Gregory Fosco

• Ph.D., Clinical Psychology
• Professor (Full) at Pennsylvania State University

This study examined the longitudinal implications of adolescents’ exposure to interparental conflict for their developmental success. In the proposed developmental cascade model, adolescents’ perceptions of parental conflict as threatening is a risk factor for diminished self-efficacy, which would account for diminished adjustment. This study prese...

Interparental conflict (IPC) is a well‐established risk factor across child and adolescent development. This study disentangled situational (within‐family) and global (between‐family) appraisal processes to better map hypothesized processes to adolescents’ experiences in the family. This 21‐day daily dairy study sampled 151 caregivers and their ado...

Background Family‐based assessments of risk factors for adolescent emotional, behavioral, and substance use problems can be used to identify adolescents who are at risk and intervene before problems cause clinically significant impairment. Expanding traditional methods for assessing risk, this study evaluates whether lability, referring to the degr...

This study revisits the premature autonomy model by examining parents’ use of positive behavior support (PBS) practices on a daily timescale to better understand underlying processes in developmental changes in family disengagement and the implications for adolescent problem behavior and substance use. This study included 151 9th and 10th grade ado...

Adolescent impulsivity is a robust risk factor for adolescent problem behaviors. Historically, impulsivity has been conceptualized as a trait characteristic; however, recent work conducted with adult samples indicates impulsivity also exhibits state-like qualities, fluctuating within persons from day to day. If this is also true for adolescents, it...

Parent’s use of positive behavior support—including praise, encouragement, and consistency—is beneficial for adolescent development, yet there is limited research exploring how within-person differences in individual and family factors contribute to why parents use it more or less on a day-to-day basis. This study aimed to examine whether daily par...

Objective This study aimed to identify whether interparental conflict (IPC) is associated with patterns of convergence and divergence in parent–adolescent perceptions of parental warmth. Background Adolescents and parents often have divergent perceptions of parenting (informant discrepancies). Parents engaged in IPC may be particularly prone to la...

Objective: The purpose of the study was to test whether associations between affect variability and mental health (i.e., anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, flourishing) differ by mean levels of affect during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: College students (N = 1883; Mage=19.81, SD = 1.33) completed a survey and 21 daily reports of affect (M =...

Conflict and a lack of cohesive daily family relationships can negatively affect adolescent adjustment, although adolescents differ in how they respond (i.e., their emotional reactivity) to these daily experiences. The present study assessed whether adolescents' well‐being (i.e., life satisfaction, purpose) was associated with dampened emotional re...

Universal and selective preventive interventions targeting youth behavioral problems have shown crossover effects on suicide risk, the second leading cause of death among youth. However, the mechanisms that explain this long-term unanticipated benefit are understudied and unclear. The current study examines the crossover effects of PROSPER, a commu...

Inspired by the tremendous impact of Robert McMahon’s career, this study evaluated an intergenerational cascade model in which young adult conduct problems may serve as a risk pathway linking generation 1 (G1) parenting and family climate in adolescence with generation 2 parenting quality and family climate with their children (G2-G3). Our sample i...

This study explored young children's mental health trajectories during the pandemic (May 2020 to April 2021) as well as associations with family functioning (i.e., cohesion, conflict, chaos, and routines) using data reported by 204 parents (children Mage 5.49; 45% girls, 90% White). Children's internalizing problems decreased early on with the onse...

Spillover from interparental conflict (IPC) to the parent–child relationship is a risk factor for adolescent emotional, social, and behavioral maladjustment. Parental depression increases the risk for more frequent and intense IPC over periods of months to years, but relatively little is known about whether parental depressive symptoms increase the...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to elucidate comorbidity between body dissatisfaction and nicotine vaping. Participants: Participants were 121 college students (M age = 20.51 years; 75.0% female; 75.2% White) who participated in a 14-day daily diary study. Methods: Logistic regression was used to test links between baseline trait body diss...

Parental warmth during the transition from childhood to adolescence is a key protective factor against a host of adolescent problems, including substance use, maladjustment, and diminished well-being. Moreover, adolescents and parents often disagree in their perceptions of parenting quality, and these discrepancies may confer risk for problem outco...

The loss of John Schulenberg reverberates across the developmental and prevention sciences. In honor of his many contributions, this paper applies his ideas of developmental continuity and discontinuity to understand the process by which PROSPER delivered universal prevention programs (delivered in Grades 6 and 7) affect young adult outcomes. Guide...

Feeling loved by one's caregiver is essential for individual flourishing (i.e., high levels of psychological well‐being in multiple dimensions). Although similar constructs are found to benefit adolescent well‐being, research that directly tests parental love as a feeling from the recipient's perspective is rare. Historically, parental love has bee...

Emotion dysregulation is linked to adolescent psychological problems. However, little is known about how lability in daily closeness of parent–adolescent dyads affects the development of emotion dysregulation. This study examined how closeness lability with parents was associated with emotion dysregulation 12 months later. The sample included 144 a...

Guided by a novel analytic framework, this study investigates the developmental mechanism through which parental warmth is related to young adult depression. Data were from a large sample of participants followed from early adolescence to young adulthood (N = 1,988; 54% female). Using structural equation modeling, we estimated and compared competin...

Objective: Health-protective behavior (HPB) adherence (wearing protective face masks, social distancing, and increased handwashing) plays a critical role in reducing infectious disease transmission; yet factors underlying HPB adherence are not well understood. Most research focuses on individual factors—beliefs about susceptibility, severity, and H...

The current study aimed to evaluate how adolescents' and parents' perceptions of daily parenting—and their discrepancies—relate to daily parent and adolescent affect. Daily parental warmth and affect were assessed using electronic diaries in 150 American adolescent–parent dyads (61.3% females, Mage = 14.6, 83.3% White; 95.3% mothers, Mage = 43.4; 8...

Studies that distinguish parental monitoring (parent-driven behaviors) from parental knowledge often fail to find protective effects of monitoring on adolescent behavior problems. To answer whether parental monitoring is more strongly associated with adolescent behavior problems among adolescents who may need it most, this study applied group-based...

Long-term studies evaluating threat appraisals as an intervening variable linking interparental conflict (IPC) and internalizing problems are lacking, as are longitudinal studies evaluating the role of the broader family context in these models. Guided by the cognitive-contextual framework, this study followed 225 adolescents (53% females) and thei...

Purpose The prevalence of nicotine vaping is increasing among adolescents and emerging evidence suggests weight concerns may promote risk for vaping. The aims of this study were to investigate whether there is an association between attempting to lose weight and nicotine vaping during adolescence, when this association emerges and is strongest, and...

Daily emotion dynamics provide valuable information about individuals’ emotion processes as they go about their lives. Emotion dynamics such as emotion levels (mean), emotion variability (degree of fluctuation), and emotion network density (strength of temporal connections among emotions) are associated with risks for various psychopathology in you...

Guided by the life course perspective, this study investigated the developmental antecedents of contact, closeness/warmth, and negativity in young adults' relationships with their parents. Taking the developmental systems approach, we considered interindividual differences in not only initial levels of parenting quality in early adolescence (Grade...

We examined whether participation in adolescent substance use prevention programming can enhance long-term resilience into adulthood such that individuals were better able to cope with adversities during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, yielding benefits for the individuals, their partners/spouses, and children; 197 adults (28–30 years...

Family conflict is a well-established predictor of well-being in youth. Traditional approaches focus on between-family differences in conflict. Daily fluctuations in conflict within families might also impact wellbeing, but more research is needed to understand how and why. Using 21 days of daily diary data and 6-times a day experience-sampling dat...

Adolescents are tasked with navigating competing priorities, including whether to marry, have children, pursue a job/career, go to college, and contribute to society. The developmental task of building expectations for the future is especially complex for Cambodian adolescents living within a society that strongly prioritizes family obligations yet...

Family systems research has identified two key processes (spillover and compensatory), linking interparental relationship quality to the parent-child relationship. However, previous research has focused on the parent as the sole initiator and had not often considered the role of the child in these processes. The present study adds to the literature...

The quality of romantic relationships formed during early adulthood has critical implications for physical and psychological wellbeing, future romantic relationships, and subsequent parenting of the next generation. The present study evaluates the cross-over effects of the PROSPER-delivered adolescent substance use prevention programming on young a...

Introduction: This study examined the role of family functioning in predicting family adherence to health-protective behaviors (HPBs) aimed at reducing COVID-19 spread. Pre-COVID-19 family functioning, disruptions to family functioning (cohesion, conflict, routines), and family chaos during the COVID-19 pandemic were tested as pathways to HPB adher...

Achieving sustained engagement in family-based preventive intervention programs is a serious challenge faced by program implementers. Despite the evidence supporting the effectiveness and potential population-level impacts for these programs, their actual impact is limited by challenges around retention of participants. In order to inform efforts t...

Objective This study aims to investigate the association between family relationship constellations and adolescent friendship quality in a more holistic way and disentangle gender differences on their associations. Background Family relationships are important for adolescent friendship, but little is known about how mother–adolescent and father–ad...

