The effects of emotion regulation strategies on positive and negative affect in early adolescents

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that impaired emotion regulation (ER) may play an important role in the development of youth psychopathology. However, little research has explored the effects of ER strategies on affect in early adolescents. In Study 1 (n = 76), we examined if early adolescents are able to use distraction and whether the effects of this strategy are similar to talking to one’s mother. In Study 2 (n = 184), we compared the effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination. In both studies, participants received instructions on how to regulate their emotions after a standardised negative mood induction. In general, the results indicated that distraction, but also cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, had promising short-term effects on positive and negative affect in early adolescents. These findings suggest that targeting adaptive ER skills, such as distraction, acceptance, and cognitive reappraisal, may be an important strategy to prevent or treat psychological problems in early adolescents.

KEYWORDS:

• Early adolescents
• emotion regulation
• distraction
• cognitive reappraisal
• acceptance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It should be noted that, while previous studies typically induced active distraction by providing explicit instructions directing participants to think about something unrelated to the emotional stimulus, both Study 1 and Study 2 aimed at inducing passive distraction (Webb et al., 2012). More specifically, participants were asked to engage in a task that was unrelated to the sad movie clip.

2 The results of a repeated measures ANOVA with Time (T2, T3) and Emotion (happy, sad, angry, anxious) as the within-subject factors and Condition (distraction, talk) as between-subject factor indicated a significant three-way interaction between Time, Emotion, and Condition F(3, 66) = 5.17, p = .003,  = .19.

3 The results of a repeated measures ANOVA with Time (T2, T3) and Emotion (happy, sad, angry, anxious) as the within-subject factors and Condition (rumination, distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance) as between-subject factor indicated a significant three-way interaction between Time, Emotion, and Condition F(9, 426) = 2.63, p = .006,  = .05.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Special Research Fund of Ghent University, Belgium [grant number 01D31513].