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Browsing by Subject "Emotion regulation"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Cognitive-Affective Strategies and Early Adversity as Modulators of Psychosocial Stress Reactivity in Children and Adolescents
    (2013-09) Johnson, Anna
    The transition to adolescence is a key period in the reshaping of systems central to emotion and stress, including maturation of neural networks involved in cognitive-affective regulation and neuroendocrine changes driven by pubertal hormones. Adolescents experience an increased prevalence of everyday stressful events and seem to exhibit increased biological stress reactivity in response to psychosocial stressors. However, there is limited developmental evidence regarding what strategies adolescents use to regulate responses to stressors and even less evidence regarding how these regulatory strategies impact physiological stress reactivity. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore cognitive-affective strategies and early life experiences as predictors of physiological reactivity to a social stressor before and after the pubertal transition. The first study examined associations between cognitive-affective strategies and cortisol reactivity to the Trier Social Stress Test for Children in typically developing children and adolescents. Across age and gender, higher trait levels of cognitive reappraisal of emotion predicted higher cortisol reactivity. The second study extended these findings by testing the impact of early life stress on the development of cognitive-affective and stress regulatory systems before and after the pubertal transition. In contrast to findings within the typically developing youth, cognitive-affective strategies did not predict cortisol reactivity in post-institutionalized internationally adopted youth. Findings are discussed in terms of future research directions and implications for the development of intervention efforts to promote self-regulation during the transition to adolescence.
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    Direct and indirect approaches to emotion regulation in children.
    (2010-09) Kesek, Amanda Christine
    The current study examined the impact of both relatively direct and relatively indirect approaches to emotion regulation in children. In Study 1, 5-year-old children (N = 83) were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions in which they were either trained to reappraise emotional pictures or trained in an irrelevant classification task. The efficacy of reappraisal training was assessed in terms of self-reported arousal, physiological response (skin conductance response), and performance on tasks thought to be influenced by mood (verbal fluency and the Children's Embedded Figures Test, a measure of global and local processing). Children who were trained to reappraise emotional stimuli demonstrated attenuated emotional reactivity to negative stimuli relative to children in the control condition. Furthermore, reappraisal training was related to enhanced performance on the verbal fluency task, thought to be influenced by positive mood, although these effects were only evident when the task was administered immediately after the post-training assessment. However, there was no reduction in self-reported valence and arousal associated with reappraisal training, and there was no relation between physiological responding and executive function (EF), temperament, or parenting. Study 2 used EEG to examine the neural correlates of emotion regulation in the context of relatively indirect task instructions, with a particular focus on the late positive potential (LPP), in children between 6 and 12 years (N = 49) As expected, the amplitude of the LPP was influenced by both valence and response. In particular, the amplitude of the LPP associated with an evaluative response (i.e. decide whether you like or dislike the picture) was larger than the amplitude of the LPP associated with a non-evaluative response (i.e. decide whether or not there is a person in the picture), but only for the older children. Furthermore, this modulation was related to better performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort, a measure of EF, controlling for age and IQ. These results add to our knowledge of the development of emotion regulation, suggesting that diverse strategies, including both direct and indirect approaches to emotion regulation, may be an effective means of modulating arousal in children, but at different points in development.
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    Emotion regulation and health behavior: effects of negative affect and emotion regulation strategies on eating and smoking
    (2013-02) Keenan, Nora Kathleen
    Negative affect (NA) and deficits in emotion regulation (ER) are associated with poorer behavioral self-regulation across multiple health domains. Specifically, people who report more NA and have difficulty regulating negative emotions are more likely to engage in emotional eating and eating disordered behavior. Among smokers, NA is associated with higher rates of smoking and more difficulty with cessation. Though ER approaches vary in effectiveness, implementing ER strategies is one promising way of improving self-regulation of eating and other health behaviors. The current research compares the effects of several ER strategies on distress and eating behavior (Study 1), and compares ER skills of smokers versus nonsmokers (Study 2). In Study 1, participants (N = 114) were assigned to one of four ER conditions (suppression, cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness, and a no-instruction control), watched a movie clip to induce NA, and completed a tasting activity. Results showed that, compared to mindfulness or reappraisal, suppression was associated with eating more sweets; furthermore, this effect was stronger for those people naturally tending toward suppression or emotional eating. Study 2 compared ER profiles of daily smokers (N = 99) and nonsmokers from Study 1 (N = 114). Results indicated that, compared to nonsmokers, smokers had significantly poorer ER skills and relied on less effective ER strategies (e.g., suppression). In sum, this research provides a stepping-stone toward improved interventions to facilitate behavioral change processes by linking habitual ER vulnerabilities to health risk behaviors and providing a controlled lab-based test of different ER strategies on health behavior regulation.
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    Emotion Regulation and Spatial Memory
    (2018-04-10) Sewon, Oh
    The emotion and memory has been studied for a long time, but the emotion was mostly induced before their main memory task and the relationship between emotion regulation and spatial memory was rarely studied. We conducted one hour experiment with university students for last one semester and analyzed using Excel 2016 in the correlation between emotion regulation self-report measures and spatial memory task accuracy. DERS supported our hypothesis weakly but ACS didn’t show the similar flow.
