The goals of the present proposal are to examine:
- the association between adolescents' emotion regulation, self-efficacy about emotion regulation, and executive functions;
- the mediation by all aforementioned mechanisms between parenting and adolescent adjustment.
The research goals of the present proposal will go beyond the current state-of-the-art in the following innovative ways:
- assessing the associations of multiple emotion regulation strategies (rumination, inhibition, coping, dysregulated expression), across discrete negative emotions (anger and sadness), self-efficacy beliefs about the regulation of both anger and sadness, and executive functions;
- assessing the association of all aforementioned mechanisms and mental health consequences (aggressive and depressive problems) in adolescence;
- examining relations of mothers' and fathers' parenting style repertoire (i.e., including positive and negative parental styles at the same time) to aforementioned mechanisms.
One hundred adolescents (balanced for gender) and their parents will be recruited in Rome. Interviews will be conducted to assess both parent- and self-reported measures of parenting, emotion regulation, self-efficacy about emotion regulation, and aggressive and depressive symptoms. Adolescents will also complete a computerized protocol of instruments assessing executive functions. This study will be conducted following approval of the IRB from University and School ethics boards.
The proposed study is an innovative and interdisciplinary contribution
(integrating personality perspective with neuropsychological approach) to research and society by demonstrating how psychosocial adjustment in adolescence is influenced by both family and individual risk factors. These findings will have translatable implications for enhancing empirically-based prevention and intervention methods with children and adolescents.
Heightened concerns are resulting from the growing awareness of the high prevalence of mental illness, the quality of life for afflicted people and their families, and the direct and indirect costs to society. Lifetime prevalence rates in Europe for the main mental disorders are around 10% for depression, 11% for anxiety, and 2% for conduct problems (Alonso et al., 2004). Evidence is clear that adolescence is associated with increases in the prevalence of behavioral and mental health issues (e.g., Silk et al. 2003). In particular, during school age, prevalence rates are around 6.5% and 7.2% for internalizing and externalizing disorders, respectively (Faravelli et al., 2009). The economic consequences of mental illness are various and long-lasting, involving costs to the individual, the family, and society.
Self-regulation in adolescence has figured prominently into scientific inquiries about factors that contribute to psychological adjustment and well-being likely because both positive and negative adjustment in adulthood are predicted by consequences of self-regulation in childhood and adolescence (Rutter, 2011).
The strategies youths use to manage emotions (i.e., emotion regulation), youths' beliefs about the capacity to deal with emotions (i.e., self-efficacy about emotion regulation), and the ways youths manage their cognitions, attentional allocations, emotions, and behaviors (i.e., self-regulation and, in particular, executive-functions; Karoly, 1993) all have been significantly correlated with psychological maladjustment (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2010). In addition, aforementioned processes are often the focus of mental health interventions (Caprara et al., 2014; Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1992; van der Donk et al., 2013). However, most studies have addressed the contribution of these processes as independent one from another, failing to integrate findings from different research programs.
It might be that the interplay between deficits in emotion regulation, lack of self-efficacy beliefs about emotion regulation, and deficits in executive functions underpin adolescent aggressive and depressive symptoms. This proposition makes good theoretical sense, but has not yet been examined empirically. The self-regulation literature would be enhanced by a study that simultaneously taps parenting, emotion regulation, self-efficacy beliefs about emotion regulation, and executive functions in adolescence.
Furthermore, developing empirical knowledge on these inter-relations will certainly advance researchers' and professionals' ability to more quickly identify, prevent, and ameliorate the antecedents and negative consequences of poor psychological adjustment in adolescence. The present study's findings will therefore have clear translatable implications for enhancing existing empirically-based prevention and intervention methods with adolescents and with adults.
References are in the previous section.