Emotion malleability beliefs predict daily positive and negative affect in adolescents

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in adolescents. 639 participants provided information about emotion malleability beliefs and emotion regulation strategies on the first day of the study and six daily measurements of PA and NA. Emotion malleability beliefs had a positive relationship with PA and a negative relationship with NA. Higher emotion malleability beliefs predicted lower carryover effects of PA and NA across assessment days. We also found that cognitive reappraisal might affect the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily affect, such that those who held high levels of malleability beliefs were more likely to engage in cognitive reappraisal and report lower NA and higher PA. The findings of the present study suggest that emotion malleability beliefs could predicate daily emotions and emotion dynamics across days in adolescents.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion malleability beliefs
• daily affect
• carryover effect
• emotion regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For details of how to deal with missing data using all available data in Bayesian estimations in Mplus, please see Asparouhov et al. (2017).

2 Dummy coding for the categorical covariates, i.e., student gender, boarding status, family structure, single child status, and family income, was used in the current study. In fact, the effect coding approach (i.e., – 0.5, and 0.5) can be applied as well. Dummy coding and effect coding are equivalent, and both give exactly the same model fit to the data, but the actual parameter estimates will differ between the two approaches. For a simple interpretation of the coefficients of these categorical covariates, we chose to use the dummy coding (Daly et al., 2016).

3 Due to the word limit, the descriptive statistics and correlations among continuous variables used in the current study were presented in a supplement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Beijing Education Sciences Planning Program during the 13th Five-Year Plan (Promotion Mechanism and Applied Research of Psychological Resilience of Middle School Students in Beijing, Grant Number: BECA2020094).