Adolescent-Parent Verbal Conflict The Roles Of Conversational Styles And Disgust Emotions

This article addresses the link between expression of some negative emotions like disgust and contempt as well as the sociolinguistic perspectives of different communication styles between adolescents and parents putting emphasis on their different communication styles and disgust emotions. The article is directed to family therapists who deal with relationship related issues among parents and children. There is a direct presentation of conflict between parents and adolescents as connected to generational gap, psychological disturbance, personality traits, family socialization, culture and the small social groups that one belongs to hence the verbal conflicts between adolescents and parents which is a common experience in most families. Adolescents talk in a way that shows overlaps, simultaneous speech and successful interruptions than their parents and especially their mothers. This is due to the perceptions of their levels of relationship conflict with their parents. Adolescents show a great deal of repulsion which results from psychological distress experienced by both the adolescents and the parents.

In some cases, it is common to find that differences in communication styles that lead to verbal conflicts between adolescents and their parents as due to the expression of negative affect of adolescents that comes from the increased challenging life experiences that occur at the adolescent stage. Both boys and girls use a high-involvement conversational methods by using fast rate of turn-taking and frequent simultaneous speech and interruptions when the parent is talking. On the other hand, parents use a high considerateness style with significantly fewer interruptions when the adolescent is talking and they also don’t engage in simultaneous speech and overlaps between turns. Therefore, there is need to dig deep into personality, psychosocial influences and generational aspects in order to get a way of handling differences that arise from communication between parents and adolescents.

Reviewed from the work of Beaumont S. L.; Wagner S. L. (2004).