Ricerc@Sapienza

We aim to investigate how emotion (dys)regulation modulates daily associations between sadness and depression and between anger and aggression utilizing ecological momentary assessment in a community sample of 100 Italian adolescents. The first hypothesis is that if adolescents experience higher-than-usual sadness or anger on a particular day, then they also experience higher than usual depressive or aggressive symptoms, respectively. Another hypothesis is that emotion (dys)regulation will modulate these associations. Specifically, adolescents with higher anger may also have greater difficulties regulating their anger which, in turn, may led to higher aggressive symptoms. If an adolescent's sadness is higher than usual on a given day, their depressive symptoms may be more severe than usual if they also have higher than usual difficulties regulating sadness. Thus, the present study attempts to bridge a gap in existing literature by examining a) whether specific mood states (i.e., sadness and aggression) are associated with the emergence of specific psychopathology symptoms (i.e., depressive and aggressive symptoms) on a daily basis in adolescents, b) whether intervening processes (i.e., emotion regulation) modulate these associations, and c) whether such intervening processes are similar across associations between different pairs of emotions and psychopathology symptoms (i.e., sadness-depression versus anger-aggression associations).