Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Psychological and Brain Sciences

Degree Program

Clinical Psychology, PhD

Committee Chair

Bufferd, Sara

Committee Member

Al-Dajani, Nadia

Committee Member

Danovitch, Judith

Committee Member

Yaroslavsky, Ilya

Author's Keywords

anxiety; irritability; accommodation; parenting; preschool; daily diary

Abstract

Anxiety and irritability are common developmentally normative emotions in early childhood, yet are also related to risk for psychopathology in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Parenting behaviors, including parent accommodation, may influence this risk. Parent accommodation is the parent modification of child/family routines and/or avoidance of activities to reduce child distress and has been documented widely in the anxiety literature. Although some research has examined parent accommodation of anxiety in preschool-aged children, most research has investigated accommodation of anxiety in clinical samples of school-aged children. Further, despite high rates of co-occurrence between child anxiety and irritability, research on parent accommodation of youth irritability is relatively minimal. Finally, there is also a gap in the literature of studies measuring daily parent accommodation. The present study sought to investigate global and daily associations between child anxiety, child irritability, parent accommodation of child anxiety, and parent accommodation of child irritability in a community sample of preschool-aged children at baseline and over a 16-day diary period. Specifically, this study hypothesized that baseline and daily child anxiety would be significantly positively associated with baseline and daily parent accommodation of anxiety and that baseline and daily child irritability would be significantly positively associated with baseline and daily parent accommodation of irritability. It was also hypothesized that baseline and daily child irritability would moderate the relationship between baseline and daily child anxiety and baseline and daily parent accommodation of anxiety. Several exploratory research questions were also proposed to evaluate causal relationships between child anxiety/irritability and parent accommodations. Overall, many of the findings supported the study hypotheses, including positive associations identified between global and daily child anxiety, irritability, parent accommodation as well as an interaction between global child anxiety and irritability in association with parent accommodation. The results add to a growing literature on parent accommodation of anxiety and irritability in community samples of preschool-aged children and provide several avenues for future research. These findings suggest that interventions to reduce parent accommodation of anxiety could be expanded to address parent accommodation of irritability and include parents of preschool-aged children.

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