Profiles of adolescents’ sadness, anger, and worry regulation: Characterization and relations with psychopathology.

Emotion, Vol 23(2), Mar 2023, 473-485; doi:10.1037/emo0001084Adaptive emotion regulation (ER) reflects competence in effective emotion expression and emotion coping, both of which are critical to mitigating psychopathology risk. The current study extends past work on adolescent ER in three ways. First, using a functionalist framework, we focused on discrete emotions, examining how adolescents may differentially express and cope with sadness, anger, and worry. Second, we used a person-centered approach to determine whether subgroups of youth report different patterns of managing emotions. Third, to provide indices of validity and replicability, we characterized ER profiles in two independent community samples of adolescents and in relation to psychological adjustment (i.e., depression, anxiety, aggression), concurrently and longitudinally. Sample A comprised 202 youths (Mage = 12.90 years, 52.5% girls) participating at two time points 2 years apart. Sample B comprised 500 adolescents (Mage = 14.06 years, 60.2% girls), 99 of whom participated again 6 months later. Latent profile analyses per sample revealed similar three-profile solutions, such that adolescents were classified into the Expressive Coping (i.e., high regulation coping, low inhibition), Inhibited Coping (i.e., high regulation coping, high inhibition), or Dysregulated Anger (i.e., low anger coping, low anger inhibition) group. Youth in the Dysregulated Anger group reported elevations in depression and, in some inst...
Source: Emotion - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research