Early Exposure to Marital Conflict and Adolescent Emotion Regulation

Exposure to both physical and psychological stress has a negative impact on one’s regulatory processing, and stress within the family context may be especially impactful on emotional regulation and development. Early experiences of exposure to parent marital conflict or parent relationship discord, such as divorce, are stressors often associated with poor emotional well-being, including emotion dysregulation, in both children and adults. However, the influence of these experiences on regulatory development is complex as there are many factors that impact the pathways of risk (e.g., parenting behaviors, child perceptions). Furthermore, emotion regulation has not been well-studied in adolescence in the context of parental relations. Because adolescence is a period of rapid growth that involves many important developmental tasks, including the shaping of regulatory processes and emotional control, the current study examined the influence of marital conflict on adolescent emotion regulation. A total of 45 parent-adolescent dyads completed online questionnaires regarding family experiences (i.e., conflict, parenting, etc.) and emotion regulation difficulties. Results demonstrated that marital conflict was significantly associated with children’s perceptions of intense and frequent conflict. Marital conflict was not significantly directly associated with adolescent emotion regulation. Indirect pathways from martial conflict to adolescent emotion regulation via parenting behaviors and children’s perceptions were also not supported. Findings suggest the importance of examining the influence of other family relationships and exploring additional assessments of emotion regulation

A Prospective Study of Childhood Negative Events, Temperament, Adolescent Coping, and Stress Reactivity in Young Adulthood

abstract: Accumulating evidence implicates exposure to adverse childhood experiences in the development of hypocortisolism in the long-term, and researchers are increasingly examining individual-level mechanisms that may underlie, exacerbate or attenuate this relation among at-risk populations. The current study takes a developmentally and theoretically informed approach to examining episodic childhood stressors, inherent and voluntary self-regulation, and physiological reactivity among a longitudinal sample of youth who experienced parental divorce. Participants were drawn from a larger randomized controlled trial of a preventive intervention for children of divorce between the ages of 9 and 12. The current sample included 159 young adults (mean age = 25.5 years; 53% male; 94% Caucasian) who participated in six waves of data collection, including a 15-year follow-up study. Participants reported on exposure to negative life events (four times over a 9-month period) during childhood, and mothers rated child temperament. Six years later, youth reported on the use of active and avoidant coping strategies, and 15 years later, they participated in a standardized psychosocial stress task and provided salivary cortisol samples prior to and following the task. Path analyses within a structural equation framework revealed that a multiple mediation model best fit the data. It was found that children with better mother-rated self-regulation (i.e. low impulsivity, low negative emotionality, and high attentional focus) exhibited lower total cortisol output 15 years later. In addition, greater self-regulation in childhood predicted greater use of active coping in adolescence, whereas a greater number of negative life events predicted increased use of avoidant coping in adolescence. Finally, a greater number of negative events in childhood predicted marginally lower total cortisol output, and higher levels of active coping in adolescence were associated with greater total cortisol output in young adulthood. Findings suggest that children of divorce who exhibit better self-regulation evidence lower cortisol output during a standardized psychosocial stress task relative to those who have higher impulsivity, lower attentional focus, and/or higher negative emotionality. The conceptual significance of the current findings, including the lack of evidence for hypothesized relations, methodological issues that arose, and issues in need of future research are discussed.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Psychology 201

Raising Flourishing Adults: How Positive Psychology Can Help Adolescents Rise Above Stressful Life Events to Lead Flourishing Adult Lives

Adolescence is a time of dramatic change and growth across multiple systems. Simultaneous development of neural, biological, and social domains of functioning renders adolescence a heightened period of sensitivity to early life experiences. Among these experiences, stressful life events are shown to disrupt the architecture of the developing brain, increasing the risk of future mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety. In this paper, I discuss the risk of adolescence, such as the vulnerabilities to stress, alongside the unique plasticity that creates an opportunity for positive external influences (e.g., family milieu). Finally, I propose a multidimensional construct, known as RISE, for adolescent flourishing borrowing from other validated positive psychology concepts. A workshop and specific interventions to improve each of the four elements of RISE are proposed that can be used by parents

A Decade of Research Exploring Biology and Communication

The study of communication has come a long way since Aristotle\u27s conceptualization of persuasion in Rhetoric from the 4th century B.C. Today, scholars conceptualize communication in much more comprehensive ways than did those Greek Aristotelian philosophers. Still, much of the discipline of communication focuses on the way that messages have an impact on individuals or societies. Since the late 1970s a small group of communication scholars, greatly influenced by their peers in other social-science disciplines (i.e., psychology) began to direct their attention to the way that communication influences and is influenced by processes in the human body. During the early 1990s, a group of researchers proposed a set of meta-theoretic axioms leading to the goal that specific theories could be generated related to the ways that the human body influences communicative messages and behaviors. These researchers called this set of propositions a communibiological paradigm. In this article, we present the following review of recent and relevant literature on the biological dimensions of human communication

BEHAVIORAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN IN A CUMULATIVE RISKY AND STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENT

Childhood is a stage’s life marked by essential psychosocial transformations that occur amid rapid pubertal growth such as identity formation, individuation from parents, and the establishment of intimate friendships. However, tension is normative when the individual goes through different changes; but, children are often faced by risks for adjustment difficulties if this developmental change is accompanied by an accumulation of stressors spanning multiple spheres of the adolescent’s life (Call & Mortimer, 2001). Recognizing that the environment of the child makes a difference in how that child learns and grows, the study of child development is a well-established social science discipline that intersects with a number of other disciplines. The theoretical perspective taken toward behavioral and emotional development in childhood is a combination of functionalist theory and dynamical systems theory (Saami, 2008). Qualitative analysis and documentary research method have been used for data collection and desk review. The results of this research showed that a child’s encounters with an environment can be seen as dynamic transactions that involve multiple emotion-related components (e.g., expressive behavior, physiological patterning, action tendencies, goals and motives, social and physical contexts, appraisals and experiential feeling) that change over time as the child matures and in response to changing environmental interactions. To cope with this, we hope that this descriptive study will try to strive, not only to understand and support the development of children, but also to assess child development and to respond to an individual child's needs. Also, we hope that it will continue to be a valuable resource for yet another generation of children and youth. Article visualizations

Childhood Trauma and Implications for Teaching Young Students Who Have Experienced Trauma

A traumatic event that was experienced at an early age can affect an individual’s ability to form relationships, brain development, and ability to learn. Research methodology included interviews with school professionals in a variety of roles in a rural Pennsylvania school district. Parents of four students completed a semi-structured questionnaire and observations of the students took place in a classroom setting. Results from this qualitative study included insight into the types of training professionals receive, level of support from administration, and behaviors exhibited from students. Four themes emerged from this mixed-methods research: lack of trauma training, high caseloads, compassion fatigue, and protective and risk factors that play a role in student’s lives. The implications of this study’s findings are significant as they describe teacher’s experiences working with traumatized students, reveal specific behaviors a child might exhibit, and offer insight into inquiry for future research in the topic of traumatized students

Net resiliency: A study of risk and protective factors in single and two-parent familes

The main goal of this study was to discover how family makeup affects net resiliency scores of children. This quantitative study uses Two-Tailed t-tests, and Pearson correlation to uncover any relationships between net resiliency and living in a single or two-parent household. A sample of 91 children ranging from eleven to eighteen years old was utilized for the study\u27s data collection. Their net resiliency scores, risk factors, protective factors, and family makeup were analyzed to discover any potential relationships between them. The analysis of these factors showed children living in single-parent families have: lower net resiliency scores, fewer protective factors, and more risk factors than their two-parent family cohorts

Resiliency in Youth Who Have Been Exposed to Violence

Youth who have been victims of crime or are exposed to community violence are at high risk for developing conduct problems. However, not all youth who have been exposed to violence develop behavioral problems. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between resiliency factors such as sense of mastery, relatedness, emotional reactivity, relatedness to parents, friends, and teachers, and conduct problems in youth who have been exposed to violence in a general population of high school students. The independent variables are measured using the Children\u27s Report of Exposure to Violence, the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, and the Hemmingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness. The Youth Self Report was utilized to measure the dependent variables in this study. A canonical correlation was used to analyze the data. The full canonical model was significant and accounted for 37 of the variance between canonical composites with two canonical roots emerging. The first root accounted for 79 of the overall variance between the canonical composites. Youth who have high exposure to violence and a high level of emotional reativity and a low connection to parents and teachers reported more aggressive behavior and rule breaking behavior. The second canonical root accounted for 21 of the overall variance between canonical composites. Youth who reported having a sense of connectedness to others also reported low emotional reactivity and aggressive behaviors but to a lesser exten

Resiliency in Youth Who Have Been Exposed to Violence

Youth who have been victims of crime or are exposed to community violence are at high risk for developing conduct problems. However, not all youth who have been exposed to violence develop behavioral problems. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between resiliency factors such as sense of mastery, relatedness, emotional reactivity, relatedness to parents, friends, and teachers, and conduct problems in youth who have been exposed to violence in a general population of high school students. The independent variables are measured using the Children\u27s Report of Exposure to Violence, the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, and the Hemmingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness. The Youth Self Report was utilized to measure the dependent variables in this study. A canonical correlation was used to analyze the data. The full canonical model was significant and accounted for 37 of the variance between canonical composites with two canonical roots emerging. The first root accounted for 79 of the overall variance between the canonical composites. Youth who have high exposure to violence and a high level of emotional reativity and a low connection to parents and teachers reported more aggressive behavior and rule breaking behavior. The second canonical root accounted for 21 of the overall variance between canonical composites. Youth who reported having a sense of connectedness to others also reported low emotional reactivity and aggressive behaviors but to a lesser exten