(PS5-63) Adolescent Negative Affect and Daily Rumination: the Moderating Roles of Attentional Control and Parental Responses to Negative Emotions

Abstract Text: Rumination refers to a maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategy that involves passive and perseverative attention to negative emotions and is an established risk factor associated with adolescent depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991; Mezulis, Priess, & Hyde, 2011). Research highlights that negative affectivity, defined as the tendency to be highly sensitive to negative stimuli and have elevated intensity of negative emotional reactions, is associated with increased attention to negative events, reduced adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and may predict daily rumination (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987).

Beyond the suggestion that adolescent negative affect may predict daily rumination, youth’s executive function abilities and parenting practices also influence adolescent emotion regulation, including rumination (Mezulis, Priess, & Hyde, 2010). Attentional control is an important cognitive ability that enables one to focus or shift their attention away from emotionally provocative stimuli (Verstraeten et al., 2009). Attentional control can buffer or exacerbate the tendency for one to focus on their negative emotions and engage in rumination, such that youth with high negative affect and low attentional control may report more daily rumination. Additionally, the ways that parents socialize their children to negative emotions, such as the degree to which parents model appropriate and effective ways to cope with negative emotions, can play a large role in how a child attends to and copes with their own negative emotions. Supportive parental responses to their child’s negative emotions are expected to weaken the effect adolescent negative affect has on daily rumination, whereas unsupportive parental responses to their child’s negative emotions are expected to amplify the effect negative affect has on daily rumination.

This study utilized self-report measures and an EMA design to collect data from 95 adolescents (Mage = 13.03, SD = 0.90) and a parent. Results indicated that poor attentional control amplified the effect of adolescent negative affect on daily rumination, such that youth with high negative affect and poor attentional control reported the most daily rumination (B=.32, t[95]=2.84, p=.005, 95% CI). The unsupportive parenting practice of dismissing negative emotions amplified the effect of adolescent negative affect on daily rumination, such that youth with high negative affect who received highly dismissing parental responses reported the most daily rumination (B=1.04, t[95]= 3.05, p=.003, 95% CI). Contrary to study hypotheses, the supportive parenting practice of expressive encouragement amplified the impact of adolescent negative affect on daily rumination in the unexpected direction, such that youth with high negative affect and high parental encouragement of emotion expression reported the most daily rumination (B=-.56, t[95]=-3.05, p=.003, 95% CI). These findings contribute to the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral interventions that target adolescent rumination.