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AbstractThis study examined parental emotion socialization processes associated with adolescent unipolar depressive disorder. Adolescent participants (N = 107; 42 boys) were selected either to meet criteria for current unipolar depressive disorder or to be psychologically healthy as defined by no lifetime history of psychopathology or mental health treatment and low levels of current depressive symptomatology. A multi‐source/method measurement strategy was used to assess mothers' and fathers' responses to adolescent sad and angry emotion. Each parent and adolescent completed questionnaire measures of parental emotion socialization behavior, and participated in meta‐emotion interviews and parent‐adolescent interactions. As hypothesized, parents of adolescents with depressive disorder engaged in fewer supportive responses and more unsupportive responses overall relative to parents of non‐depressed adolescents. Between group differences were more pronounced for families of boys, and for fathers relative to mothers. The findings indicate that parent emotion socialization is associated with adolescent depression and highlight the importance of including fathers in studies of emotion socialization, especially as it relates to depression.

There are major obstacles to the effective delivery of mental health services to poor families, particularly for those families in rural areas. The rise of Internet use, however, has created potentially new avenues for service delivery, which, when paired with the many recent advances in computer networking and multimedia technology, is fueling a demand for Internet delivery of mental health services. The authors report on the adaptation of a parenting program for delivery via the Internet, enhanced with participant-created videos of parent-infant interactions and weekly staff contact, which enable distal treatment providers to give feedback and make decisions informed by direct behavioral assessment. This Internet-based, parent-education intervention has the potential to promote healthy and protective parent-infant interactions in families who might not otherwise receive needed mental health services.