Longitudinal relations between emotional awareness and expression, emotion regulation, and peer victimization among urban adolescents

Abstract

Introduction There are potential long‐term psychosocial effects of experiencing peer victimization during adolescence, including: internalizing symptoms, externalizing behaviors, and risks behaviors such as substance use. While social‐emotional theories of development note associations between deficits in emotion competencies and peer victimization in childhood, these associations are less established among adolescent samples. Identifying which inadequacies in emotional competence place particular adolescents at risk for peer victimization may provide insight into the developmental pathways leading to unfavorable outcomes. Methods The current study examined the relation between emotional competence and overt peer victimization among adolescents. Adolescents living in a mid‐sized urban city in the southeastern region of the United States (N = 357; Mage = 12.14 years, 92% African American) reported their emotional awareness and reluctance to express emotion at baseline. Two years later, adolescents reported their regulation of anger and caregivers reported on adolescents' global emotion regulation. Adolescents also reported on occurrences of overt peer victimization during the previous 30 days at baseline and during the two‐year follow up. Results Our hypothesized model fit the data adequately. Greater emotion awareness was associated with higher scores on caregiver‐rated emotion regulation and adolescent‐rated anger regulation two years later, and in turn, lower frequencies of overt victimization by peers. Further, greater expressive reluctance was associated with greater anger regulation, and in turn, lower frequencies of overt victimization by peers. Patterns of associations did not vary by sex or age. Conclusions The present study extends models of social‐emotional development and peer interactions into the development age stage of adolescence.

Maladaptive Social Consequences of Emotional Clarity Deficits in Early Adolescence

“…This study extends prior research that independently links compromised emotional competence (e.g., alexithymia/low emotional awareness, low emotional intelligence) to aggression (Downey et al, 2010;Honkalampi et al, 2009;Laible, 2007;Mestre et al, 2006), social withdrawal/loneliness (Honkalampi et al, 2009;Spitzer et al, 2005;Wols, Scholte, & Qualter, 2015), and relationship difficulties (Brackett et al, 2004;Karukivi et al, 2011;Laible, 2007;Mestre et al, 2006;Riley, Sullivan, Hinton, & Kliewer, 2019), by revealing that emotional clarity deficits simultaneously predict these four social impairments over time. Compromised emotional clarity not only may interfere with adolescents' subsequent motivation or ability to engage in positive approach behavior in the peer group but also may result in information processing difficulties (e.g., an inability to accurately process social cues and understand others' emotions) that disrupt social interactions and elicit adverse reactions from peers.…”

How does peer adversity “Get inside the Brain?” Adolescent girls’ differential susceptibility to neural dysregulation of emotion following victimization

“…Thus, we cannot establish definitively that exposure to victimization preceded the emergence of poor ER. Difficulty regulating emotions may mark youth as targets of peer victimization (Riley et al, 2019), suggesting the possibility of reciprocal associations between victimization and emotion dysregulation across development. It would be beneficial for future work to include larger samples that would enable more sophisticated analytic approaches examining within‐person changes in victimization and neural function over time.…”

Pathways Into Psychosocial Adjustment in Children: Modeling the Effects of Trait Emotional Intelligence, Social-Emotional Problems, and Gender

“…One of the main contributions of this study is that it focuses on child population, since most previous research has been carried out on adults or adolescents, bypassing the study of childhood. Research carried out on EI and psychosocial adjustment in children is still incipient ( Mavroveli et al, 2008 ), despite the personal and social consequences of a deficit development in certain areas (emotional, cognitive, and social) or the problems of imbalance at this evolutionary stage ( Lahaye et al, 2013 ; Eastabrook et al, 2014 ; Rowsell et al, 2014 ).…”