Relationship structure (patterns of relative closeness among multiple family members) and dynamics (changes in relationship structures overtime) are two main aspects of family system functioning, yet empirical tests of these concepts lag behind theory. Recent growth in advanced methods for complex data structures makes it possible to empirically ca...

Objective This study examined within‐ and between‐person associations among interparental conflict (IPC), threat appraisals, temperament, and anxiety to evaluate how these risk processes unfold at the daily level in adolescence. Background Adolescence is a developmental period of increased risk for anxiety, and exposure to IPC in the home elevates...

Adolescents who are triangulated into interparental conflict are at increased risk for psychological maladjustment. However, little is known about factors that may predict family risk for triangulating adolescents, or protective factors that can off‐set this risk. In this study, we conducted longitudinal tests of family, parent, and adolescent fact...

Objective This study aimed to illuminate developmental changes and gender differences in the link between weight concerns and cigarette use across adolescence. Specifically, we examined whether and how the strength of the association between weight concerns and cigarette use changed across adolescence, and whether patterns of association differed b...

Objective. This study provides a novel evaluation of adolescent sensitization to interparental conflict (IPC), which is thought to be a critical factor in understanding multifinality in risk outcomes. Background. Adolescents’ threat and self-blame appraisals of IPC are mechanisms of risk for subsequent maladjustment. Youth who are exposed to high...

Background This study evaluated two risk pathways that may account for increases in child internalizing and externalizing problems during the COVID‐19 pandemic: one pathway operating through pre‐existing family vulnerability and a second pathway operating through disruption in family functioning occurring in response to the pandemic. We assessed fa...

Adolescent appraisals of interparental conflict (IPC)-perceiving IPC as threatening to their well-being or that of the family, and self-blaming attributions-are well-established processes through which IPC confers risk for developmental disruptions and psychopathology. Recent work documents intraindividual change in IPC and appraisals that occur on...

Parent-youth intimacy protects adolescents from adjustment problems, including weight concerns, low self-esteem, and depressive symptoms. This study aimed to identify when in development parent-youth intimacy emerges as a protective factor, how this protective effect changes in its strength across adolescence, and whether there are differences in i...

Background Evocative gene–environment correlation (rGE) describes a process through which children’s heritable characteristics influence their rearing environments. The current study examined whether heritable influences on parenting and children’s behavioural outcomes operate through child negative emotionality. Method Using data from the Early G...

Triangulation is a process in which a child is drawn into conflict between two parents, and is linked to adolescent psychological maladjustment. Although harmful, families may engage in triangulation due to its promotion of diverging realities in which youth become more attuned to interparental conflict (IPC), yet parents are distracted from tensio...

The manner in which family contexts place constraints on the universality of theoretical predictions has been of long-standing interest to developmental and family scientists. Current conceptualizations about family context, however, are evolving. Innovative thinking is emerging about how family contexts can be characterized, and there is growing a...

Research has historically under-emphasized adolescent contributions to family functioning. In this study, we examined how adolescents’ day-to-day challenges in school — such as having problems with peers or teachers — may filter into family life, across family-level, mother–adolescent, and interparental relations. This study used daily diary data c...

Supportive relationships with parents and friends reduce adolescent risk for depression; however, whether and how the strength of these associations changes across adolescence remains less clear. Age‐varying associations of mother–adolescent and father–adolescent closeness and friend support with depressive symptoms were examined across ages 12.5–1...

Growing attention is being given to understanding factors that promote individuals’ happiness, life satisfaction, engagement, and meaning in life. This study examined the mutual benefits of a close, connected relationship for parents’ and adolescents’ daily subjective well-being (SWB) and eudaimonia (EUD). Using multilevel actor-partner interdepend...

Feeling loved has many benefits, but research is limited on how daily behaviors of one person in a relationship shape why someone else feels more or less loved from day to day. The parent–adolescent relationship is a primary source of love. We expected parent-reported warmth and conflict would explain daily fluctuations in how loved adolescents rep...

Few longitudinal studies examine how changes in parent–child relationships are associated with changes in youth internalizing problems. In this longitudinal study, we investigated how developmental trends (linear change) and year-to-year lability (within-person fluctuations) in parental warmth and hostility across Grades 6 to 8 predict youth intern...

Children with externalizing symptoms typically show dysregulated arousal when facing emotional challenges and are at risk for antisocial outcomes later in life. The model of emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998) points to supportive emotion-related parenting as central to promoting children’s regulatory capability and behav...

Adolescent antisocial behavior (ASB) can have long-term individual and societal consequences. Much of the research on the development of ASB considers risk and protective factors in isolation or as cumulative indices, likely overlooking the co-occurring and interacting nature of these factors. Guided by theories of ASB risk (i.e., coercive family p...

