Emotion regulation difficulties in real-life: Variability and predictability of daily and moment-to-moment emotions of mothers and adolescents

• In Event: Studying the Dynamics of Parenting Adolescents on a Momentary Timescale

Abstract

Introduction. Parents play an important role in nurturing adolescents’ emotion regulation (Allen & Manning, 2007), for example by modeling how to regulate emotions (Morris et al., 2007). During adolescence, many parents and adolescents experience conflicts (Laursen & Collins, 2009), which can play an important role in adolescents’ emotion regulation. Whether or not conflict interactions result in positive outcomes depends on how emotions are handled during conflicts. In the present study, we investigated to what extent variability and predictability of mothers’ and adolescents’ daily and moment-to-moment emotions were associated with their self-reported emotion regulation difficulties.
We expected that high daily variability might point at regulation difficulties (Maciejewski et al., 2014), but that more emotional variability in moment-to-moment dyadic conflict interactions might point at more optimal opportunities for development (Van der Giessen et al., 2013). On the other hand, positive health outcomes have been related to the predictability of daily emotions (i.e., how often patterns repeat; Jenkins et al., 2019), but in parent-adolescent moment-to-moment conflict interactions high predictability of negative emotions might point at becoming “stuck” in negative states (Main et al., 2016).
Method. We used data of 92 mother-adolescent dyads (i.e., the observation sample of RADAR; Van der Giessen et al., 2014). At T1, mothers were on average 44.87 years old (SD = 4.83) and adolescents were 13.01 years old (SD = 0.52; 41.3% girls).
Three sources of data were collected from mothers and adolescents during five annual measurement waves:
1) Self-report: Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004).
2) Daily emotions: Experience Sampling for three weeks per year, 5 days per week (Maciejewski et al., 2014).
3) Moment-to-moment emotions: Videotaped conflict interactions, which were coded using the SPecific AFFect coding system (SPAFF; Gottman et al., 1996; Van der Giessen et al., 2014).
As indicators of variability, we used the Mean Average Successive Difference in anger reports for the first week per year (Maciejewski et al., 2015) and the number of transitions per minute between SPAFF codes. Predictability will be calculated using Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA; Coco & Dale, 2014; Main et al., 2016; Webber & Zbilut, 2005).
Results. Initial analyses showed that emotion regulation of mothers and adolescents changed over the course of five years (Figure 1). Daily and moment-to-moment variability decreased over the years for both. Adolescent-reported emotion regulation difficulties seemed to decrease at first, but increased again in late adolescence. Table 1 shows correlations between the measures at wave 5. Self-reported emotion regulation difficulties and moment-to-moment variability of mothers and adolescents were significantly associated. Furthermore, in line with expectations, adolescents’ regulation difficulties were associated with less emotional variability of mothers during conflict interactions. Mothers’ regulation difficulties were associated with higher variability of adolescents’ daily anger. Results on predictability of emotions will be presented during the conference. The findings suggest that emotion regulation difficulties might run in families and that interventions should not target only adolescents or mothers individually, but families as a whole.

Authors

• Monika H. Donker, Universiteit Utrecht
  Presenting Author

• Danielle Van Der Giessen, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dominique Maciejewski, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Wim Meeus, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Branje, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author