A person-centered approach to adolescent emotion regulation: Associations with psychopathology and parenting

Abstract

Adolescence is a unique period of heightened emotional arousal and still-developing regulatory abilities. Adolescent emotion regulation patterns may be critically involved in adolescents’ psychosocial development, but patterns of emotion regulation in youth are not well-understood. The present study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to elucidate patterns of emotion expression, experience, and emotion-related physiological arousal in adolescents. One-hundred ninety-eight adolescents and their primary caregivers participated in an emotionally-arousing parent-adolescent conflict interaction. Adolescent’s observed emotion expressions, emotion experiences, and heart rate (HR) and caregiver parenting behaviors were assessed during and/or after the interaction. Parents reported on adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and youth reported on depressive symptoms. The LPA revealed 4 emotion regulation profiles: a moderate HR-and-high expression profile, a suppression profile (with low negative emotion expression, high emotion experience), a low reactive profile, and a high reactive profile. The moderate HR-and-high expression profile was associated with lower conduct disorder symptoms; the suppression profile was related to lower anxiety symptoms; and the high reactive profile was associated with higher adolescent depressive symptoms. The high reactive and moderate HR-and-high expression profiles were associated with more negative/critical parenting behaviors. Findings suggest that profiles of adolescent emotion regulation can be empirically identified and may be significant risk factors for psychopathology.

Emotion Dysregulation Mediates Relations Between Chinese Parents’ Histories of Childhood Emotional Abuse and Parenting Stress: A Dyadic Data Analysis

“…These results are supported by the spillover process in family systems theory (Cox & Paley, 2003;Erel & Burman, 1995), which suggests that influences might transfer from one setting (or relationship) to another directly in a family. Previous research has demonstrated spillover effects from emotion dysregulation to parenting outcomes, such as overactive discipline (Lorber, 2012), low sensitivity of parenting (Crandall, Deater-Deckard, & Riley, 2015), and critical parenting behaviors (Turpyn, Chaplin, Cook, & Martelli, 2015). The actor effects found in our study expand the research in this area by supporting the finding that one's difficulties in emotion regulation might yield negative spillover effects on the same person's parenting subsystem by raising his or her parenting stress.…”

Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

“…Current work on these topics has progressed from presuming that all families are negatively affected by the “storm and stress” of adolescence, to recognizing that some family environments pose particular risk for maladaptive parent-adolescent conflict and adverse consequences for adolescents (e.g., Donenberg & Weisz, 1997; Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013; Laursen & Collins, 1994; Rutter, Graham, Chadwick, & Yule, 1976). Although under some circumstances parent-adolescent conflict may be normative and even adaptive (Adams & Laursen, 2007; Laursen & Hafen, 2010), core features of maladaptive conflictual interactions may pose risk for youth maladjustment (e.g., Chaplin et al, 2014; Chaplin et al, 2012; Moed et al, 2015; Turpyn, Chaplin, Cook, & Martelli, 2015). Creating laboratory paradigms of parent-adolescent conflict discussions that approximate adolescents’ conflict-related responses is a first step towards then testing how this conflict impacts adolescent decision-making and behavior.…”

“…In addition to the difficulty constructing a conflict task, a second key issue with regard to the experimental study of parent-adolescent conflict involves identifying the contextual and individual difference factors that determine whether adolescents evidence a strong link between their experience of parent-adolescent conflict and psychosocial maladjustment (Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013; Laursen & Hafen, 2010; Rutter et al, 1976; Turpyn et al, 2015; Weymouth et al, 2016). Factors still unknown are under what conditions parent-adolescent conflict is expressed, and whether there are factors that may result in greater increases in the expression of behavioral conflict in adolescents, such as higher baseline conflict.…”

The Relationship of Body Image with Emotion Regulation, Stress, and Aggression and their Comparison Between Males and Females With Multiple Sclerosis

“…Romer and Gratz believe that emotional regulation includes being aware of and perceiving emotions, accepting emotions, having the ability to control impulsive behaviors and behave in accordance with the considered goals when experiencing negative emotions, and having the ability to apply appropriate emotion regulation strategies to modulate emotional responses in order to achieve individual goals and situational demands. Additionally, they argue that difficulties in emotion regulation are associated with low levels of well-being (13). People with MS often deal with attention lapses and failures in applying effective emotion regulation strategies (14).…”