Abstract
Cognitive strategies that adolescents use to cope with negative emotions might show distinct profiles of cognitive emotion regulation strategies, which could be differentially associated with depressive symptoms. In total, 411 Dutch adolescents who had experienced at least one stressful life event that required some coping strategy participated in this study, including 334 nonclinical and 77 clinically depressed adolescents (12-21 years). A person-centered approach with Latent Profile Analysis was used to identify underlying profiles of cognitive emotion regulation based on the adolescents' reports of their use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies when they were confronted with stressful life events. Nine different strategies, five adaptive and four maladaptive, were used as indicators. Four profiles with distinct features were found in the nonclinical sample, as well as in the combined sample of nonclinical and clinically depressed adolescents: Low Regulators, High Regulators, Maladaptive Regulators, and Adaptive Regulators. In both samples, the High Regulators profile was most commonly used, followed by the Adaptive, Maladaptive, and Low Regulators profile. Maladaptive Regulators endorsed higher levels of depressive symptoms relative to Low, High, and Adaptive Regulators. The findings underscore the utility of using a person-centered approach in order to identify patterns of cognitive emotion regulation deficits in psychopathology.
Highlights
Emotion regulation plays an important role in psychological well-being (Thompson, 1991; Werner & Gross, 2009)
We conducted the present study to investigate whether different cognitive emotion regulation profiles in response to stressful life events can be distinguished in adolescents and whether these profiles are differentially associated with depressive symptoms
We used the idea of interaction between strategies to test whether patterns or interactions of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies play a role in depressive symptomatology in order to go beyond one single process or cognitive emotion regulation strategy and investigate whether there are more processes or combinations of cognitive emotion regulation strategies at play
Summary
Emotion regulation plays an important role in psychological well-being (Thompson, 1991; Werner & Gross, 2009). While during childhood emotions are primarily regulated on an external and behavioral level (e.g. via parental support and crying), in adolescence emotion regulation becomes more internal and cognitive (Aldwin, 2009; Kopp, 1989; Sameroff, 2010) This is because in adolescence more advanced cognitive competencies develop such as self-reflection and abstract reasoning (Garnefski, Legerstee, Kraaij, Kommer, & Teerds, 2002). We conducted the present study to investigate whether different cognitive emotion regulation profiles (i.e., patterns of cognitive emotion regulation strategies) in response to stressful life events can be distinguished in adolescents and whether these profiles are differentially associated with depressive symptoms. An increase in depressive symptoms may be averted when negatively biased associative processing is corrected by reflective processing (e.g., by putting the event into perspective) (Beevers, 2005) It is a single emotion regulation strategy that influences depressive symptomatology and the interaction between multiple strategies. We used the idea of interaction between strategies to test whether patterns or interactions of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies play a role in depressive symptomatology in order to go beyond one single process or cognitive emotion regulation strategy and investigate whether there are more processes or combinations of cognitive emotion regulation strategies at play
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