Always look on the bright side of life: Individual differences in visual attentional breadth for understanding temperament and emotion regulation in adolescents.

Introduction: Cognitive-affective models of depression show that negative and positive emotionality differentially confer risk for depression through maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies respectively. Yet, no research has examined the mechanisms through which these temperament traits shape individual differences in ER. The current study explored the mediating role of attentional breadth for emotional information in the distinct pathways from temperament to ER strategies in adolescents. Methods: The hypotheses were tested in a selected sample of 71 adolescents (M = 14.15, SD = 1.90; 62% girls) using a previously validated measure of visuospatial attentional breadth. Results: First, positive emotionality was positively associated with attentional breadth for positive stimuli and temperamental vulnerable adolescents showed deficits in the processing of positive stimuli when presented far from the center of the visual field. Second, attentional breadth towards neutral stimuli was positively related to adaptive ER strategies. Third, no evidence was found for the proposed mediation models. However, post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence for a reversed mediation model in which adaptive ER strategies mediate the relationship between temperament and attentional breadth towards neutral stimuli. Discussion: The results underscore the apparent complexity of the relations between temperament, attentional breadth, and ER and point out the need for further research in order to inform early intervention.

The relationship between perceived stress and depressive symptoms in adolescents during high stress: The moderating role of emotion regulation.

INTRODUCTION: This study examined the moderating role of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation in the relationship between general perceived stress and depressive symptoms during the first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown in March-April 2020 in Belgium, while controlling for past depressive symptoms in 2016. METHODS: Participants were 110 adolescents (55% female; Mage = 16, SDage = 1.80) who filled out different questionnaires assessing maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation strategies (ERS), perceived stress, and depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Results revealed that only maladaptive ERS statistically significantly moderated the relationship between perceived stress and depressive symptoms. More specifically, the amount of perceived stress is positively associated with the level of depressive symptoms, especially in adolescents who use more maladaptive ERS. CONCLUSION: The repertoire of adaptive ERS might not be sufficient for adolescents to flexibly cope with a highly stressful situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Study findings highlight the need to support youth, particularly those who use more maladaptive ERS, in adaptively coping with intense stressful life events.

A brief emotion regulation training in children and adolescents with obesity: A feasibility study.

BACKGROUND: Recent studies emphasize the role of emotion dysregulation as an underlying mechanism initiating and maintaining emotional eating in obesity. Since multidisciplinary obesity treatment (MOT) does not directly address emotion regulation (ER), the current study aimed to investigate the feasibility of an ER training in children and adolescents with obesity on top of MOT. Feasibility was evaluated multi-informant on relevant parameters e.g. practicability, satisfaction, change in affect and homework compliance. METHODS: Participants (N = 50, M_age = 12.26, 60.7 % girls) with obesity received a brief ER training and were assigned to one out of three conditions to learn one specific ER strategy (i.e., Cognitive reappraisal, Distraction or Acceptance). Afterwards the ER strategy was further trained by a homework assignment during 5 consecutive days. Children and adolescents, trainers and as well as the educators of the treatment center completed a feasibility questionnaire. RESULTS: The training was positively evaluated by different informants for 11 out of 19 feasibility criteria. Only one implementation barrier was reported regarding homework compliance. Furthermore, some important considerations could be taken into account e.g. session length and motivation. CONCLUSIONS: Reports suggest that, with some modifications, it is feasible to implement an ER training on top of MOT. In addition, future training protocols should focus on other essential components of ER (e.g., emotional awareness, emotional flexibility).

Comparing emotional working memory in adolescents and young adults with and without depressive symptoms: developmental and psychopathological differences.

Depressive symptoms are associated with working memory impairments. Yet, comparative studies examining working memory across the developmental spectrum in depressed and non depressed cohorts are lacking. This study examined emotional working memory in 74 adolescents (mean age = 14; 21 with depressive symptoms) and 92 adults (mean age = 22; 36 with depressive symptoms). Participants completed two versions of an emotional face n-back task, and either paid attention to the valence of the emotion or the gender. Both tasks were completed at low load (0-back) and high load (2-back). In the high load condition, healthy adolescents showed a bias towards positive faces, both speeding up reaction times (RTs) when emotion was task relevant but slowing RTs when they were task irrelevant. This interaction was neither significant in adolescents with depressive symptoms nor in young adults. Depressive symptoms did not influence RTs in low load. The results indicate that adolescents with depressive symptoms might lack the bias towards positive affective material at high load WM task present in healthy adolescents.

