Thao Ha

t.ha@pwo.ru.nl

Title project:
“The Rocky Road of Love: A Longitudinal Observational Study on Affective Quality in Adolescents’ Interactions with Partners”.

Abstract:
Nearly all adolescents express a curiosity in dating and by late adolescence most of them have been involved in some kind of partner relationship. Furthermore, establishing and maintaining satisfactory partner relationships are important developmental tasks facing adolescents, and these relationships have major implications for emotional adjustment. Although partner relationships in adulthood have been studied extensively, there is a lack of knowledge on the development of adolescents’ interactions with romantic partners and how these affect subsequent social-emotional functioning. Therefore, this project aims to answer the following question: How are early interactions in adolescents’ first partner relationships related to later individual emotional adjustment and the quality of future partner relationships? Dyadic interactions between adolescent partners will be observed on a micro-level over time to assess stability and variability in the affective quality and content of these interactions.