Interparental relationship dissatisfaction plays an important role in adolescent mental health. Past research examining mechanisms underlying this association has highlighted the role of the parent-child relationship as a mediating mechanism through which associations may be understood; however, there has been relatively limited examination of wider social relationship processes that may explain how interparental relationship dissatisfaction leads to adolescent mental health outcomes. Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland Study (Cohort '98), this study examined parent-child conflict and insecure peer attachment as mediators of the association between interparental relationship dissatisfaction and multiple adolescent mental health outcomes (emotional, conduct, and peer problems, and prosocial behaviors). Results showed that: (1) interparental relationship dissatisfaction at age 9 was indirectly linked to adolescent mental health at age 13 through parent-child conflict at age 9 and insecure peer attachment at age 13 (total indirect effect = 0.12, 95% CI [0.093, 0.141], p < .001); (2) parent-child conflict and insecure peer attachment sequentially mediated this association (serial indirect effect = 0.01, 95% CI [0.007, 0.015], p < .001); and (3) both total and serial indirect effects remained significant when each mental health dimension was modelled individually. These findings suggest that coordinated family- and school-based interventions aimed at reducing family conflict and fostering supportive peer relationships are potentially helpful in improving adolescent mental health.
Children's question-asking is an important means of information seeking and learning, yet little is known about how it changes during and following sustained individualized dialogic practice. In a two-group controlled trial, 190 first-grade children (ages 6–7) were allocated to one-to-one individualized dialogic practice delivered by an AI conversational agent or to instructor-led whole-class discussion, matched in content, materials, and session duration, across seven weekly sessions. At pretest and posttest, children completed assessments without instructional or AI-generated support. Children in the individualized-practice condition demonstrated substantially higher pretest-adjusted posttest question frequency (unadjusted posttest d = 1.23). Among children who produced at least one valid question at both assessments, those in the individualized-practice condition also demonstrated higher pretest-adjusted mean cognitive complexity at posttest (unadjusted posttest d = 0.53). An exploratory, post hoc analysis including all 190 children further indicated that children in the individualized-practice condition produced explanation-or-higher questions at a higher adjusted rate (adjusted count ratio = 3.1, 95% CI [2.5, 4.0]). Within the individualized-practice condition, question frequency showed marked phase-specific growth across practice sessions, whereas mean per-question quality increased only gradually, providing no support for a quantity-before-quality ordering. Because interaction format, per-child practice opportunities, feedback immediacy, facilitator identity, and delivery medium covaried in this design, the findings support sustained individualized dialogic practice as implemented here, rather than AI per se.
Drawing from situated expectancy-value theory and the transactional model of development, the present study examined bidirectional associations between undergraduate STEM students' career motivation and interactions with three key socializers across a semester of college. We collected 13 weekly surveys (N = 5224 responses) with 658 undergraduate students (average age = 19.02 years; 54.6% male, 44.8% female, 0.5% non-binary; 74.6% White, 19.9% Asian or Asian American, 7.8% Black or African American, 3.5% Latine, 2.9% Middle Eastern, 0.9% American Indian or Alaskan Native, 0.3% Pacific Islander) from the United States, asking them to report each week the quality of interactions with instructors, peers, and family members related to their career plans, and their career-related expectancies, values, and costs. Results from psychometric network analyses that allowed for within-person, temporal associations between variables indicated that interactions with peers and family members increased students' career expectancies, with positive family interactions also increasing career intrinsic and importance value, and positive instructor interactions (unexpectedly) decreasing students' career expectancies. Notably, we also found strong effects in the opposite direction: Students who initially had higher career-related expectancies and values or higher career-related costs reported later interactions with socializers about their career plans that served to confirm and/or enhance their positive or negative motivation. Overall, this study suggests that career plan development occurs through complex, dynamic, and bidirectional associations between the individual and their social environments across time, supporting central tenets of the transactional model of development and situated expectancy-value theory.
