Ricerc@Sapienza

Although previous research has corroborated the independent contributions of parent personality and adolescent temperament in predicting adolescents’ externalizing behavior problems (EXT), few studies have examined their joint contribution to predict EXT in adolescence. In the present longitudinal study, first we examined the developmental trajectory of EXT from ages 12 to 14, and, next, we investigated the joint effects of mothers’ irritability and adolescents’ inhibitory control (IC) in predicting the developmental trajectory of EXT.

According to Belsky’s process model of parenting, parents’ personality represents the most important factor influencing parenting and child development. While an extensive literature has empirically corroborated the role of irritability traits in predicting aggressive behaviors in laboratory-based studies, only a few studies have examined the role of irritability in predicting aggressive behaviors within family contexts. The present study addressed this gap by examining the longitudinal association between maternal irritability and harsh parenting.

The present study examines parents' self-efficacy about anger regulation and irritability as predictors of harsh parenting and adolescent children's irritability (i.e., mediators), which in turn were examined as predictors of adolescents' externalizing and internalizing problems. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States) were interviewed when children were about 13 years old and again 1 and 2 years later.

The present study examined the extent to which individual differences in personality that have been previously associated with aggression in non-clinical subjects (Caprara et al., 2013, 2014) account for aggression among adolescents referred to psychiatric services with diagnosis within the externalizing spectrum (i.e., conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).