About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 22. Social Relationships

Abstract

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Self-disclosure is the deliberate and often affective sharing of personal information unknown to a conversation partner (Howe et al., 1995). Siblings and friends are significant recipients of self-disclosure during early adolescence, as it plays a critical role in identity formation and relational development (Buhrmester & Prager 1995). Internal state language (ISL) encompasses terms that describe the thoughts, beliefs, and emotions of oneself or others, and is linked to ways individuals communicate information about themselves to others. For example, siblings and peers employ ISL during social play (e.g. Leach et al., 2015) and in narrative contexts (e.g. Bauer et al., 2005). Although self-disclosure between close others is a natural setting for the use of ISL, no studies examine ISL within the context of disclosure to both siblings and friends. Moreover, it is important to understand its role in adolescents’ social and emotional learning (Bell et al., 2024). The present study investigated early adolescents’ use of ISL during a hypothetical picture task designed to measure children’s responses to social situations (e.g., 2 siblings arguing; friends comforting). Specifically, we examined ISL terms that adolescents ascribed to the story characters and if they disclosed to the target (sibling or friend character). Additionally, we explored whether disclosure during the picture task was associated with adolescents’ reports of their actual sibling and friend relationship quality.
Participants included 79 focal young Canadian adolescents (M = 10.34, SD = 1.05). Participants completed the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) and Friendship Activity Questionnaire (Bukowski et al., 1994) on the sibling they felt closest to and their best friend, respectively. Participants also completed the Hypothetical Relationships Picture Task (Karos et al., 2007) composed of six figures pertaining to affective relationship scenarios designed to assess socio-emotional understanding. We coded ISL terms and self-disclosure that adolescents used to narrate the social situation. ISL was coded as (a) goals, (b) cognitions, (c) emotions, and (d) preferences. Self-disclosure was coded for presence of disclosing (yes/no) and target (sibling, friend, both).
Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated adolescents used cognitions most frequently, followed by emotions, goals, and preferences across the six pictures. Among situations in which participants were more likely to disclose, similar patterns emerged, namely preferences were the least commonly used ISL category. However, for the scenario with adult and child characters adolescents used similar levels of cognitive, goal, and emotion terms. Overall, there was no significant interaction between ISL and disclosure recipient across pictures. However, for two situations (i.e. conflict between two children and one child comforting the other), adolescents used more emotional ISL when disclosing to a sibling compared to a friend. Unexpectedly, correlations revealed that overall sibling and friend relationship quality were not related to characters’ disclosures made during the hypothetical task. The only exception was that power in the sibling relationship demonstrated a significant negative association with sibling self-disclosure. These findings provide further insight into early adolescents’ social and emotional understanding via their use of ISL and willingness to disclose personal information with siblings and friends.

Author information

Author	Role
Patricia Monica Forbes, Toronto Metropolitan University	Presenting author
Nina Howe, Concordia University	Non-presenting author
Ryan J. Persram, Toronto Metropolitan University	Non-presenting author

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