Developmental And Neural Mechanisms Of Emotion Up-and Down-Regulation In Adolescence

Early descriptions of adolescent emotional life depicted it as a period full of "storm and stress" and characterized by fluctuations. Increased demands of emotion regulation catalyse adolescents’acquisition of effective regulatory strategies, and the development of emotion regulation in turn affects their interpersonal interactions, mental health, and general well-being. Therefore, understanding emotion regulation development in adolescence might give important insights into the nature of social development during adolescence, with implications for adjustment in later life. The present dissertation aimed to explore the developmental and neural mechanism of early adolescents’ development of different emotional regulatory strategy usage.Emotion regulation is a multifaceted process that integrates physiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes. Recent studies have suggested that emotion regulation improves with age. However, previous studies rarely combined different method to examine the different facets of emotion regulation processing together. Also, examining individual development from a shorter time scale to a longer time scale is necessary to study the development mechanism and explore how these changes form during development. Consequently, the present dissertation examined the development of emotion regulation among adolescents in different time windows and tried to contribute to the literature on a broader scope. Based on the multi-trait multi-method philosophy, the present dissertation included five studies and examined the developmental and neural mechanisms of early adolescents’ emotion regulation in different time scale.In study1, open-ended questions were used to explore the relationship between emotional events, emotional regulatory strategy usage, emotion experience, and the regulation goal. The result indicated:(1) in adolescents’ daily emotional lives, most of the negative emotional events were relevant to academic failure and the types of the positive emotional events were various,(2) in most of the emotional events relevant to academic activities, adolescents tended to use more down-regulation when encountering both positive and negative emotional events,(3) in different emotional events, adolescents who had a hedonic goal of emotion regulation would be more likely to use up-regulation strategies; early adolescents who had a utilitarian goal of emotion regulation would be more likely to down-regulate their emotions.To further examine the developmental trajectories of early adolescents’ emotion regulation in a larger time scale, study2used a three-phase longitudinal design to examine the development of emotion regulation and explored the contributions of different regulatory strategies to emotion experience. In each phase of the study, participants completed Adolescents Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and Daily Emotion Scale. Results of hierarchical linear regressions revealed that (1) Chinese adolescents reported more down-regulation during long-term development encountering both positive and negative emotional episodes,(2) down-regulation is more effective than up-regulation in enhancing desirable emotion experience and reducing undesirable emotion experience during adolescents’ development.To examine the changes of early adolescents’ emotion regulation in a shorter time scale, study3used an experience sampling method to examine Chinese adolescents’ emotion regulatory tendency and its effect. Momentary emotional experience and regulation was assessed up to5or6times each day for two weeks. Results showed that (1) adolescents tended to use up-regulation when they experienced positive emotion and habitually regulated their negative emotion by down-regulation,(2) adolescents who utilized down-regulation in a certain sampling moment reported higher positive emotion at the subsequent sampling moment,(3) adolescents who utilized down-regulation more frequently reported higher positive emotion.To examine the online regulation effects of different regulatory strategies, study4used the Reactivity and Regulation-Image Task. The results indicated that (1) emotion regulation effect was the lowest in old adolescents and highest in adults,(2) effect of down-regulation improved more than effect of up-regulation for both positive and negative emotional stimuli from early adolescence to early adulthood,(3) results proved that individuals’ online emotion regulation becomes more effective with the attainment of adulthood.Study5was an ERP study to explore the possible different neural mechanisms between early adolescents and adults in online regulation of different emotional stimuli. The results showed that (1) adolescents had great difficulty initiating shifts in meaning via regulation at the earlier and relatively automatic stages of er process,(2) adolescents had a reduced recruitment of prefrontally mediated cognitive control resources,(3) adults were better able to recruit cognitive resources in the service of er in each later time windows.All in all, the five studies together demonstrated the developmental and neural mechanisms of emotion regulation in early adolescence.