Parental distress in high-conflict divorces and its relationship with emotional socialization

Abstract

High-conflict divorces have been related to consequences on both the physical and mental health of former spouses and this, in turn, can affect their parenting skills, including emotion socialization. However, the impact of divorce and conflict may depend on a number of other mediating and moderating factors, such as co-parenting, gender, or resilience. Despite this, the relationship between all these interdependent factors in high-conflict divorces has hardly been studied. In fact, most studies have focused on the impact on children rather than the consequences for parents themselves. However, studying interparental factors is important, as is precisely those factors that also play a role in the adjustment of children after divorce. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to understand how high-conflict divorces are related to parents emotion socialization. To this end, some inter- and intra-personal factors, such as physical and psychological symptomatology, co-parenting, resilience, and gender, were considered. These factors have been studied in the context of divorce, but never in high-conflict divorces, nor in relation to emotion socialization. Four studies make up the research: A meta-analysis on physical health and divorce, a cross-sectional study on the relationship between divorce and somatization, a Latent Profile Analysis on the relationship between parental symptomatology and co-parenting and emotion socialization, and the Spanish validation of the Family Hardiness Index (FHI). Overall, it can be concluded that it is essential to focus on parental health when studying emotion socialization, especially in high-conflict divorces. However, divorce is a complex and multifactorial phenomenon, so it is important to consider other possible factors that may make this impact different. Studying the specific characteristics of divorced people and families, may enable health professionals to develop prevention and intervention programmes tailored to their specific needs.