Joint Contributions of Negative Emotionality, Positive Emotionality, and Effortful Control on Depressive Symptoms in Youth.

From a clinical developmental perspective, temperament has been shown to confer vulnerability to depression among youth. High negative emotionality (NE), low positive emotionality (PE), and low effortful control (EC) have repeatedly been independently associated with youth depressive symptoms. However, far less research has examined the joint contributions of NE, PE, and EC on such symptoms. The present study builds upon previous research by examining how NE, PE, and EC jointly predict change in depressive symptoms over time among 211 youngsters (7-14 years, M = 10.7, SD = 1.81) who participated in an 8-month prospective study. Self-reported temperament and symptoms were assessed at baseline; self-reported symptoms were measured again at follow-up. Results suggest that all 3 temperamental traits need to be considered jointly in predicting change in depressive symptoms. Furthermore, results provide further support for the "best two out of three" principle. Surprisingly, results reveal that high EC might be maladaptive in the context of high emotional reactivity. Last, results show that the combination of high NE and low EC could be a possible pathway to the development of symptoms. The current study clarified how NE, PE, and EC may jointly confer risk-or protection for developing depressive symptoms during adolescence. The results highlight the need of taking into account all three temperamental traits in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the risk for developing depressive symptoms at an early stage, as well as to provide customized care targeting temperamental vulnerability in depressed youth.

Parent-Reported BIS/BAS Scales for Children: Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance Across Age and Gender.

The present study examined the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Behavioral Inhibition System/Behavioral Approach System (BIS/BAS) scales parent-report in children and adolescents (N = 1,444, 58% girls) across age (Group 1, 2-5 years; Group 2, 6-9 years; Group 3, 10-13 years; Group 4, 14-18 years old) and gender. The results consistently underscored a four-factor structure, resembling the original factor structure, with one BIS-factor and three BAS-factors. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis showed full measurement invariance across gender as well as across Group 1 and 2, and Group 2 and 3. Strong measurement invariance was found across Group 3 and 4, Group 1 and 3, and Group 2 and 4. Configural and metric invariance was found across Group 1 and 4. Hence, mean-level BIS/BAS scores can be compared across gender and age although comparison between preschool children (Group 1) and late secondary school children (Group 4) should be done with caution.

How do I feel right now? Emotional awareness, emotion regulation, and depressive symptoms in youth.

Decreased emotional awareness contributes to the risk of internalizing disorders, such as depression. Although emotional awareness may be especially important during adolescence, a developmental period in which emotional arousal is high and the risk of depression rises dramatically, little research has examined the mechanisms linking emotional awareness to depression. Starting from affect regulation models, the current study proposes emotion regulation (ER) as a key underlying mechanism in the emotional awareness-depression relationship. The current study investigated whether maladaptive and adaptive ER strategies mediate the relationship between emotional awareness and depressive symptoms among youth using a cross-sectional design. Participants were 220 youth (65% girls; [Formula: see text] = 11.87, SD = 1.94) who filled out a set of questionnaires assessing emotional awareness, ER strategies, and depressive symptoms. Results revealed no direct relationship between emotional awareness and depressive symptoms. However, emotional awareness yielded a significant mediation effect through total adaptive ER strategies on higher depressive symptoms. No evidence was found for the mediating role of maladaptive ER strategies in this relationship. The current study provides further support for affect regulation models positing that emotional awareness may be a basic skill that is required for learning adaptive ER skills, and thus call for greater attention to adaptive ER strategies.

'Boost Camp', a universal school-based transdiagnostic prevention program targeting adolescent emotion regulation; evaluating the effectiveness by a clustered RCT: a protocol paper.

