Adverse Childhood Experiences and Symptoms in Early Adulthood: The Role of Adolescents’ Emotion Differentiation

• In Event: 2-119 - Childhood Adversity and Youth Outcomes: Identifying Intergenerational and Longitudinal Pathways of Risk and Resilience

Integrative Statement

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) portend emotion regulation difficulties and the development of internalizing symptoms for youth (e.g., McLaughlin & Lambert, 2017). However, it is unknown how ACEs impact the way youth experience and regulate negative emotions (NE) in everyday life, and how these daily experiences contribute to future internalizing symptoms. We test two affective mechanisms that might link ACEs to anxiety over time: negative emotional differentiation (NED) and perseverative cognition (PC). NED is a developmental ability (Nook et al., 2018) to differentiate broad negative emotional experiences into discrete emotion categories (Barrett et al., 2001). Low NED has been linked to concurrent low emotional well-being among youth (Lennarz et al., 2018). PC--excessive worry and rumination in response to NE—has been shown to prolong and amplify negative emotion, in turn increasing risk for anxiety (Verstraeten et al., 2011 ). However, it is unknown whether NED and PC in daily life might underlie long-term links between ACEs and anxiety.

Using multi-wave data from a community sample of late adolescents, we tested a) prospective associations between ACEs and NED and PC in everyday life and b) NED and PC as moderators of prospective links between ACEs and anxiety in emerging adulthood.
Data were collected during waves 1 (ages 9-10) through 6 (ages 18-25) of a longitudinal study (Margolin et al., 2010). We prospectively measured ACEs based on parents and youth reports across waves 1-5 (see Miller et al., 2014). At wave 5, participants (Mage=18.00), completed surveys for 10 consecutive days, including 10 mood items adapted from the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson et al., 1988). These items were used to generate an NED index. Four daily items asked about using PC to in response to NE (e.g., worry, self-blaming). At Waves 5 and 6 (Mage=23.00), 87 participants reported anxiety symptoms using the GAD-7 (Spitzer et al., 2006).
We derived an NED index for each participant by calculating the within-person average interitem correlations (AICs) between all possible pairs of NE across the ten diary entries (e.g., Kashdan et al., 2010). We then subtracted this coefficient from 1.0 to reverse the score so that higher AICs scores indicated better NED.

As expected, ACEs predicted lower NED b= -.21, p =.04) and increased use of daily PC (b=.28, p=.03). PC and NED were negatively correlated (r=-.23, p=.04). Controlling for anxiety in late adolescence, NED moderated the link between ACEs and anxiety levels in emerging adulthood (b= -.31, p=.01). For adolescents with low (-1 SD), or average NED more ACEs predicted higher anxiety. However, at high NED levels (+1 SD), ACEs did not predict anxiety (see Figure 1). Though PC was higher among high-ACEs youth (r=.24, p=.03), it did not increase risks for anxiety symptoms or moderate links between ACEs to anxiety in emerging adulthood.

Our findings suggest that ACEs disrupt the development of negative emotional granularity, which in turn strengthens prospective links between ACEs and anxiety symptoms. Future interventions should help at-risk youth to distinguish between various negative emotions to facilitate better mental health.

Authors

• Reout Arbel, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Kelly F. M. Kazmierski, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah L Schacter, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author