This study examined combinations of warmth and hostility in mother-father-adolescent triadic relationships when adolescents were in 6th grade and associations with adolescent middle school substance initiation. We conducted a latent profile analysis with a sample of 687 two-parent families (52.4% of adolescents were female, mean age = 11.27 at 6th...

Family‐level conflict and cohesion are well‐established predictors of adolescent mental health. However, traditional approaches focusing on between‐family differences in cohesion and conflict may overlook daily intrafamily variability that might provide important new information. We used data from a 21‐day daily diary protocol in a sample of 151 ca...

Antisocial peer behavior and low parental knowledge of adolescents' activities are key interpersonal risk factors for adolescent substance use. However, how the magnitude of associations between these risk factors and substance use may vary across adolescence remains less well understood. The present study examined the age-varying associations of p...

Parent–adolescent conflict has been studied both as a precursor of long‐term macrolevel developmental risks and as an outcome of microlevel, moment‐to‐moment interaction patterns. However, the family‐level processes underlying the maintenance or regulation of conflict in daily life are largely overlooked. A meso‐level understanding of parent–adoles...

Objective Parents' comments about their adolescents' weight have been linked with adolescents' disordered eating, but we know little about the personal and contextual conditions that promote or mitigate the effects of parents' perceptions on adolescents' weight concerns. This study examined whether the prospective association between parents' perce...

The goal of this study was to broaden the developmental understanding of the implications of interparental conflict (IPC) and threat appraisals of conflict for adolescents' relationships with peers. Guided by the cognitive contextual framework and evolutionary perspectives, we evaluated a developmental model in which adolescents who are exposed to...

Research documents that lability in parent-child relationships–fluctuations up and down in parent-child relationships–is normative during adolescence and is associated with increased risk for negative outcomes for youth. Yet little is known about factors that predict lability in parenting. This study evaluated whether children’s behaviors predicted...

In this study, we evaluate whether the use of dynamic characteristics of the family provides new and important information when conceptualizing the family context of adolescents. Using 21 days of daily diary data from adolescents (N=151; 61.59% female; mean age = 14.60 years) in two-caregiver households, we quantified between-family differences in...

Family-based prevention programs increasingly are being disseminated and can be effective for an array of adolescent problem behaviors, including substance use initiation. Yet, we continue to have little understanding of how and why these programs work. Increased specificity in our understanding of what components drive program effects can facilita...

Introduction: Recent work has sought to understand how family-specific risk, such as exposure to interparental conflict, may generalize to developmentally-salient processes in adolescence. A cascade model has been identified in which conflict-specific threat appraisals may erode adolescents' self-efficacy over time, and in turn, undermine their ps...

In line with family systems theory, we examined patterns of hostile interactions within families and their associations with externalizing problems among early-adolescent children. Using hostility scores based on observational data of six dyadic interactions during a triadic interaction (n = 462; i.e., child-to-mother, mother-to-child, child-to-fat...

Emotion network density describes the degree of interdependence among emotion states across time. Higher density is theorized to reflect rigidity in emotion functioning and has been associated with depression in adult samples. This paper extended research on emotion networks to adolescents and examined associations between emotion network density a...

The ability to develop and maintain healthy romantic relationships is a key developmental task in young adulthood. The present study investigated how adolescent interpersonal skills (assertiveness, positive engagement) and family processes (family climate, parenting practices) influence the development of young adult romantic relationship functioni...

Weight concerns are common among adolescents and are associated with a range of negative psychological and physical health outcomes. Self-esteem is one correlate of weight concerns, yet prospective research has not yet documented the direction of this association over the course of adolescence or whether this association differs by gender. This stu...

Although interparental conflict (IPC) has been linked directly and indirectly (via adolescents’ appraisals) with a wide range of adolescent outcomes, little is known about the implications of IPC and related adolescent threat appraisals for substance use. Drawing on the cognitive-contextual framework, we test competing hypotheses about how IPC may...

The quality of family relationships and youth friendships are intricately linked. Previous studies have examined different mechanisms of family-peer linkage, but few have examined social anxiety. The present study examined whether parental rejection and family climate predicted changes in youth social anxiety, which in turn predicted changes in fri...

Low family socioeconomic status (SES) is a robust risk factor for adverse child outcomes, yet the specific processes that account for this risk are not fully understood. This study examines whether and how variation in two adverse factors, stressful life events and harsh parental discipline, affect children’s social competence within a high-risk en...

Objective. Emotion network density describes the degree of interdependence amongemotion states across time, such that higher density reflects self-perpetuating emotions orrigidity in emotion functioning. Higher density in emotion networks appears to be a riskfactor for depression in studies of adults. This paper extended research on emotionnetwork...

