4 For better, for worse, or both? 117 family studies, parental psychological control (Mabbe et al., 2019; Nelemans et al., 2020; Van Lissa et al., 2019) and parental support (for review see Boele et al., 2020, 2022) have not consistently predicted adolescent psychological functioning, perhaps because some adolescents are more affected than others as environmental sensitivity theories suggest. Moreover, recently it has been gained attention that one’s environmental sensitivity might not generalize to different outcomes (Belsky et al., 2022). Additionally, in (developmental) psychology it has been stressed that that the same influence may lead to different outcomes depending on the child (i.e., the principle of multi-finality; Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996) and that absence of dysfunction is not by itself an indicator of good functioning (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Keyes, 2014; Ryff et al., 2006). Therefore, we examined three different indicators of adolescents’ psychological functioning, including one positive (i.e., self-esteem) and two negative indicators (i.e., depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms). In sum, the responsivity-to-parenting patterns were based on two parenting dimensions and three adolescent outcomes. As a last step, to test whether adolescents with different responsivity patterns can also be detected using a theory-based sensitivity marker (Greven et al., 2019; Pluess, 2015; Pluess et al., 2018), we compared empirically derived subgroups on trait levels of environmental sensitivity. We used a self-report measure of the Highly Sensitive Child Scale to examine these individual differences in environmental sensitivity (HSC; Pluess et al., 2018; Weyn et al., 2021). Hypotheses First, we expected that, on average, increases in parental psychological control are followed by decreases in adolescents’ self-esteem (H1a) and by increases in adolescents’ depressive and anxiety symptoms (H1b), whereas increases in parental support are followed by increases in adolescents’ self-esteem (H1c) and decreases in adolescents’ depressive and anxiety symptoms (H1d). Second, based on the aforementioned environmental sensitivity models (for overview, see Greven et al., 2019 and Figure 1) as well as the first studies on parenting effect heterogeneity (Bülow, Van Roekel, et al., 2022; L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga et al., 2021), we expected differential parenting effects across families; Hence, we hypothesized between-family variance around these average withinfamily parenting effects (H2). Third, our main hypothesis was the “coexisting responsivity patterns hypothesis”, in which we expected that three environmental sensitivity theoretical models coexist in the sample
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