Affectionate Communication Moderates the Effect of Adverse Childhood Experience on Mental Well-Being

Abstract

Affectionate communication is a prosocial behavior that exhibits a stress-buffering effect, ameliorating the influence of stressors on stress reactivity. Whereas previous research has demonstrated such an effect on physiological and health-related reactions to acute stressors, the current study explores the ability of affectionate communication to moderate the influence of early childhood adversity on adult mental well-being. Using a Census-matched probability sample of U.S. American adults (N = 727), this study documents that both depressive symptoms and stress are inversely related to trait affectionate communication and that trait affectionate communication moderates the effect of adverse childhood experiences on these outcomes.

Keywords:

• Adverse childhood experiences
• affectionate communication
• affection exchange theory
• depression
• stress

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An anonymized version of the OSF preregistration is viewable at https://osf.io/53nsc/?view_only=c6e88f23bbcc4d4db2cdfb07c198657b

2. No participants completed the survey in less than two standard deviations below the average completion time, so no participants were removed from the data file for completing the study too quickly.

3. These percentages sum to >100 because participants could select multiple racial identities.

4. A post-hoc power analysis indicated that the reduced sample size of 727 still offered in excess of 95% power to identify a small effect size, using a multiple regression analysis and assuming a .05 probability level.

5. Cronbach’s alpha is perhaps the most commonly reported measure of internal reliability, yet recent research has advocated substituting McDonald’s omega (ω), which is Cronbach’s alpha’s parent measure (Hayes & Coutts, 2020). Unlike alpha, McDonald’s omega does not assume essential tau-equivalence, which is the assumption that “each item measures the same latent variable, on the same scale, but with possibly different degrees of precision” (Graham, 2006, p. 934).

6. This analysis excluded seven participants who did not identify as either female or male.

7. Welch’s t-test is preferred to the more widely known Student’s t-test because it offers a more stable Type I error rate and is more robust to violations of normality and homogeneity of variance (Delacre, Lakens, & Leys, 2017). Moreover, Welch’s t-test outperforms Student’s t-test when sample sizes are unequal, and when data meet the homoscedasticity assumption, Welch’s t-tests loses minimal robustness compared to the Student’s t-test.

8. This analysis included only participants who identified as either male or female.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kory Floyd

Kory Floyd is a professor of communication and professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.