Longitudinal Relations Between Emotion Regulation and Internalizing Symptoms in Emerging Adults During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Xinran Niu; Morgan M Taylor; Jennifer J Wicks; Alyssa N Fassett-Carman; Amelia D Moser; Chiara Neilson; Elena C Peterson; Roselinde H Kaiser; Hannah R Snyder

doi:10.1007/s10608-023-10366-9

Longitudinal Relations Between Emotion Regulation and Internalizing Symptoms in Emerging Adults During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Cognit Ther Res. 2023;47(3):350-366. doi: 10.1007/s10608-023-10366-9. Epub 2023 Mar 13.

Authors

Xinran Niu^{1

2}, Morgan M Taylor¹, Jennifer J Wicks¹, Alyssa N Fassett-Carman^{1

3}, Amelia D Moser^{3

4}, Chiara Neilson³, Elena C Peterson^{3

5}, Roselinde H Kaiser^{3

4

5}, Hannah R Snyder¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA USA.
² Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN USA.
³ Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO USA.
⁴ Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO USA.
⁵ Renee Crown Wellness Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO USA.

Abstract

Background: Maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation are putative risk and protective factors for depression and anxiety, but most prior research does not differentiate within-person effects from between-person individual differences. The current study does so during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic when internalizing symptoms were high.

Methods: A sample of emerging adult undergraduate students (N = 154) completed online questionnaires bi-weekly on depression, anxiety, and emotion regulation across eight weeks during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic (April 2nd to June 27th, 2020).

Results: Depression demonstrated significantly positive between-person correlations with overall maladaptive emotion regulation, catastrophizing, and self-blame, and negative correlations with overall adaptive emotion regulation and reappraisal. Anxiety demonstrated significantly positive between-person correlations with overall maladaptive emotion regulation, rumination, and catastrophizing, and a negative correlation with reappraisal. After controlling for these between-person associations, however, there were generally no within-person associations between emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms.

Conclusions: Emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms might be temporally stable individual differences that cooccur with one another as opposed to having a more dynamic relation. Alternatively, these dynamic mechanisms might operate over much shorter or longer periods compared to the two-week time lag in the current study.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10608-023-10366-9.

Keywords: Anxiety; Depression; Emerging adults; Emotion regulation; Internalizing symptoms; Random intercept cross-lagged panel models.

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