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    The Role of Stressor Controllability in Regulatory Strategy Use Effectiveness: A Daily Diary Examination of Strategy-Situation Fit
    (2022-09) Mischel, Emily
    The current study sought to increase understanding of college student regulatory strategy use by examining the strategy-situation fit hypothesis using daily diary methods. Specifically, the study examined the role of controllability of a stressor on the associations between strategy-situation fit and well-being (with different strategies hypothesized to be more adaptive in high or low control situations). Participants were 221 undergraduate students, 18 years or older from two Midwestern universities, who completed daily diary surveys electronically for 14 days during the Fall 2020 semester. Measures were included to assess regulatory strategy use (i.e., problem-solving, reappraisal, acceptance), stressors and stressor controllability, and well-being indicators (i.e., positive and negative affect, depression and anxiety symptoms, perceived stress, problem resolution). Several multilevel models were used to test hypotheses. Problem-solving and reappraisal use were positively associated with stressor controllability whereas acceptance was negatively associated with controllability. On days when students experienced more objectively controllable stressors, they reported greater well-being than on days with less controllable stressors. Each regulatory strategy was associated with greater well-being. Use of acceptance was most consistently associated with greater well-being across indicators. Interactions between controllability and regulatory strategy use in predicting well-being indicators were largely nonsignificant and did not support the strategy-situation fit hypothesis. The exception was that students reported lower perceived stress when they used more problem-solving in high-control situations than if they used less problem-solving. Results are discussed in terms of previous research and future implications.
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    Vagal flexibility and parenting behaviors in post-deployed military fathers
    (2018-05) Zhang, Na
    The lives of about two million American children have been affected by the military deployment of a parent. A parent's deployment influences children's adjustment through compromised parenting. While an emerging body of literature suggests that effective parenting requires parental emotion regulation, few studies have focused on fathers. In addition, limited knowledge exists about whether or how fathers' emotion regulation might affect their responsivity to a parent training program. With a focus on military fathers who had been deployed since 2001, the current research consisted of two studies that investigated vagal flexibility as an index of physiological emotion regulation and social engagement in relation to observed parenting behaviors. The first study, entitled "Military fathers' nurturing parenting: Psychological and physiological flexibility both matter", demonstrated that vagal flexibility buffers against the negative effects of psychological inflexibility (i.e. self-reported experiential avoidance) on observed emotion-related parenting. The second study, entitled "Adapting to 'ADAPT': Vagal flexibility predicts military fathers' changes in parenting following a parent training program", tested the effect of vagal flexibility in predicting the degree of changes in observed parenting skills at 1-year follow-up in a randomized controlled trial of the After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools/ADAPT program. These two studies provided evidence for the role of cardiac vagal tone as a correlate of emotion-related parenting and a tailoring variable to inform precision-based parenting programming for military fathers.
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    Who eats their feelings, and who sweats them out?: Understanding how individuals and their romantic partners use eating and exercise for emotion regulation
    (2022-04) Jones, Rachael
    Researchers argue that individuals’ emotion regulation affects their long-term health outcomes by leading them to engage in health behaviors to cope with their stress and negative emotions. However, there is a need to isolate health behavior for this purpose from individuals’ typical health behavior, and to include health-promoting behaviors, such as exercise, in addition to health-compromising behaviors, such as eating junk food. Furthermore, emotion regulation and health behavior often occur around close others and are influenced by them, highlighting the need to study the social context around these processes. Thus, this dissertation examines how individuals’ and their romantic partners’ emotion regulation and typical health behavior predict their use of eating and exercise to down-regulate negative emotion. Participants reported their typical health habits and use of eating and exercise for emotion regulation, including how frequently they engaged in the behaviors and how they deviated from their typical health behavior when doing so. Participants’ balanced (i.e., constructive and effective) emotion regulation was measured by well-established self-report surveys as well as by their behavior during conflict discussions with their romantic partners, which was coded by trained observers. The results indicated that balanced emotion regulation was not related to individuals’ typical health behavior but was related to their health behavior for emotion regulation. Furthermore, participants reported significantly changing their typical health behavior when using it to cope. Actor Partner Interdependence Model regressions revealed that participants lower in self-reported balanced emotion regulation engaged in eating for emotion regulation more frequently than those higher, especially if they were women. Their typical junk food consumption was not predictive. In contrast, those who typically exercised more in their daily lives used exercise for emotion regulation more frequently than those who exercised less. They also tended to increase their exercise more when using it to regulate their emotions, especially if they were men. Balanced emotion regulation was not related to individuals’ use of exercise to manage their feelings, although those higher in balanced emotion regulation used exercise significantly more often than they used eating for this purpose. Individuals’ partners’ tendencies were sometimes associated with individuals’ eating for emotion regulation, but not with their exercise. Self-reported balanced emotion regulation was more strongly related to other variables than was behavioral balanced emotion regulation. These findings suggest that health behavior for emotion regulation differs from typical health behavior, more dysregulated individuals may eat (but not exercise) more often to cope with their negative feelings, and experience with exercise may be needed to employ physical activity for emotion regulation.