Kalee De France

The ability to manage emotions using emotion regulation (ER) strategies is a core competency developed across childhood and into adolescence. Youth are expected to develop more diverse ER repertoires—the range of strategies that adolescents use—as they approach adulthood. However, to date, an examination of longitudinal change and stability in normative ER strategy use or repertoires across early to late adolescence has yet to be conducted. The present study reports on two longitudinal samples with measures of six ER strategies. Reports in the Younger Sample ( N = 201, aged 11–12 at Wave 1) were repeated once a year for 5 years, and reports from the Older Sample ( N = 187, aged 13–15 at Wave 1) were repeated twice a year for 3 years. Growth curve analyses revealed that Distraction, Rumination, and Suppression increased in the Younger Sample, whereas Reappraisal, Relaxation, and Engagement increased in the Older Sample. Latent Markov models showed four ER repertoires in both samples (low/average, suppression propensity, engagement propensity, and high diversity) that showed moderate to high stability across waves. Across adolescence, there were increasing transitions into the high diversity profile, with some nuances by sample. Results are discussed in terms of normative emotional development and implications for understanding adolescent polyregulation and ER flexibility.

How gender identity is assessed directly shapes how students are supported in elementary schools in the United States. Despite the existence of gender diversity, calls for more inclusive science, and recommendations from national research associations and societies to incorporate and emphasize the voices of individuals with diverse gender identities, most studies exploring gender disparities in education have relied heavily on the assumption of a gender binary. As a result, the omission of diverse gender identities from educational research in the elementary years is troubling. To address this area of need, the current article summarizes the opportunities for and constraints surrounding inclusive evaluation of gender identity in the elementary school years. We begin with a brief review of common methods used to assess gender identities for children in elementary school, including the strengths and limitations of each. We next contextualize these measures by outlining the current state-level barriers to including diverse gender identities in assessments of gender. In highlighting the best available practices and the structural systems of oppression realized through state-level policies that perpetuate an inability to represent student voices across the gender spectrum, we conclude with a call to action to inspire the evolution of best practices in the service of all students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Successful emotion regulation (ER) is important for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. Specific ER strategies have been identified as being more or less likely to be successful. However, recent evidence suggests significant individual differences in the association between strategy implementation and ER success. Indeed, 2 key factors may play an important role in moderating the link between ER strategy use and ER success in the moment: (a) the intensity of the specific emotional experience, and (b) the relative frequency in using a given ER strategy. Experience-sampling across 14-days (N = 304, M_age = 19.14, % female = 87.5) was used to assess whether emotion intensity and trait ER strategy use were differentially associated with perceived regulatory success depending on which ER strategy was used. Multilevel modeling revealed that more intense emotions were associated with lower perceived success for all strategies. Additionally, habitual reappraisal predicted greater success and habitual rumination predicted lower success. We discuss the possibility that results reflected intensity-based ER strategy choices and add to the growing call to abandon the reductive labeling of ER strategies as either "adaptive" or "maladaptive." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The World Economic Forum predicts that the skills most highly valued by employers in 2025 will be problem-solving, self-management, working with people, and technology use and development. Educators are seeking ways in which to incorporate these skills into their daily instruction. Here, we offer one possible approach to bolster skills in each of these domains: the inspirED program. inspirED was designed for U.S. middle and high schools to support teams of students in completing projects or campaigns that they believe will make their school a better place for all. This study enrolled teams of students from 22 middle and high schools, and provided them with online training, coaching in the inspirED process, and resources to complete their project. Upon finishing their projects, students on the inspirED teams reported higher sense of purpose and self-awareness around the importance of emotions. The larger student bodies at schools in which inspirED projects took place also reported improvements in school climate including students’ perceptions of teaching quality, sense of school pride, student relationships, and emotional safety. Implications and future directions for school-based social-emotional learning and student leadership opportunities are discussed.

