7 Summary and general discussion 215 3.2 Explaining heterogeneity: The role of adolescents’ environmental sensitivity and neuroticism To understand why families differ in their dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning, I tried to explain the heterogeneity with several theoretically meaningful moderators. Based on my findings across studies, two adolescent characteristics seem especially promising: environmental sensitivity and neuroticism. Environmental sensitivity, or more specifically sensory processing sensitivity, is a relatively stable trait capturing the tendency of perceiving and responding to environmental stimuli, such as the behavior of others (Greven et al., 2019; Pluess, 2015). Neuroticism (or also called emotional instability) is the tendency to experience and inability to adaptively cope with negative emotions (Caspi et al., 2005), which is related to but distinct from environmental sensitivity (Greven et al., 2019). Overall, adolescents’ trait level of environmental sensitivity (Chapters 4-6) and neuroticism (Chapters 5 & 6) explained subtle differences in the strength (but not simply in the presence) of how parenting impacted the adolescent’s subsequent functioning. Specifically, higher trait levels of environmental sensitivity were associated with stronger day-to-day effects of parenting upon adolescents’ positive affect, whereas higher trait levels of neuroticism were associated with stronger parenting effects upon adolescents’ negative affect. In contrast to earlier empirical work on between-family associations (e.g., Branje et al., 2010), other adolescent characteristics (i.e., sex, age, educational level; mean levels of daily parenting and affective functioning, internalizing problems, and legitimacy beliefs of parental authority; Chapters 5 & 6) were not related to the presence or strength of daily within-family associations between parenting and adolescents’ affective functioning. Apparently, how between-family differences are explained by moderators does not necessarily translate to how within-family processes are moderated (for example, see Rekker et al., 2017). As the findings of Chapter 6 suggest that the dynamic parenting processes in everyday life may be family specific and not group differential, perhaps, the way in which moderators alter the within-family processes is also idiosyncratic. Potentially, adolescent environmental sensitivity and neuroticism might interact with many other adolescent, parent, and contextual characteristics and combine into an one-of-kind recipe that defines a family’s unique dynamics (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). 3.3 Concluding remarks of aim 3 To conclude, the family-specific findings of this dissertation, which are based on different samples and timescales (i.e., daily and bi-weekly), align with long-held theoretical beliefs
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