Predicting Negative and Positive Affect During COVID‐19: A Daily Diary Study in Youths

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic has the potential to profoundly affect youths’ mental health. Understanding predictors of affective responding to the pandemic is critical for prevention and intervention efforts. This study examines emotion regulation as an important predictor of youth’s changes in positive and negative affect. The present study of 115 participants (62 girls, M age = 11.77) explores the relation between pre‐existing emotion regulation strategies, as measured by multi‐week daily diaries pre‐COVID, and youths’ mean positive and negative affect levels and variability during a 28‐day period amidst the pandemic, while including COVID‐related worries and isolation as important moderators. The findings provide important insight into interactions between pre‐existing vulnerabilities and COVID‐related stressors in predicting affective adjustment in youth.

COVID-19 Stressors and Latinx Adolescents’ Mental Health Symptomology and School Performance: A Prospective Study

“…Consistent with research conducted among adolescents living in Europe (Alt, Reim, & Walper, 2021 ; Gracia et al, 2021 ; Salema-Ara et al, 2021 ), Canada (DeFrance et al, 2021 ) and in low-risk communities in the U.S. (e.g., Deng et al, 2021 ; Romm et al, 2021 ), our results offer some, albeit limited, evidence suggesting COVID-related declines in adolescent well-being. Among this school-based, probability sample of Latinx adolescents, girls experienced increased internalizing symptoms and worse school performance from before to after the onset of the pandemic.…”

The Impact of the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Adolescent Emotional, Social, and Academic Adjustment

“…For example, adolescents that had specific vulnerabilities such as higher stress, maladaptive coping, or internalizing problems before the pandemic, experienced more COVID‐19‐related concerns during the pandemic (van Loon et al., 2021 ). Comparably, adolescents who used more pre‐existing savoring and less dampening emotion regulation strategies reported higher positive affect while adolescents who used more rumination reported increased negative affect during the pandemic, although these effects tended to be stronger for adolescents experiencing less COVID‐19‐related worries and more COVID‐19 isolation (Deng et al., 2021 ). Also, pre‐pandemic self‐injury was a major risk factor for during‐pandemic self‐injury (Steinhoff et al., 2021 ), and pre‐pandemic neural response to anticipated social reward was associated with reduced odds of suicidal ideation (Hutchinson et al., 2021 ).…”

“…An important strength of many of the papers in this special issue is that they use longitudinal data to compare the functioning of adolescents during the pandemic to their functioning before the pandemic, and as such go beyond reports of perceived change in well‐being, to focus on pandemic‐related factors and processes that might account for these changes. In addition, several papers focus on changes in functioning during different phases of the pandemic (e.g., Deng, Gadassi Polack, Creighton, Kober, & Joormann, 2021 ; Klootwijk, Koele, van Hoorn, Güroğlu, & van Duijvenoorde, 2021 ; Magis‐Weinberg, Gys, Berger, Domoff, & Dahl, 2021 ). These studies allow us to examine how the changing circumstances during the pandemic relate to adolescent adjustment and well‐being and examine the effects of changes in pandemic‐related experiences across time.…”

Emotion Regulation and Disordered Eating in Youths: Two Daily-Diary Studies

“…Third, Wave 2 data collection was conducted during COVID-19, a period of increased stress. As exposure to stress has been linked to increases in negative affect (Deng et al, 2021;Larson & Ham, 1993) and psychopathology in adolescence (Monroe et al, 1999), associations between rumination, dampening, and disordered eating cognitions and behaviors may have been particularly pronounced in Wave 2. In line with previous research (e.g., Kubiak et al 2008), our findings emphasize the crucial role played by both rumination and dampening in conferring risk for disordered eating cognitions and behaviors on a day-to-day basis.…”

“…The present report is part of a larger study on emotions, social experiences and eating behaviors in youths: The full details of the procedure have been described previously (e.g., Deng et al, 2021;Gadassi Polack et al, 2021).…”