Poster #188 - Adolescents’ Daily Stressful Demands and Affective Well-being: The Moderating Role of Gender

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Sex, Gender

Integrative Statement

Introduction: As adolescents navigate their new developmental landscapes, the social and situations changes in their lives provide opportunities for experiencing normative stressful demands. Although these demands afford opportunities for the development and refinement of regulatory strategies (e.g., coping), they also have the potential to adversely impact adolescents’ affect. Adolescents are still developing in brain regions associated with regulatory affective processing. As such, experiencing greater stressful demands may have important implications for their behavior. However, extant research has largely relied on aggregate measures, which ignore the important variability in young peoples’ lived experiences. Further, despite demonstrated differences in adolescents’ affective regulation, gender differences have largely remained understudied. Therefore, the goal of the current study is to investigate gender differences in the association between experiencing stressful demands and adolescents' affect at the daily level.

Method: Daily diary survey data were collected from adolescents (N=53; Mage=17.40; SD=.79; 62% female) in a Western state of the United States. After a baseline survey, adolescents completed seven daily surveys between 8:00-11:59pm about their emotional experiences and life demands each day. In total, adolescents provided 349 assessments. To measure daily affect each day, adolescents’ completed the 10-item short-form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Mackinnona, 1999). To assess stressful demands, participants indicated whether the following four stressful events or situations were experienced that day: (1) had a lot of work at home, (2) had a lot of work at school, (3) had a lot of demands made by family, and (4) had a lot of demands made by friends (Kiang, 2006). These demands were summed to create a composite of daily demands. Adolescents also provided an overall evaluation of their day on a scale ranging from awful (1) to great (5) (Howe, 2011) and demographic information.

Results: Regression analyses were used to examine relationships between daily demands and affect. Huber-White adjusted standard errors were used to account for nested structure of the data. Adolescents experienced one or more stressful demands on most days (65%). Table 1 displayed model results. Only stressful demands and overall day ratings positively predicted positive mood. Experiencing more stressful demands and being older predicted greater negative affect. However, more positive overall day ratings were inversely associated negative affect. The interaction between daily stressful demands and gender also was significant. Simple slope analyses revealed that this interaction was only significant for boys, such that experiencing greater demands was associated with boys’ greater negative mood (boys: b=.30, p<.05; girls: b=.02, p=.69).

Implications: While many aggregate studies suggest girls are particularly reactive to stressors, findings from the current study highlight experiences of stressful demands as potential risk factors for boys’ negative affect at the daily level. This is particularly important given adolescent boys are less likely to use adaptive affective regulatory strategies and studies suggest that adolescents make poor behavioral decisions with affective instability. Findings from the current study call for increased attention to boys’ affective well-being and for prevention efforts to help young people navigate their new developmental demands.

Authors

• Laura J Finan, Illinois State University
  Presenting Author

• Sofia Lacklen, Berkeley City College
  Non-Presenting Author