Dimensions of Negative and Positive Emotions and Children’s Internalizing Symptoms: a Six- Wave Study of Ecological Momentary Assessment

• In Event: Parenting, Peer Victimization, and Youth Emotional Experience Predicting Adolescent Adjustment: Effects of Culture and Ethnicity

Abstract

Vulnerability to developing internalizing symptoms increases as youth enter adolescence (Costello et al., 2003). Therefore, it is important to delineate how emotional patterns increase risk for internalizing symptoms. Recent taxonomies of adolescents’ emotions emphasize the importance of emotional intensity, stability, and ability to differentiate between negative emotions (NED) to children’s well-being (Bailen et al., 2019). Despite rich theorizing, little is known about their contribution to children’s adjustment across time. Addressing this gap, we used a six-wave longitudinal investigation to test the bi-directional temporal associations between children’s emotional dimensions and internalizing symptoms. Our sample included 202 ethnically-diverse mother [Mage at baseline=40.1 years (SD=6.1] and child dyads [Mage at baseline=10.1 (SD=.90), 51% girls], who participated in the Mothers and Their Children's Health (MATCH) study. The MATCH study includes six 7-day waves of Ecological Momentary Assessment with each wave separated by 6 months. We probed for two positive emotions (PE; happy, joyful) and three negative emotion (NE; mad, sad, stress) up to eight random times per day. During each wave, children completed the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS; Chorpita et al., 2005), and mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach, 1991). Instability of NE and PE was measured by the root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) (Ebner-Priemer & Trull, 2012). NED was indexed with the intra-class correlation with absolute agreement. We used multi-level cross-lagged panel models to test both within- and between-subject effects. Between-subject associations between the emotional dimensions and symptoms were all significant (r ranges between |.17*| to |.35**). Within-subject associations were significant within a wave (r ranges between |.11*| to |.18**), but not across (r ranges between |.002| to |.11|). Results indicated that emotional intensity, instability, and differentiation may be conceptualized as manifestations of internalizing symptoms and not as risk factors for its development among typical children.

Authors

• Reout Arbel, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Tyler Mason, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Genevieve Dunton, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author