Poster #85 - Emotionships in children: Emotion-regulation relationships and associations with generalized anxiety

• In Event: Poster Session 08

Abstract

Children up-regulate and down-regulate their emotions through relationships with others, and this process is essential to forming close social bonds and maintaining children’s wellbeing (e.g., Morris et al 2007). Emotionships is the term used to describe the relationships people turn to for help regulating specific emotions (e.g., who calms down sadness versus increases happiness). Previous work has demonstrated that adults can nominate discrete emotionships and those who diversify their emotion-regulation needs across multiple relationships report higher wellbeing (Cheung et al., 2015). However, it is unknown whether this extends to children. We investigated (1) whether children can nominate discrete emotionships, and (2) how the structure of children’s emotionships correlate with psychological functioning, specifically general anxiety. Generalized anxiety, characterized by excessive worries about multiple life domains, was selected because of its high prevalence in childhood and association with poorer emotion regulation.
Participants included 186 children aged 9 to 12 years old (106 females; Mage = 10.71 years, SDage = 1.12). Children were asked to nominate up to four people they would seek out to help them regulate specific emotions (i.e., cheering up sadness, calming down anxiety, capitalizing happiness), the relationship type (e.g., friend), and how close they felt to each person (Cheung et al. 2015). The structure of children’s emotionships repertoires was assessed through: (1) breadth (i.e., number of emotion domains with at least one person listed), (2) specialization (i.e., proportion of people that only served one emotion-regulation function), and (3) perceived quality (i.e., perceived closeness to people averaged across emotion domains). Children self-reported on symptoms of generalized anxiety (Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders; Birmaher et al., 1997).
Most children reported at least one emotionship (81%) and varied in the quantity (Mquantity = 5.88, SDquantity = 2.21, Range = 0 to 12) and perceived quality (Mquality = 8.55, SDquality = 1.10, Range = 4.25 to 10) of their emotionships. Emotionships were of diverse relationship types (averaged across emotion domains): parents (40%), friends (37%), siblings (13%), teachers (3%), extended family (4%), and other (3%). Children listed more emotionships to up-regulate their excitement than to down-regulate their nervousness (p < .001) or sadness (p = .001), but the latter two did not differ (p = .887). Further, children whose emotionship repertoires were of higher breadth (p = .026) and perceived quality (p = .002) reported higher generalized anxiety. The specialization of children’s emotionships was not related to generalized anxiety.
We found that children were able to list distinct relationships that they turn to for fulfilling specific emotion-regulation needs (i.e., emotionships) and that there was variability in the quantity and quality of these relationships across children. Children turn to a host of relationships for their emotion regulation needs, but primarily parents and friends. We also found that children who were higher in generalized anxiety had someone they seek out for help regulating both positive and negative emotions. We hypothesize that anxious children may be overly reliant on relationships as a source of regulation and reassurance seeking, and that this pattern may maintain symptomology.

Authors

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Kristie Poole, Brock University

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo