A Prospective Investigation of Parenting, Emotion Regulation, and Adolescents’ Stress Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Adaptive emotion regulation during stressful events supports positive psychological adjustment. For example, cognitive reappraisal of emotion (i.e., construing emotion-relevant stimuli in unemotional terms) reduces unpleasant emotions (Gross, 1998) and is associated with fewer stress-related symptoms than expressive suppression of emotion (i.e., inhibiting emotion-expressive behavior) (Moore et al., 2008). Given that children who perceive their parents as warm and affectionate also evidence improved adjustment, including greater emotional responsiveness and stability (Khaleque, 2013), we predicted that parenting quality would influence adolescents’ use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression strategies, which, in turn, would influence youth’s stress responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that warm and affectionate parenting would be associated with adolescents’ lower stress responses to the COVID-19 pandemic because it promotes more cognitive reappraisal and less expressive suppression.
This investigation drew on an ongoing longitudinal study of 206 children (51% male) who were ethnically/racially diverse (47% Hispanic, 24% multiethnic/racial, 18.5% Black, 10% White, 0.5% Asian) to evaluate a multiple mediation model from parental warmth and affection in early adolescence (Mage_W1 = 12.2; SD = 0.35) to adolescents’ use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression emotion regulation strategies before the pandemic (Mage_W2 = 14.2; SD = 0.42) to changes in perceived stress from age 14 to the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 (Mage_W3 = 15.2; SD = 0.52). Youth completed the Parental Acceptance and Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ: Rhoner et al., 1978) at Wave 1 (age 12), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ: Gross & John, 2003) at Wave 2 (age 14 pre-COVID), and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS: Cohen et al., 1983) at both Waves 2 and 3 (age 14 pre-COVID and age 15 post-COVID). All analyses controlled for sex, ethnicity/race, income-to-needs poverty ratio, and pre-COVID stress. Missing data were estimated using the EM algorithm in SPSS V27.
Table 1 depicts bivariate relations among study variables, and Table 2 depicts multiple mediation results using Hayes’ Process routine across 10,000 bootstraps. Parental warmth and affection at age 12 predicted increased stress during the pandemic over and above pre-pandemic stress, and cognitive reappraisal, but not expressive suppression, partially mediated this pathway.
These findings supported our hypothesis that warm and affectionate parenting would be positively associated with cognitive reappraisal, and cognitive reappraisal would evidence negative concurrent relations with stress. However, the positive relation between cognitive reappraisal and adolescents’ stress response to Covid-19 was unexpected. As suggested by Sheppes and Gross (2011), these findings indicate that, rather than universally positive or negative, the effectiveness of specific emotion regulation techniques may vary depending on the timing and emotional intensity of a stressor. Because cognitive reappraisal entails attending to unpleasant stimuli, it may not be beneficial in the immediate aftermath of a stressor but may become more useful over time (Moore et al., 2008). Thus, we will test this additional hypothesis (i.e., stressor duration will moderate this indirect pathway) using data from a second wave of COVID-19 adjustment data that we will collect in a fourth data wave this fall (age ~15.8).

Authors

• AnnaMaria Boullion, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Tuppett M. Yates, University of California - Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author