The Biasing Effect of Parental Conflict History on College Students' Reactions to Couple and Peer Conflict
Date
2000
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
Language
eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Past research has highlighted adolescents' exposure to parental conflict as a predictor of maladjustment. The current study explores college students' reactions to peer and couple conflict video vignettes as a function of their own history of exposure to parental conflict. Based on the Cognitive-Contextual Theory (Grych & Fincham, 1990, 1992) and the Emotional Security Hypothesis (Davies & Cummings, 1994), past history of parental conflict acts as a bias in rating current conflict scenes. The prediction that high conflict history would sensitize college students to the conflict emotions, causing them to rate the actors' emotions more negatively than college students with low conflict histories was not confirmed overall, but there was some support for the alternative habituation theory where high conflict history habituated students to the conflict emotions making them rate the actors less intensely.