Emotion regulation in response to daily negative and positive events in youth:The role of event intensity and psychopathology

Environmental and individual contextual factors profoundly influence how people regulate their emotions. The current article addresses the role of event intensity and psychopathology (an admixture of depression, anxiety, and psychoticism) on emotion regulation in response to naturally occurring events. For six days each evening, a youth sample (aged 15-25, N = 713) recorded the intensity of the most positive and most negative event of the day and their subsequent emotion regulation. The intensity of negative events was positively associated with summed total emotion regulation effort, strategy diversity, engaging in rumination, situation modification, emotion expression, and sharing and negatively associated with reappraisal and acceptance. The intensity of positive events was positively associated with strategy diversity, savoring, emotion expression, and sharing. Higher psychopathology symptoms were only related to ruminating more about negative events. We interpret these findings as support for the role of context in the degree of effort and type of emotion regulation that young people engage in

Capacity for social contingency detection continues to develop across adolescence

The capacity for dynamically coordinating behaviour is assumed to have largely matured in infancy. In adolescence—another sensitive period for social development—the primary focus on individual social cognition as the main driver of interaction has prevented the study of actual social interaction as behavioural coordination within dyads. From a dynamic perspective, however, capturing real-time social dynamics is essential for the assessment of social interactive processes. In order to improve the understanding of social development during adolescence, we investigated the potential developmental course of social contingency detection in dynamic interactions. Pairs of 205 Belgian adolescents (83 male, 122 female), aged 11–19, engaged in real-time social interaction via the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE). Comparing early, middle and late adolescents, we found a generally higher performance of late adolescents on behavioural and cognitive measures of social contingency detection, while the reported awareness of the implicitly established social interaction was lower in this group overall. Additionally, late adolescents demonstrated faster improvement of behavioural social coordination throughout the experiment, compared with the other groups. Our results indicate that social interactive processes continue to develop throughout adolescence, which manifests as faster social coordination at the behavioural level. This finding underscores dynamic social interaction within dyads as a new opportunity for identifying altered social development during adolescence

Psycho-social factors associated with mental resilience in the Corona lockdown.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. Although increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes, as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resilience refers to the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. To gain mechanistic insights about the relationship between described psycho-social resilience factors and resilience specifically in the current crisis, we assessed resilience factors, exposure to Corona crisis-specific and general stressors, as well as internalizing symptoms in a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 24 languages during the most intense phase of the lockdown in Europe (22 March to 19 April) in a convenience sample of N = 15,970 adults. Resilience, as an outcome, was conceptualized as good mental health despite stressor exposure and measured as the inverse residual between actual and predicted symptom total score. Preregistered hypotheses (osf.io/r6btn) were tested with multiple regression models and mediation analyses. Results confirmed our primary hypothesis that positive appraisal style (PAS) is positively associated with resilience (p < 0.0001). The resilience factor PAS also partly mediated the positive association between perceived social support and resilience, and its association with resilience was in turn partly mediated by the ability to easily recover from stress (both p < 0.0001). In comparison with other resilience factors, good stress response recovery and positive appraisal specifically of the consequences of the Corona crisis were the strongest factors. Preregistered exploratory subgroup analyses (osf.io/thka9) showed that all tested resilience factors generalize across major socio-demographic categories. This research identifies modifiable protective factors that can be targeted by public mental health efforts in this and in future pandemics

Psychopathology and ruminating, savoring, and sharing in the daily lives of adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic

Emotion regulation in daily life can serve as a risk or resilience factor during times of crisis. Using the experience sampling method, the current study investigated rumination, savoring, and sharing with others in response to positive and negative events during the early COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures among adolescents (N = 110, aged 13-20, 89% female). For six days, adolescents reported the intensity and valence of events throughout the day and how much they ruminated and shared about negative events and savored and shared about positive events. We aimed to conceptually replicate pre-pandemic findings and found that relationships between emotion regulation and event intensity were largely replicated: During the pandemic, higher intensity of negative events was associated with ruminating more and higher intensity of positive events was associated with savoring more and sharing more about them. Symptoms of psychopathology (anxiety, depression, and psychoticism) were not associated with ruminating about negative events, contrary to pre-pandemic observations, or sharing about negative events. However, psychopathology symptoms were positively associated with savoring positive events. The current results highlight the importance of context in daily life emotion regulation and suggest that adaptive emotion regulation may look different for adolescents during a major disruption to daily life

Associations between adverse childhood experiences, parent-child and peer attachment relationships, and daily-life self-harm in adolescents

Objective: Self-harm is a leading cause of death and injury worldwide and is especially common amongst adolescents. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are characterized as a risk factor for self-harm within the Integrated-Motivational Volitional (IMV) model. However, it remains unclear whether ACEs are associated with self-harm thoughts, behaviours, or both. Moreover, research that investigates potential protective factors in the association between ACEs and self-harm is scarce. Here, we investigated whether ACEs were associated with lifetime and current self-harm thoughts and behaviours, and whether parent-child or peer attachment relationship quality influenced this association. Additionally, we explored whether specific types of ACEs were differentially associated with self-harm. Method: N=1014 adolescents (Age, Mean (SD) = 14.05 years (1.91), 66.66% female) were recruited from the general population via schools across Flanders (Belgium). Retrospective questionnaires were used to assess ACEs, lifetime self-harm thoughts and behaviours, and paternal, maternal, and peer attachment relationship quality. Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) was used to assess current self-harm thoughts and behaviours, 10x/day for 6 days. Results: Multilevel analyses demonstrated associations between ACEs and lifetime and current self-harm thoughts and behaviours, that were attenuated by a high-quality maternal attachment relationship. Specific types of ACEs (e.g., sexual victimization) were more strongly associated with lifetime and current self-harm thoughts and behaviours. Conclusions: The study provides evidence for ACEs as a pre-motivational phase variable within the IMV model. Clinicians are encouraged to consider exposure to ACEs and the potential of maternal relationships to buffer their impact in the prevention and management of adolescent self-harm