Supportive Friend Emotion Socialization and Daily Dynamics of Emotional and Peer Problems in Chinese Adolescents

• In Event: Friend Socialization of Emotion in Adolescence: A Multicultural Perspective

Abstract

As children enter into adolescence, they increasingly seek social connections outside the family (Rubin et al., 2011). Thus, emotion socialization from peers, especially friends (Friend Emotion Socialization, FES; e.g., how friends respond to adolescents’ emotional expressions) may have great influence on adolescents’ emotional development. Prior research has found that youths receiving supportive responses from friends had better emotional functioning, such as less negative affect and better emotion regulation (Cui et al., 2020; Tillery et al., 2015). However, few studies have examined whether and how FES is associated with adolescent interpersonal adjustment (e.g., peer relationships). In addition, previous studies about FES exclusively focused on the mean level of adjustment outcomes. Adolescence is a stage characterized by heightened emotional and interpersonal instability (Choudhury et al., 2008; Rice & Dolgin, 2005). Adolescents with similar levels of average emotions and social connectedness may differ considerably in their daily fluctuations of emotions and perceived relatedness across days (Sang et al., 2018; Vannucci et al., 2019). Compared to the average levels, dynamic indicators such as inertia (i.e., the autoregressive coefficient between repeated assessments of a construct) and variability (i.e., the magnitude of fluctuations across a time period) can provide unique information on individuals’ psychological functioning. The present study, thus, implemented a dynamic perspective of adolescent daily experiences to examine whether and how supportive FES was associated with adolescent daily emotional experience and peer problems with a daily diary approach.
Participants were 315 Chinese adolescents (48.3% girls; Mage = 13.05 years, SD = 0.77 years). Adolescents completed the 8-item “Communication with friends” subscale from Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987) which corresponded with supportive FES (e.g., "My friends care about how I am feeling”). They also rated their daily levels of emotional problems (e.g., “upset”) and peer problems (e.g., “I had a lot of demands made by friends.”) each weekday across 2 weeks.
A multilevel first-order autoregressive model with random innovation variance (Jongerling et al., 2015) was conducted. This model simultaneously estimated mean level, inertia, and random innovation variance of indicators of adolescents’ daily experiences. It is suggested that heightened inertia indicates poor regulatory flexibility and heightened random innovation variance indicates high unpredictability of individual states (Jongerling et al., 2015; Reitsema et al., 2021). Results showed that higher supportive FES was associated with lower inertia of emotional problems but not associated with the average level and random innovation of emotional problems. Besides, adolescents with higher supportive FES had fewer daily peer problems, lower inertia, and less random fluctuations.
The current study is one of the first research examining the associations between supportive FES and adolescent daily emotional and social adjustment. The results indicated the beneficial role of FES in alleviating adolescent peer problems, but it was not associated with the levels and random fluctuations of adolescents’ daily emotional problems. Future research is needed to comprehensively examine the unique effects of specific FES strategies (e.g., reward, magnify) on a wide range of adolescent adjustment indicators with multiple methods.

Authors

• Jianjie Xu, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Hui Wang, Beijing Normal University

• Sinan Fu, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, China

• Shurou Zhang, Beijing Normal University

• Zhuo Rachel Han, Beijing Normal University