Abstract
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: medium; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 32px;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Anxiogenic parenting behaviors (e.g. overcontrol, accommodation) play an important role in the etiology and maintenance of child anxiety disorders. While theoretical models suggest parent anxiety is an important risk factor of increased anxiogenic parenting, existing literature is inconsistent, suggesting further study of the mechanism underlying anxiogenic parenting in warranted. Growing evidence points to the importance of parental emotion regulation by positing that parents engage in maladaptive parenting in order to reduce unwanted distress in response to observing their child’s anxiety. Transdiagnostic, higher order cognitive risk factors, including distress intolerance, anxiety sensitivity, emotional impulsivity, and repetitive negative thinking are important to examine as they impact the appraisal of and behavioral reaction to emotions necessary for effective affect regulation. Therefore, this study sought to<b> </b>further our understanding of the link between parent anxiety to anxiogenic parenting behaviors by examining whether these factors mediate this relationship and if this indirect effect is moderated by child anxiety. Participants were 350 parents of children ages 4 to 17 recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Structural equational modeling demonstrated that distress intolerance in mothers mediates the relationship between parent anxiety and anxiogenic parenting at high, but not low levels of child anxiety. Emotional impulsivity also mediates this relationship but is unrelated to the level of child anxiety. Anxiety sensitivity and repetitive negative thinking were not significant mediators. These findings suggest that distress intolerance and emotional impulsivity are important targets for parent-focused child anxiety treatments. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; color: rgb(112, 48, 160);"><o:p></o:p></span></p>