Patterns among emotional experience, arousal, and expression in adolescence by DIANNA MELANIE LANTEIGNE A thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Queen‟s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada August, 2011 Copyright © Dianna Melanie Lanteigne, 2011 Abstract Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened emotional intensity, negative emotions, and self-consciousness. Problems with emotion regulation during adolescence have been linked to the development of internalizing and externalizing disorders (Hastings et al., 2009). Emotion regulation involves changes across several integrated emotion domains: (1) Experience, (2) Arousal, and (3) Expression (Ekman, 1992; Gross, 2007; Lang, 1994; Lazarus, 1991; Levenson, 1994). Emotion is not necessarily regulated equally across these three domains, in fact discordant responses are more common than concordant ones (Mauss & Robinson, 2009). Discordance represents how emotion is being regulated during a specific event, but it has not been directly linked with habitual emotion regulation strategies. Different patterns among these emotional domains have been linked to internalizing and externalizing problems and coping skills (Hastings et al., 2009; Mauss et al, 2005; Zalewski et al., 2009a, b). The current study expands on previous research by (1) simultaneously measuring and analyzing experience, arousal, and expression, and (2) understanding how patterns of concordance and discordance relate to individual difference factors such as gender, habitual emotion regulation strategies, and internalizing and externalizing problems in a typically developing adolescent sample. This study involved measuring the experience, arousal, and expression of self- conscious emotion in 138 adolescents (55% female) during a video-recorded social stressor speech task. Participants rated their emotional experience via questionnaire after the speech task. Physiological data were reduced from recordings during the speech and observational coders rated the emotional expression of participants from video files of the i speeches. Patterns of responses across experience, arousal, and expression were grouped using cluster analysis. The different patterns of response were related to different profiles of habitual emotion regulation strategies and problematic internalizing and externalizing behaviour. Adolescents classified as “Experience-Expressive” (high experience, moderate arousal, high expression) or “Suppressive” (high experience, high arousal, low expression) had more problematic socioemotional functioning than those classified as “Expressive” (low experience, moderate arousal, high expression) or “Low-Reactive” (low experience, low arousal, low expression). There was not strong evidence for differences across gender. The current study contributes to the understanding of adolescent emotional regulation and the development of psychopathology in adolescence. ii Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Tom Hollenstein, for your guidance and encouragement with this project. Your enthusiasm and expertise has enabled me to grow and learn so much during these past two years. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Wendy Craig and Dr. Meredith Chivers, as well as the Developmental Psychology group at Queen‟s University for your helpful comments and direction with this project. Thank you to my labmates Jenny Eastabrook, Jessica Lougheed, and Lindsay Lavictoire. Your support with organizing and executing this project, as well as personal support was invaluable. Thank you to all of the people that made this project possible. First, thank you to all of the adolescents and parents for taking the time to participate in our study. Second, thank you to our recruitment coordinator Amanda Timmers for her patience and determination throughout the recruitment process. Third, thank you to all of our undergraduate students that spent countless hours helping with data collection, data entry, and physiological data reduction (Karizma Mawjee, Allison Rinne, Elizabeth Brown, Samantha Boggs, Laura Peill, Annamaria McAndrews, Jenna Brandon, Jamie Leung, Katey Austin, Matthew Kan, Michael La Fleur). Last but not least, thank you to my observational coding team for your dedication, enthusiasm, and insightfulness (Michael Tung, Alessia Milano and Serena Wong). You were all a pleasure to work with. Finally, a big thank you goes to my family, friends and Jeff for your endless support and encouragement. iii Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................1 1.1 The Development of Discordance ..............................................................................3 1.2 Bivariate Discordance ................................................................................................5 1.3 Patterns of Discordance .............................................................................................8 1.4 The Current Study ....................................................................................................12 1.5 Objectives and Hypotheses ......................................................................................13 Chapter 2: Methods ............................................................................................................17 2.1 Participants ...............................................................................................................17 2.2 Procedure ..................................................................................................................17 2.2.1 Recruitment and Consent ................................................................................17 2.2.1 Laboratory Procedure ......................................................................................18 2.3 Measures ...................................................................................................................19 2.3.1 Questionnaires .................................................................................................19 2.3.1.1 Demographics and pubertal status ..............................................19 2.3.1.2 Internalizing and externalizing measures ....................................19 2.3.1.3 Emotion regulation measures .......................................................21 iv 2.3.2 Laboratory Measures ...............................................................................................22 2.3.2.1 Self-Reported Experience ...............................................................22 2.3.2.2 Physiological Arousal ....................................................................23 2.3.2.3 Observational Coding of Expression .............................................23 2.4 Data Reduction ........................................................................................................24 Chapter 3: Results ..............................................................................................................26 3.1 Descriptive Statistics ...............................................................................................26 3.2 Testing the Social Stress Elicitation ........................................................................27 3.3 Objective 1 Analyses: Correlations .........................................................................28 3.4 Objective 2 Analyses: Patterns of Discordance ......................................................28 3.5 Objective 3 Analyses: Gender Differences .............................................................35 Chapter 4: Discussion ........................................................................................................38 4.1 Between-Subjects Concordance ..............................................................................38 4.2 Gender Differences .................................................................................................39 4.3 Patterns of Discordance ...........................................................................................40 4.4 Limitations ..............................................................................................................45 4.5 Future Research .......................................................................................................45 4.6 Conclusions .............................................................................................................46 References ..........................................................................................................................47 Appendix A: Consent Forms .............................................................................................60 Appendix B: Final Consent Form ......................................................................................63 Appendix C: Demographics ...............................................................................................64 Appendix D: Pubertal Status ..............................................................................................65 v Appendix E: Beck Depression Inventory II .......................................................................67 Appendix F: Beck Anxiety Inventory ................................................................................70 Appendix G: Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents ..........................................................71 Appendix H: Youth Self-Report Revised ..........................................................................72 Appendix I: Experience of Shame Scale ...........................................................................73 Appendix J: Children‟s Coping Strategy Checklist ...........................................................75 Appendix K: Emotion Regulation Questionnaire ..............................................................76 Appendix L: Difficulty with Emotion Regulation Scale ...................................................78 Appendix M: How Are You Feeling Questionnaire ..........................................................81 Appendix N: Self-Conscious Affect Coding Manual ........................................................83 Appendix O: Intercorrelations between the Internalizing, Externalizing and Emotion Regulation measures ..........................................................................................................87 Appendix P: LSD Post-Hoc comparisons between the clusters ........................................88 vi List of Tables Table 1. Descriptive statistics of the domains and control variables and intercorrelations with socioemotional functioning measures. ......................................................................27 Table 2. Cluster means, standard deviations, and Z scores for the four-cluster solution ..29 Table 3. Means and standard deviations for the clusters and omnibus ANOVA and ANCOVA results for differences between clusters ..........................................................32 Table 4. Correlations between Experience, Arousal, and Expression within gender ........36 Table 5. Frequencies of boys and girls in each cluster ......................................................37 vii List of Figures Figure 1. A conceptual model of the emotion system.......................................................4 Figure 2. Cluster groups made from Experience, Arousal, and Expression and relations with emotion regulation and internalizing problems (Lanteigne et. al, under review)......11 Figure 3. Four clusters by the three domains that were used to create cluster membership. .......................................................................................................................30 Figure 4. Internalizing and Externalizing measures for each of the clusters .....................34 Figure 5. Emotion Regulation measures for each of the clusters. .....................................35 viii Chapter 1: Introduction Adolescence is a developmental period marked by many emotional changes: emotions are experienced as more intense, moods are more volatile, and negative emotions are more frequent in comparison to childhood and adulthood (Arnett, 1999; Larson & Ham, 1993; Spear, 2000). The emotional „storm and stress‟ that characterizes this period is not experienced to an equal extent by all adolescents because individuals differ in the way that they regulate their emotions during stress (Arnett, 1999; Larson & Richards 1994). Adolescents that have difficulty with emotion regulation are at risk for the onset of both internalizing and externalizing problems (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema & Schweizer, 2010; Aguilar, Sroufe, Egeland & Carlson, 2000; Beauchaine, 2001; Bongers, Koot, van der Ende, & Verhulst, 2004; Dahl & Gunnar, 2009). Emotion regulation and dysregulation can be understood by examining the changes that occur during an adolescent‟s emotional response across three primary domains: how the emotion is experienced, how it is expressed outwardly to others, and how bodily arousal mechanisms respond (Gross & Levenson, 1993). The pattern of responses across the three domains reflects how emotion is being regulated in the moment (Smith, Hubbard & Laurenceau, 2011; Zalewski et al., 2011a,b). Discordant responses (e.g., strong experience, high physiological arousal, and low expression) suggest that an emotion is not being regulated equally across the domains. Discordance among two of the three domains has been related to psychological problems (Hastings et al., 2009; Hubbard et al., 2004), however the discordant patterns among all three domains have not yet been investigated in adolescence. The focus of the current study was to explore the relation between different patterns of emotional response and psychological health in adolescence. 1