Adolescent Emotion Regulation and Emotion Discourse with Friends: Similarities and Differences Across Sex

• In Event: 3-161 - Unpacking Emotion Regulation within Adolescent Peer Relationships: Innovative Approaches

Integrative Statement

Adolescence has a changing emotional and social landscape, as emotion regulation continues to develop and friendships increasingly focus on intimacy and discourse (Bailen et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2012). Friendships are an important social context in which adolescents express and regulate their emotions (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014). Discussing emotions with friends is one avenue by which friends can socialize adolescents’ emotions (Zeman et al., 2012). However, little is known about how adolescent’s emotion regulation abilities may impact how adolescents engage with friends about emotions during discourse. The present study examines how adolescent emotion regulation is related to ways that adolescents discuss emotions with friends. Because girls and boys have unique emotional experiences with peers in adolescence due to gendered socialization around emotions throughout early and middle childhood (Zahn-Waxler, 2010), we also examined potential moderation by sex.
Participants were 30 adolescent-parent-friend triads (60% female, 40% male; adolescent M = 14.40 years, SD = 1.47 years, range = 13-18 years). Adolescents reported their emotion regulation abilities (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, Gratz & Roemer, 2004) and completed a discourse task with their friend about upsetting and happy events. Transcripts of adolescent-friend conversations were coded for adolescent expressivity and time spent discussing emotions (α = .82-.84)
Regressions indicate that adolescent emotion regulation was related to how adolescents expressed and discussed emotions with friends, with some evidence of moderation by adolescent sex. Specifically, adolescents reporting more difficulty with emotional awareness were less expressive of negative emotions (B = -.40) and spent less time discussing their emotions with their friend (B = -.47). Adolescents reporting more difficulty with emotional clarity were less expressive of positive emotions with friends (B = -.47). Regarding moderation, boys reporting more difficulty accepting their emotions spent more time discussing their emotions with their friend (Figure 1). This association was not significant for girls.
Taken together, findings indicate that adolescent emotion regulation is related to how adolescents express and discuss emotions with friends. In particular, for both girls and boys, having less awareness or clarity of their own emotional experience corresponded to less engagement with their friends about their emotions. Because conversations for this study included emotion prompts, perhaps these adolescents engaged less extensively in emotion-related discourse with their friends because doing so was confusing or uncomfortable. Interestingly, boys who had difficulty accepting their emotions discussed their emotions more with friends, perhaps using friends as a resource to process their emotional experience and receive support. This relation may have been non-significant for girls in part because of the greater normativity of emotion-related discourse in girls’ friendships (Rose et al., 2002). In our presentation, we will also compare patterns for adolescent-friend discourse with patterns we observed for adolescent-parent discourse, as parents remain important socializers in adolescence. Future studies should examine friends’ emotion regulation abilities and how “fit” between adolescent and friend in regard to emotion regulation skill and style may affect how they discuss emotions together.

Authors

• Rachel Miller-Slough, Duke University Medical Center
  Presenting Author

• Julie Dunsmore, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author