4 For better, for worse, or both? 131 Trait Environmental Sensitivity and Responsivity Patterns (H4) Because the (theorized and expected) unsusceptible adolescents were not found in our sample, and the other subgroups were too small to allow comparisons (ns ≤ 17; see Table 4), we combined subgroups of adolescents. When comparing differentially susceptible adolescents (M = 4.41; n = 66) to all other adolescents (M = 4.45; n = 186), no differences in trait levels of environmental sensitivity were found, as measured with the HSC4, W = 5743.5, p = .439. We ran exploratory models to further investigate the link of trait environmental sensitivity to within-family parenting effects. Exploratory Analyses (Not Preregistered) Potentially, trait environmental sensitivity could be related to how strongly adolescents are affected by perceived changes parenting (i.e., absolute effect sizes), regardless of their pattern of effects. However, we found no compelling evidence for this; of the five absolute effect sizes, only one parenting-outcome effect size significantly correlated with trait levels of environmental sensitivity (see Table D1 in Appendix D). Specifically, adolescents who scored higher on trait environmental sensitivity reported stronger responses to changes in parental support in terms of their depressive symptoms, indicated by a positive correlation between the HSC and the individual effect sizes of parental support on depressive symptoms (r = .20, p = .015). Another plausible explanation might be that trait environmental sensitivity reflects individual differences in the ability to perceive subtle changes in parenting rather than responsivity (Pluess, 2015). As depicted in Figure 5, exploratory analyses indeed showed that unperceptive adolescents who did not perceive bi-weekly changes in parenting (n = 70, M = 4.11) scored lower on trait environmental sensitivity than adolescents who did perceive changes (n = 182, M = 4.57), t = -3.19, p = .002, d = -.49. In support of this idea, adolescents who scored higher on trait environmental sensitivity perceived greater over-time changes in parenting, as indicated by significant correlations between the within-family standard deviation of parental psychological control or support and trait environmental sensitivity (rs = .21 and .23, p ≤ .001). Together, these exploratory findings indicate that adolescents scoring higher on trait environmental sensitivity tended to perceive (greater) over-time changes in parenting but were not more responsive to them. 4 We conducted a Mann-Whitney U test instead of a t-test, because of the non-normal distribution of the HSC (W = 0.98, p = .003).
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