Adolescence is characterized by frequent emotional challenges, intense emotions, and higher levels of expressive suppression use than found in older populations. While evidence suggests that contingent expressive suppression use based on context is the most functional, it remains unclear whether adolescents use expressive suppression differentially based on social context. Because the peer relationship is highly salient in adolescence, the current study was designed to assess whether adolescents use expressive suppression differentially based on their social context. Adolescents ( N = 179, M_age = 13.94, 49.2% female) reported emotional events using experience sampling via a smartphone application for 14 days. Multilevel modeling revealed that adolescents used less expressive suppression when they were alone compared with when they were with people, and used more expressive suppression when they were with their peers compared with when they were with family. In addition, more closeness with family predicted less overall expressive suppression use, while closeness with peers did not influence the level of expressive suppression use within the peer context. We discuss the importance of peer relations in adolescence and the relationship between closeness and emotional expression.

We investigate disparities in perceptions of school climate during the COVID-19 pandemic across multiple indicators of minoritized group membership (low SES, non-binary gender, non-heterosexual sexual orientation, racial/ethnic minority). Furthermore, we examine the effects of belonging to multiple minoritized groups. Across a range of school climate indices, belonging to a minoritized group is associated with significantly lower quality of school climate, however, specific effects vary across minoritized group and aspect of school climate.

Using a longitudinal design (Wave 1 n = 164, M_age = 3.57 years, 54% female, predominantly White and French-speaking), the current study sought to answer two questions: 1) does poverty influence children’s negative emotionality through heightened family-level, poverty-related stress? and 2) is negative emotionality, in turn, predictive of adolescent internalizing symptoms, externalizing behaviors, cognitive abilities, and physical health? Results confirmed an indirect pathway from family poverty to child emotionality through poverty-related stress. In addition, negative emotionality was associated with adolescent internalizing symptoms, attention difficulties, and physical health, but not externalizing symptoms, even when controlling for early poverty exposure.

Childhood disadvantage is associated with psychological distress throughout the lifespan. Poor children are alleged to give up more often than their more privileged peers when facing challenges. Yet little research has examined the role of task persistence in poverty and mental health. We test whether poverty-related deficits in persistence contribute to the well-documented link between childhood disadvantage and mental health. We used growth curve modeling to analyze three waves (ages 9, 13, and 17) of data assessing the trajectories of persistence on challenging tasks and mental health. Childhood poverty is the proportion of time participants lived in poverty from birth to age 9. We found that individuals experiencing more poverty in early childhood demonstrate less persistence and deteriorated mental health from ages 9 to 17. As expected, task persistence accounts for a portion of the robust childhood poverty—worsening mental health association. Clinical research on childhood disadvantage is in the early stages of unpacking underlying reasons why childhood poverty is bad for psychological well-being throughout life, revealing potential points of intervention.

There are opposing views on the relative adaptiveness of affective change and its role in depression. Some studies link depression to more changes in affect (i.e., higher variability), others to a greater resistance to change (i.e., higher inertia). Our study provides an explanation for such inconsistencies by hypothesizing that the relation between affect dynamics and depression differs as a function of mean levels of affect. We analyzed data from seven studies that measured affect in daily life in adolescents and young adults (N = 1,448, age range = 11.7-29.9 years, 64.8% females). We tested main and interaction effects of affect dynamics (variability and inertia) and affect level on depressive symptoms, separately for positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). For PA, we found mostly main, but no interaction effects. Depressive symptoms were associated with more PA variability and less PA inertia, indicating that depressive symptoms in young people may be characterized by more fluctuating PA, independent of PA mean levels. For NA, we found a significant moderation effect between NA variability and NA levels for depressive symptoms at baseline. For individuals with low NA levels, high NA variability was associated with more depressive symptoms. In contrast, for individuals with high NA levels, high NA variability was associated with fewer depressive symptoms. These results suggest that the relative adaptiveness of NA variability depends on overall NA levels and underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of affect variability in depression.