Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodology was used to examine the emotional context of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). Forty-seven adolescents and young adults used a novel smartphone app to monitor their emotional experiences, NSSI thoughts, and NSSI behaviors for 2 weeks. Momentary changes in both negative and positive emotions predicted greater intensity of NSSI thoughts at the subsequent assessment, while only increases in negative emotion predicted NSSI behaviors. Immediately following NSSI behaviors participants reported reduced high-arousal negative emotions and increased low-arousal positive emotions, suggesting that NSSI may be an efficient and effective method of regulating emotion. Findings highlight the importance of addressing emotion regulation in NSSI interventions.
The current study used longitudinal data to examine the role of emotional awareness as a transdiagnostic risk factor for internalizing symptoms. Participants were 204 youth, ages 7 to 16, who completed assessments every three months for a year. Results from hierarchical mixed effects modeling indicated that low emotional awareness predicted both depressive and anxiety symptoms for up to one year follow-up. In addition, emotional awareness predicted which youth went on to experience subsequent increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms over the course of the year. Emotional awareness also mediated both the cross-sectional and the longitudinal associations between anxiety and depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that emotional awareness may constitute a transdiagnostic risk factor for the development and/or maintenance of symptoms of depression and anxiety, which has important implications for youth treatment and prevention programs.
Influenced by chaos theory, the emotional cascade model proposes that rumination and negative emotion may promote each other in a self-amplifying cycle that increases over time. Accordingly, exponential-compounding effects may better describe the relationship between rumination and negative emotion when they occur in impulsive persons, and predict impulsive behavior. Forty-seven community and undergraduate participants who reported frequent engagement in impulsive behaviors monitored their ruminative thoughts and negative emotion multiple times daily for two weeks using digital recording devices. Hypotheses were tested using cross-lagged mixed model analyses. Findings indicated that rumination predicted subsequent elevations in rumination that lasted over extended periods of time. Rumination and negative emotion predicted increased levels of each other at subsequent assessments, and exponential functions for these associations were supported. Results also supported a synergistic effect between rumination and negative emotion, predicting larger elevations in subsequent rumination and negative emotion than when one variable alone was elevated. Finally, there were synergistic effects of rumination and negative emotion in predicting number of impulsive behaviors subsequently reported. These findings are consistent with the emotional cascade model in suggesting that momentary rumination and negative emotion progressively propagate and magnify each other over time in impulsive people, promoting impulsive behavior.
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