Leiden University Student Repository

Mullee, Amanda (2026)

The Relationship Between Parental Experiential Avoidance and Offspring Social Anxiety in Young Adulthood: Moderation by Parent Gender and Offspring Gender

Bachelor thesis | Psychologie (BSc)

Experiential Avoidance (EA), the unwillingness to experience unpleasant inner states, is a cognitive-affective process strongly linked to social anxiety. EA is theorized to play a role in the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety. Evolutionary models also propose that fathers play a larger role than mothers in the etiology of social anxiety. Preliminary research has found parental EA to be associated with social anxiety in children and adolescents, and parent gender and/or child gender may affect this relationship. Using multiple linear regression, this cross-sectional study tested the relationship between parental EA and offspring social anxiety in a community sample of young adults aged 18 to 24. We also investigated whether parent gender or offspring gender moderated this association. A total of 142 parent-child dyads filled out online questionnaires. EA and social anxiety were self-reported. Contrary to our hypotheses, parental EA did not predict offspring social...Show moreExperiential Avoidance (EA), the unwillingness to experience unpleasant inner states, is a cognitive-affective process strongly linked to social anxiety. EA is theorized to play a role in the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety. Evolutionary models also propose that fathers play a larger role than mothers in the etiology of social anxiety. Preliminary research has found parental EA to be associated with social anxiety in children and adolescents, and parent gender and/or child gender may affect this relationship. Using multiple linear regression, this cross-sectional study tested the relationship between parental EA and offspring social anxiety in a community sample of young adults aged 18 to 24. We also investigated whether parent gender or offspring gender moderated this association. A total of 142 parent-child dyads filled out online questionnaires. EA and social anxiety were self-reported. Contrary to our hypotheses, parental EA did not predict offspring social anxiety, and neither parent gender nor offspring gender emerged as moderators. Our failure to find a significant association may stem from using a trait measure of EA that is not specific to the parenting context. This would suggest a unique relevance for parents’ avoidance of their offspring’s emotions, as opposed to parents’ avoidance of their own emotions. We recommend that future studies use both child-referent and parent-referent measures of EA. Our findings do not support the theory that EA plays a role in the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety, or the theory that fathers play a greater role in the etiology of social anxiety.Show less

Author

Mullee, Amanda

Faculty

Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences

Supervisors

Aktar, Evin

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en