Emotional self-control and dysregulation: A dual-process analysis of pathways to externalizing/internalizing symptomatology and positive well-being in younger adolescents - PubMed (original) (raw)

Emotional self-control and dysregulation: A dual-process analysis of pathways to externalizing/internalizing symptomatology and positive well-being in younger adolescents

Thomas A Wills et al. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2016.

Abstract

Objectives: There is little knowledge about how emotional regulation contributes to vulnerability versus resilience to substance use disorder. With younger adolescents, we studied the pathways through which emotion regulation attributes are related to predisposing factors for disorder.

Methods: A sample of 3561 adolescents (M age 12.5 years) was surveyed. Measures for emotional self-control (regulation of sadness and anger), emotional dysregulation (angerability, affective lability, and rumination about sadness or anger), and behavioral self-control (planfulness and problem solving) were obtained. A structural model was analyzed with regulation attributes related to six intermediate variables that are established risk or protective factors for adolescent substance use (e.g., academic involvement, stressful life events). Criterion variables were externalizing and internalizing symptomatology and positive well-being.

Results: Indirect pathways were found from emotional regulation to symptomatology through academic competence, stressful events, and deviance-prone attitudes and cognitions. Direct effects were also found: from emotional dysregulation to externalizing and internalizing symptomatology; emotional self-control to well-being; and behavioral self-control (inverse) to externalizing symptomatology. Emotional self-control and emotional dysregulation had independent effects and different types of pathways.

Conclusions: Adolescents scoring high on emotional dysregulation are at risk for substance dependence because of more externalizing and internalizing symptomatology. Independently, youth with better behavioral and emotional self-control are at lower risk. This occurs partly through relations of regulation constructs to environmental variables that affect levels of symptomatology (e.g., stressful events, poor academic performance). Effects of emotion regulation were found at an early age, before the typical onset of substance disorder.

Keywords: Adolescents; Behavioral self-control; Emotion regulation; Mediation; Symptomatology.

Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.. All rights reserved.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest

No conflicts declared.

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Structural model of distal, intermediate, and criterion variables. Straight single-headed arrows represent path effects, curved double-headed arrows represent covariances. Values are standardized coefficients; all are significant at p < .01. All covariances among the distal variables, the regulation variables, and the intermediate variables were included in the model but these three sets of covariances are represented only schematically in the figure. R2 figures indicate the variance accounted for in a given construct by all constructs to the left of it in the model. Six paths that were included in the model but were excluded from the figure, for graphical simplicity, are in Table 3.

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