Although the association between interparental conflict and adolescent adjustment is well documented, the intervening mechanisms that explain this relationship are not fully understood. Guided by the spillover hypothesis and the self-determination theory, this study examined whether the associations among interparental conflict and adolescent depressive feelings and life satisfaction were explained by maternal autonomy support and, in turn, by adolescent need frustration. Participants were 925 Turkish adolescents (Mage = 16.08 years, SD = 0.31) and their mothers (Mage = 41.43, SD = 5.16). Results from path analysis showed that interparental conflict was related to lower maternal autonomy support, and in turn to higher adolescent need frustration. Greater need frustration, in turn, predicted higher adolescent depressive feelings and lower life satisfaction six months later. These findings suggested that conflictual parental relationships may predict adolescent adjustment through poor parenting and adolescent need frustration. The findings and related directions for future research are discussed in the context of self-determination theory and its role in advancing a process-oriented understanding of the familial and individual determinants of adolescent adjustment. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Research has shown that teachers’ autonomy support and provision of structure relate to students’ agentic and behavioral engagement. Moreover, agentic engagement elicits higher teacher autonomy support. In the present 5-week diary study, we investigated the dynamic nature of this interplay between teachers and students through their cross-assessment of students’ agentic and behavioral engagement. We also considered the week-to-week student-reported teacher autonomy support and provision of structure as well as two student personal characteristics — proactive personality and situational autonomous versus controlled motivation. Two hundred fifty-seven Turkish middle school students and their teachers from 13 classes participated in the study. Multilevel analyses showed that students’ week-to-week perceived autonomy support and initial level of autonomous motivation positively predicted week-to-week agentic engagement (teacher- and student-reported). Students’ week-to-week perceived structure positively predicted week-to-week agentic and behavioral engagement (student-, but not teacher-, reported). These findings indicate the interplay between students’ situational engagement and teachers’ situational motivating style (i.e., autonomy support and provision of structure). They also suggest greater predictive power for students’ situational motivation over the personal trait of proactive personality. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.