Poster #138 - Stress Responses as a Potential Mechanism Linking Poor Emotional Clarity with Aggression in Middle School

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Stressors associated with reorganization of peer groups in middle school may heighten risk for aggression in youth. Thus, developing adaptive stress responses is an essential task during this time. Contemporary approaches to conceptualizing stress responses distinguish among four categories: effortful engagement (efforts to modify or adapt to stressors; e.g., cognitive restructuring), effortful disengagement (efforts directed away from stressors; e.g., avoidance), involuntary engagement (automatic responses directed towards stressors; e.g., rumination), and involuntary disengagement (automatic responses directed away from stressors; e.g., emotional numbing). Youth who engage in more involuntary stress responses show higher rates of aggression, whereas youth who use more effortful engagement show lower rates of aggression. Identifying factors that shape stress responses may therefore provide insight into the emergence of aggression during this developmental stage. This study will examine one potential antecedent of stress responses, emotional clarity (i.e., ability to identify one’s emotions), and will test whether maladaptive stress responses help to account for the contribution of emotional clarity to overt and relational forms of aggression across the transition to middle school.

Participants were 636 children assessed in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. During a classroom assessment, youth completed well-established measures of emotional clarity (e.g., “I usually know how I am feeling.”) and responses to peer stressors, including subscales assessing effortful engagement (e.g., “When kids are mean to me, I think of different ways to change or fix the problem.”), effortful disengagement (“When something goes wrong with other kids, I say to myself ‘this isn’t real.’”), involuntary engagement (“When kids are mean to me, I get really jumpy.”), and involuntary disengagement (“I just freeze when things like this happen, I can’t do anything.”); teachers completed a measure assessing youth’s overt (e.g., "This child hits or kicks peers”) and relational (e.g., “This child spreads rumors or gossips about some peers”) aggression. Emotional clarity was assessed in 4th and 5th grade; stress responses and aggression were assessed in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades.

Based on prior research, a latent variable reflecting maladaptive stress responses (lower levels of effortful engagement and higher levels of effortful disengagement and involuntary responses) will be created. Two separate structural equation models will be evaluated to explore the direct and indirect pathways from emotional clarity to each type of aggression via stress responses (see Figure 1). We hypothesize that, adjusting for earlier levels of the relevant constructs, lower levels of emotional clarity will predict more maladaptive stress responses, which will predict more overt and relational aggression.. Bootstrapping will be utilized to estimate the indirect effects. Exploratory multi-group comparison analyses will examine whether paths differ between girls and boys. This research will clarify the role that one aspect of emotional competence plays in shaping developmental outcomes across the transition to middle school. Support for the hypotheses would suggest that future research should investigate interventions aimed at enhancing emotional clarity to promote more adaptive stress responses and decrease associated aggression.

Authors

• Erin Wood, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Karen Rudolph, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign