Emotion Dysregulation and Inhibition Within Adolescent Best Friendships: Links to Depression and Bullying

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

Integrative Statement

Best friendships in adolescence provide a unique opportunity for youth to learn and practice ways of regulating emotions within an egalitarian social structure. This intimate type of relationship provides a sense of security and safety to express negative emotions that is not present in the broader peer group or smaller cliques (Murphy et al., 2015). The type of emotion experienced and expressed is also an important contextual variable to consider as decisions to inhibit or express emotions are related to different social and psychological outcomes that may differ by gender. However, research has often examined negative emotion as a global construct without examining the unique effects of discrete emotions (Adrian et al., 2011). In this study, we examined two emotion management responses (dysregulation and inhibition) to anger, sadness, and worry within reciprocated, same-sex friendship dyads, and the relations to symptoms of depression.
Participants were 202 youth (M = 12.65 years, 52.5% girls, 76.2% White, middle class) who participated in best friend dyads. Adolescents reported on their emotion regulation using the CEMS dysregulation and inhibition scales for anger, sadness, and worry (Zeman et al., 2001, 2010). Youth completed a measure of depressive symptoms (CDI, Kovacs, 1992) and bullying.
To account for the mutual influence within dyadic relations, Actor-Partner Interdependence Modeling was used. Associations within individuals (actor effects) and between dyad members (partner effects) were modeled while accounting for the effects of the other. Gender was a moderator. There was a significant actor effect in which more global emotion dysregulation was related to more depressive symptoms. When examined by individual emotions, the findings provided a more nuanced picture. All three emotions had an actor effect similar to the global dysregulation finding. For anger dysregulation, there was also a Partner x Sex interaction; for boys, more anger dysregulation by Friend A was related to fewer depressive symptoms in Friend B. For sadness dysregulation, there was an Actor x Sex interaction; sadness dysregulation was related to more depressive symptoms for both boys and girls. For global inhibition, there was a significant actor effect; more inhibition was related to more depressive symptoms. When considering specific emotions, there was a significant actor effect for sadness indicating more sadness suppression was related to more depression. For bullying, there was a significant Actor x Sex effect such that for girls, more dysregulation was related to more bullying. There was a significant actor effect for anger dysregulation. For Inhibition, the only significant finding was a sadness dysregulation x gender effect; for girls, more inhibition was related to less bullying. (see Table for t-values and significance)
In sum, these findings illustrate the importance of going beyond examining emotion regulation using global negative emotionality indices as this obscures the more nuanced and interesting findings that are present by emotion type. The results also indicate that dysregulation and inhibition of emotion within the context of best friendships are two separate responses to negative emotion that do not represent the flip side of the same coin.

Authors

• Janice Zeman, William & Mary
  Presenting Author

• Sara Franklin-Gillette, William & Mary
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Elizabeth Miller, The College of William & Mary
  Non-Presenting Author