4 For better, for worse, or both? 139 of environmental sensitivity, which relates to prior work suggesting that more sensitive children in families with low-quality parenting are at higher risk for internalizing problems (Lionetti et al., 2021, 2022). In light of interventions targeting parenting, it is crucial to further identify which adolescents are more responsive to perceived changes in adverse parenting, supportive parenting, or to both. Because we unexpectantly observed adolescents who perceived parenting as stable during the full study year, we looked at this subgroup in more detail. Findings revealed that this subgroup showed lower trait levels of environmental sensitivity compared to adolescents who perceived changes in parenting and seemed affected by it – in all possible ways. Overall, our findings indicate that individual differences in trait levels of environmental sensitivity reflect differences in the ability to perceive subtle environmental changes and not per se differences in responsivity to environmental changes (Aron et al., 2012; Pluess, 2015). Unpredicted Responsivity Pattern: When Supportive Parenting is Unsupportive One intriguing and unexpected finding was that 37% of the sample responded contrary to parenting theories (Soenens et al., 2017) and therefore did not match with one of the hypothesized responsivity patterns. Most of these adolescents reported lower psychological functioning after parental support increased 2 weeks earlier. With the appearance of intensive longitudinal work on parenting, such unexpected effects of parental support have been reported in a recent experience sampling study (Bülow, Van Roekel, et al., 2022) but not consistently in daily diary studies (Bülow, Neubauer, et al., 2022; L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga et al., 2021). One explanation for these unexpected findings is that parental support can backfire in some families, for instance based on characteristics of the parent, the adolescent, or the parent-adolescent relationship (L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga, et al., 2021; Rote et al., 2020). For some, supportive parenting might be experienced as overinvolvement, hindering their psychological functioning by age-inappropriate restriction of their autonomy, for instance (Padilla-Walker & Nelson, 2012; Rote et al., 2020; Schiffrin et al., 2014). Likewise, less support and warmth from parents may be experienced as granting more independence and less intrusion (Dietvorst et al., 2018; Van Petegem et al., 2015), which could actually promote better functioning. Earlier work suggests that mainly adolescents who score higher on depressive symptoms might be more vulnerable for the negative effects of parental
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