Objective. Emotion network density describes the degree of interdependence amongemotion states across time, such that higher density reflects self-perpetuating emotions orrigidity in emotion functioning. Higher density in emotion networks appears to be a riskfactor for depression in studies of adults. This paper extended research on emotionnetwork...

Research has clearly established the important role of parents in preventing substance use among early adolescents. Much of this work has focused on deviance (e.g., antisocial behavior, delinquency, and oppositional behavior) as a central pathway linking parenting behaviors and early adolescent substance use. This study proposed an alternative path...

Family systems theorists have forwarded a set of theoretical principles meant to guide family scientists and practitioners in their conceptualization of patterns of family interaction – intra-family dynamics – that, over time, give rise to family and individual dysfunction and/or adaptation. In this paper, we present an analytic approach that merge...

According to family systems and life course theories, periods of intense change, such as early adolescence, can disrupt stable family systems, leading to changes in family relationships. In this longitudinal study, we investigate 2 types of change in parental hostility and warmth toward their children during early adolescence (Grades 6 to 8)—develo...

This study explored the use of dynamical systems modeling techniques to evaluate self- and co-regulation of affect in couples' interactions before and after the transition to parenthood, and the impact of the Family Foundations program on these processes. Thirty-four heterosexual couples, randomized to intervention and control conditions, participa...

This article presents the results of an evaluation of Positive Family Support, an ecological family intervention and treatment approach to parent supports and family management training developed from a history of basic and translational research. This effectiveness trial, with 41 public middle schools randomly assigned to intervention or control,...

The stepfamily literature is replete with between-group analyses by which youth residing in stepfamilies are compared to youth in other family structures across indicators of adjustment and well-being. Few longitudinal studies examine variation in stepfamily functioning to identify factors that promote the positive adjustment of stepchildren over t...

Prior studies have found that parents' perceptions of control over their lives and their social support may both be important for parenting behaviors. Yet, few studies have examined their unique and interacting influence on parenting behaviors during early adolescence. This longitudinal study of rural parents in two-parent families (N = 636) invest...

Despite the growing recognition of the importance of family involvement in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention, little guidance exists on how professionals can establish successful collaborative relationships with families. In this paper, we discuss family systems theory and ecological systems theory as a framework to guid...

Models that incorporate environmental and contextual influences on parenting offer a promising perspective for understanding fathering. The goal of the present study was to examine the influences of religion on fathers’ roles in the family system, and it addressed two questions: Do specific measures of religion better predict father involvement tha...

Emotion dysregulation often emerges early in development and is a core feature of many psychological conditions. The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is a well validated and widely used self-report measure for assessing emotion regulation problems among adolescents and adults. The DERS has six subscales with five to eight items each...

The formation and maintenance of young adult romantic relationships that are free from violence and are characterized by love, connection, and effective problem-solving have important implications for later well-being and family functioning. In this study, we examined adolescent hostile-aggressive behavior (HAB) and family relationship quality as k...

Youth appraisals and triangulation into conflicts are key mechanisms by which interparental conflict places youth at risk for psychological maladjustment. Although evidence suggests that there are multiple mechanisms at work (e.g., Fosco & Feinberg, 2015; Grych, Harold, & Miles, 2003), this body of work has relied on variable-centered analyses that...

Higher levels of parental knowledge about youth activities have been associated with lower levels of youth risky behavior. Yet little is known about how parental knowledge fluctuates during early adolescence and how those fluctuations are associated with the development of problem behavior. We use the term lability to describe within-person fluctua...

Objective: This commentary reviews current conceptualizations of well-being, examines explanations for the lack of attention to well-being research, and provides justification for investing research time and funding into well-being studies. Opportunities for integrating factors related to well-being into prevention and intervention programs are als...

Family-centered prevention programs are understudied for their effects on adolescent depression, despite considerable evidence that supports their effectiveness for preventing escalation in youth problem behavior and substance use. This study was conducted with 2 overarching goals: (a) replicate previous work that has implicated the Family Check-Up...

The Family Check Up (FCU) is a family-centered intervention for reducing children's problem behavior through improving parenting skills and family interactions. Although the FCU was designed to prevent conduct problems, we have also found the program to be effective in preventing escalating symptoms of depression in early adolescence. The current a...

Guided by family systems and ecological theories, this study examined the multicontextual implications of family, school, and individual domains for adolescents’ school success. The first goal of this study was to examine reciprocal influences among family climate, school attachment, and academic self-regulation (ASR) during the middle school years...