearson correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the relationship between facets of parent and child personality. Adult participants (parents) also completed the Emotional Socialization Measure that captures specific parental strategies used to respond to their child’s emotions (i.e. sadness, anger, and fear). It was hypothesized that parent aggression and alienation would be associated with increased child aggression, harm avoidance, and negative emotionality. Furthermore, I anticipated that specific parental emotional socialization strategies (i.e. magnification, overriding, and neglect) would be positively associated with parent alienation and aggression. Parent alienation was found to be positively associated with child negative emotionality and aggression, but negatively associated with child harm avoidance. Parent aggression was also positively linked to adolescent aggression scores and negatively associated with child harm avoidance. However, parent aggression was not significantly associated with child negative emotionality.