4/1/25 Abigail Snow: Parent Emotion Socialization in Adolescents with Tourette Syndrome: Associations with Psychological Symptoms
Clinical Brown Bag 
Abigail Snow
Graduate Student
Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Location: Zoom
Parent Emotion Socialization in Adolescents with Tourette Syndrome: Associations with Psychological Symptoms
Adolescents with Tourette syndrome (TS) are at heightened risk for experiencing psychosocial difficulties. While tics are the defining symptom of TS, there is evidence for widespread deficits in emotion regulation, as nearly 90% of individuals with TS meet diagnostic criteria for at least one psychological comorbidity. Current treatments focus on tic management, yet psychological symptoms have consistently been shown to be a stronger predictor of quality of life than tic severity. As such, there is an urgent clinical need to identify risk factors for psychopathology in adolescents with TS. Parent emotion socialization (ES) is a method through which parents educate their children about emotions and model for them emotion regulation strategies, and it has been implicated in the development of children’s emotion regulation skills. Parents maintain an important role in shaping youth’s utilization of regulatory strategies and influencing their subsequent psychosocial trajectories during adolescence; however, parent ES behaviors in TS adolescents have not yet been examined. The present study utilized behavioral observations of parent-adolescent dyads engaging in a conflict discussion to examine ES behaviors in parents of adolescents with TS and investigate the relationship of these behaviors with adolescent psychological symptoms. Results reveal that parents of adolescents with TS engage in a range of ES behaviors, and these behaviors are differentially associated with adolescent psychological symptoms. Findings implicate a novel target for intervention in families affected by TS and highlight the importance of parental support in this population.
https://vanderbilt.zoom.us/j/96882292273?pwd=G3zeVaPsYWGy1e6p0IPIYap2c1SaT0.1
Meeting ID: 968 8229 2273
Passcode: 702697