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

• Published in: Cognitive therapy and research Vol. 47; no. 3; pp. 350 - 366
• Main Authors: Niu, Xinran, Taylor, Morgan M., Wicks, Jennifer J., Fassett-Carman, Alyssa N., Moser, Amelia D., Neilson, Chiara, Peterson, Elena C., Kaiser, Roselinde H., Snyder, Hannah R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-06-2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Anxiety; Clinical Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Emotional regulation; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental depression; Original; Original Article; Pandemics; Quality of Life Research; Rumination; Emerging adults; Depression; Anxiety; Internalizing symptoms; Random intercept cross-lagged panel models; Emotion regulation
• ISSN: 0147-5916; 1573-2819
• DOI: 10.1007/s10608-023-10366-9

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.