Poster #217 - Coping Strategies as Predictors of Emotional Well-Being in Anxious Solitary Adolescents

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Anxious solitude (AS) is defined as frequent shy, verbally inhibited, solitary behavior with familiar peers (Coplan et al., 1994; Gazelle & Ladd, 2003). AS adolescents face heightened anxiety in peer contexts and higher rates of peer mistreatment (Coplan et al., 1994). Coping mechanisms in response to peer mistreatment can include voluntary engagement (problem solving), voluntary disengagement (conscious avoidance), involuntary engagement (rumination), and involuntary disengagement (emotional numbing), and AS students may be more likely than their peers to use maladaptive coping strategies (Scott et al., 2015). This study explored how these coping strategies impact emotional well-being. It was hypothesized that negative coping mechanisms, such as involuntary disengagement, would increase the rate of internalizing symptoms, specifically depression and anxiety, while more positive coping strategies (e.g., voluntary engagement) were expected to decrease internalizing symptoms. These patterns were expected to be stronger for AS versus non-AS adolescents.
A total of 230 students (ngirls=131, nboys=99) were identified as anxious solitary by sociometric peer nominations conducted among school teammates (N=1,589) in the fall of sixth grade. Participants completed the Response to Stress Questionnaire (Connor-Smith et al., 2000) to identify how they would respond to hypothetical peer problems. Responses were used to compute the rate of endorsement for each coping type (voluntary engagement, voluntary disengagement, involuntary engagement, involuntary disengagement) compared to overall coping rates. In the fall of seventh grade, students completed the Children’s Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1980) to assess depressive symptoms and the Social Anxiety Scale for Children (La Greca et al., 1988) to measure anxiety.
Hierarchical regressions were used to predict internalizing symptoms in seventh grade from sixth grade AS and coping (Table 1). An AS x Involuntary Disengagement interaction indicated that consistent with expectations, low AS adolescents experienced greater depressive symptoms when they reported higher levels of involuntary disengagement (Figure 1A). In contrast, contrary to expectations, high AS adolescents experienced lower depressive symptoms at higher levels of involuntary disengagement. There was also a significant AS x Voluntary Engagement interaction predicting social anxiety, indicating that among low AS students, higher voluntary engagement predicted lower anxiety symptoms, consistent with expectations (Figure 1B). In contrast, for high AS students, voluntary engagement did not significantly predict anxiety.
Consistent with previous evidence for low AS adolescents, more effective coping was associated with lower internalizing symptoms (Findlay et al., 2009). In contrast, for high AS adolescents, coping style was less related to socioemotional outcomes. It may be that AS students’ history of peer mistreatment could make the relationship between coping and internalizing symptoms more complex. Non-AS students who utilize positive coping may feel more in control over negative peer situations and in fact may have more peer positive responses to their coping attempts. In contrast, AS children may experience mistreatment regardless of their responses to these situations (Gazelle & Druhen, 2009), thus their specific coping strategies may not predict the impact that mistreatment has on internalizing symptoms.

Authors

• Colton Chase Collins, UVa-Wise
  Presenting Author

• Madelynn Shell, UVa-Wise
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heidi Gazelle, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author