Chapter 4 138 2015). In other words, perceived parenting and psychological functioning seemed to cofluctuate similarly within individual adolescents. However, when disentangling the direction of effects to assess “what comes first” (Hamaker et al., 2015; Keijsers, 2016), adolescents indeed seemed to respond differently to preceding changes in perceived parenting in terms of their psychological functioning. Our findings thus highlight the necessity to also consider lagged effects when aiming to unraveling heterogeneity in parenting effects. In addition to adolescent-reported parenting, we also explored adolescents’ responses to changes in parent-reported parenting. In line with prior work (Hou et al., 2019; L. H. C. Janssen, Verkuil, et al., 2021), we found differences in adolescents’ and parents’ reports of parenting. For instance, some adolescents had perceived no changes in parenting while their parent did report changes. Moreover, adolescents’ reports of parenting were more often predictive of their psychological functioning than parent-reported parenting (see also Bülow, Neubauer, et al., 2022), which is in accordance with developmental theories emphasizing that subjective experiences are the driving forces of well-being (Rohner, 2016; Sameroff, 2010; Soenens et al., 2015). Hence, although we did find similar co-existing responsivity patterns, thereby again confirming our main hypothesis, the classification of adolescents’ responsivity patterns differed between informants. As environmental sensitivity theories posit that individual differences in sensitivity (i.e., how stimuli are perceived and processed) are accountable for differences in responsivity patterns (Greven et al., 2019; Pluess, 2015), our main findings based on self-reports may be more meaningful in light of environmental sensitivity theories. Some Are More Sensitive in Perceiving Changes in Parenting One of the key elements of the environmental sensitivity models is that effect heterogeneity can be explained by individual differences in trait environmental sensitivity. We examined environmental sensitivity as sensory processing sensitivity, which is characterized by greater awareness of subtle environmental cues, behavioral inhibition, deeper cognitive processing, higher emotional and physiological responsivity, and ease of overstimulation (Aron et al., 2012; Pluess, 2015). Due to limited subgroup sizes and no observed unsusceptible adolescents in our main findings, we were unable to test whether differentially susceptible adolescents demonstrated the highest trait levels of environmental sensitivity. Instead, we checked how the five parenting effects were related to trait environmental sensitivity. The results showed that only the effect of parental support on depressive symptoms was stronger for adolescents who reported higher trait levels
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