Self-Reported Emotion Reactivity Among Early-Adolescent Girls: Evidence for Convergent and Discriminant Validity in an Urban Community Sample☆
Section snippets
Emotion Reactivity
Emotion regulation theory has become increasingly influential in developmental psychopathology and clinical child and adolescent psychology in recent years, yielding specific and transdiagnostic implications for the assessment and treatment of psychological problems in youth (Cole and Hall, 2008, Southam-Gerow and Kendall, 2002). Broadly defined, emotion regulation refers to the ongoing process through which one’s affective state is continually modulated. As such, emotion regulation and
Participants and procedures
Study data were collected as part of a program evaluation of a 6-week summer day camp for middle-school-age adolescents at two sites in a large urban midwestern city. The camp seeks to enroll at-risk youth, free of charge, and utilizes performing arts training and personal development classes to help improve self-esteem, confidence, and resiliency. The program evaluation is conducted as part of an ongoing university-community partnership, intended to (a) provide feedback and recommendations to
Evidence for convergent validity
Means, standard deviations, correlations, and distributional characteristics (range, skewness, and kurtosis) for all variables are presented in Table 1. Emotion reactivity showed significant zero-order correlations with nearly all other variables in a direction consistent with hypotheses. With regard to convergent validity, emotion reactivity was positively associated with internalizing problems, both generally and specifically with depression, anxiety, and social stress. Emotion reactivity was
Discussion
This study examined several correlates of self-reported emotion reactivity measured via the ERS. Using data drawn from an urban community sample of predominantly African-American, early-adolescent girls, these findings corroborate and extend upon previous research in several ways. First, the convergent validity of ERS scores is supported by positive associations with internalizing problems (depression, anxiety, and social stress), poor emotion coping, negative life events, reactive aggression,
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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Portions of this research were completed with support from the American Psychological Foundation (Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Child Psychology Graduate Student Fellowship) and the University of Kansas (Lillan Jacobey Baur Early Childhood Fellowship) awarded to the first author.