engleski

Regulating emotions and some indicators of adjustment among high school students

Emotion regulation (ER) is an ability to change the intensity, duration, or frequency of one's own and/or other people's emotions. Previous studies evidenced the effects of ER on different indicators of adjustment. This study intends to continue this line of research, considering the findings of two widely investigated strategies: reappraisal and suppressing emotional expression and their differential relations to positive and negative (respectively) indicators of adjustment. This study focuses on high school students because of their new developmental tasks, accompanied by more intensive emotional experiences than before, yet still in the process of developing ER skills and critical thinking with regard to particular strategies. Moreover, many adolescents start engaging in some risky behavior in order to handle some emotions like anger or fear. Risky and harmful behaviors such as smoking can undoubtedly impair the well-being of an individual in the long run (due to numerous harmful effects on physical and mental health), but in the short term, adolescents who smoke perceive this form of behavior as functional in some way. The relationship between ER and smoking has not been studied in the recent literature in this area, and this was the impetus for conducting this study. Based on previous findings on constructive vs. detrimental effects of some emotion regulation strategies, we might hypothesize that cognitive reappraisal could decrease, and suppression could increase the likelihood of persons engaging in risky behaviors. Life satisfaction is a relevant variable that can provide a broader picture of success in coping with developmental challenges and tasks in adolescents. The first aim was to examine two ER strategies as predictors of some negative (smoking) as well as positive (life satisfaction) indicators of adolescents' adjustment. The second aim was to explore whether using these ER strategies differed with age or gender. The data from 297 (age range 16-20, M = 17.33 ; SD = 0.834 ; 54.2% girls) high school students (a convenient sample) were analyzed. Two ER strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were measured by the Emotion regulation questionnaire, while global life satisfaction was measured by a general item in Personal Well-being Index. The results of regression analysis indicated that cognitive reappraisal was a positive predictor of adolescents' life satisfaction. The results also showed it was a negative predictor of smoking, while age was a positive predictor of that behavior. No gender differences in using two ER strategies investigated were found. Concerning age, older participants reported suppressing expressions of emotions somewhat more than younger ones. However, the age effect in using cognitive reappraisal strategy was not found in this study. Potential benefits of enhancing cognitive reappraisal skills in adolescents are discussed.

adolescents, emotion regulation, adjustment, smoking, life satisfaction

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