Emotion Regulation Attenuates the Prospective Links from Peer Victimization to Internalizing Symptoms during Middle Childhood

ABSTRACT

Objective: Peer victimization has been shown to be a robust predictor of depressive and anxiety symptoms over time. Relatively little is known, however, regarding what protective factors may attenuate these associations and render youth more resilient to this interpersonal stressor. Therefore, the current study examined sadness and worry regulation as moderators of the prospective links from peer victimization to internalizing symptoms over a 1-year period.

Method: Participants included 464 predominantly Caucasian children (54.7% boys; ages 7–10), as well as their homeroom teachers, from an elementary school located in the Midwestern United States. Child and teacher reports of peer victimization and child reports of sadness and worry regulation were assessed at Time 1. Children also provided ratings of depressive and anxiety symptoms at Time 1, approximately 6 months later (Time 2), and again approximately 1 year later (Time 3). Moderating effects were evaluated using a series of multivariate latent growth curve models.

Results: Consistent with expectations, sadness regulation attenuated the prospective links from both child- and teacher-reported peer victimization to internalizing symptoms. Worry regulation also attenuated the prospective links from teacher-reported peer victimization to internalizing symptoms. The moderating effects of emotion regulation did not differ according to gender.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that the ability to effectively manage feelings of sadness and worry may serve as a buffer against the internalizing symptoms associated with peer victimization. Additional research is needed to determine whether interventions focused on enhancing victims’ emotion regulation skills reduce their subsequent risk for depressive and anxiety symptoms.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2020.1731819

Notes

¹ Note, however, that anger and sadness regulation were found to exacerbate the prospective association between peer victimization and relational aggression (Cooley & Fite, 2016).

² To further investigate potential differences in teachers’ ratings, peer victimization was regressed on child gender, teacher gender, and the interaction between these two variables; however, this interaction was not significant, β = .19, SE = .12, p = .26.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the American Psychological Foundation [Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Child Psychology Graduate Fellowships, John L. Cooley and Spencer C. Evans] and the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology [Routh Research and Dissertation Grants, John L. Cooley and Jennifer B. Blossom]. John L. Cooley was supported in part by a training fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health [T32 MH015442].