BACKGROUND: The transition from childhood into adolescence can be considered as a critical developmental period. Moreover, adolescence is associated with a decreased use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies and an increased use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies increasing the risk of emotional problems. Targeting emotion regulation is therefore seen as an innovative prevention approach. The present study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Boost camp, an innovative school-based prevention program targeting ER, on adolescents' emotion regulation skills and emotional wellbeing. Also secondary outcomes and possible moderators will be included. METHODS: The aim is to reach 300 adolescents (16 class groups, 6 schools) in their first year of high school. A clustered Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) with two conditions, intervention (n = 150) and control (n = 150), will be set up. Adolescents in the intervention condition will receive 14 lessons over the course of 2 days, followed by Booster sessions, and will be compared with adolescents in a non-intervention control group. The outcomes will be measured by self-report questionnaires at baseline, immediately after Boost camp, and at three and 6 months follow-up. DISCUSSION: Data-collection is planned to be completed in May 2018. Data-analyses will be finished the end of 2018. The presented paper describes the Boost camp program and the clustered RCT design to evaluate its effectiveness. It is expected that Boost camp will have beneficial effects. If found effective, Boost camp will have the potential to increase adolescent's ER and well-being, and reduce the risk to become adults in need. The trials is registered on the 13th of June 2017 in ISRCTN registry [ISRCTN68235634].

Altered Working Memory Processing of Emotion in Adolescents with Dysphoric Symptomatology: An Eye Tracking Study.

It has been suggested that altered processing of emotion during cognitive control plays an important role in the etiology of depressive symptoms. The current study investigates the influence of emotional stimuli on working memory (WM) in adolescents with dysphoric symptomatology (DS). Twenty-five adolescents with DS and 40 adolescents with no dysphoric symptomatology (NDS) completed a memory-guided eye movement task. This task assessed the influence of irrelevant affective information on WM processes during high and low cognitive load. Latency analyses showed that, in the high load WM condition, negative distractors disturbed WM performance in adolescents with NDS, but not in adolescents with DS. Accuracy analyses revealed that adolescents with NDS had higher accuracy rates in the presence of positive distractors relative to negative and neutral distractors, and in comparison to adolescents with DS. The findings indicated altered WM performance in the context of emotional distractors in adolescents with DS and may contribute to theoretical knowledge and early prevention of youth depression.

The impact of happy and angry faces on working memory in depressed adolescents.

Recent cognitive models suggest that the ability to control emotional information in working memory (WM) may be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of depression. However, few studies have examined the effects of processing relevant and irrelevant emotional stimuli on WM performance in depressed adolescents. In the current study, depressed adolescents (n = 27) and healthy adolescents (n = 49) completed two versions of an emotional n-back task: a low WM load (0-back) task and a high WM load (2-back) task. In the emotion-relevant condition participants were asked to attend to the emotional expression of an angry, happy, or neutral face, whereas in the emotion-irrelevant condition participants were asked to attend to the gender of the face. The results showed a WM improvement for happy faces in the emotion-relevant condition and a WM impairment for happy faces in the emotion-irrelevant condition for healthy adolescents but not for depressed adolescents. No biases toward angry faces were found. These results demonstrate that depressed adolescents do not show a preferential processing of angry faces but rather fail to show a positivity bias as seen in healthy adolescents. This supports the theoretical notion that a depressive disorder is characterized by a blunted reactivity toward positive information and may provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of youth depression.

The effects of emotion regulation strategies on positive and negative affect in early adolescents.

Recent research suggests that impaired emotion regulation (ER) may play an important role in the development of youth psychopathology. However, little research has explored the effects of ER strategies on affect in early adolescents. In Study 1 (n = 76), we examined if early adolescents are able to use distraction and whether the effects of this strategy are similar to talking to one's mother. In Study 2 (n = 184), we compared the effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination. In both studies, participants received instructions on how to regulate their emotions after a standardised negative mood induction. In general, the results indicated that distraction, but also cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, had promising short-term effects on positive and negative affect in early adolescents. These findings suggest that targeting adaptive ER skills, such as distraction, acceptance, and cognitive reappraisal, may be an important strategy to prevent or treat psychological problems in early adolescents.

The Role of Interference and Inhibition Processes in Dysphoric Early Adolescents.

Cognitive theories emphasize the importance of attentional biases in the development and maintenance of depression. Noteworthy, recent studies indicate that depression-related biases only occur in later stages of attentional processing. This is consistent with the idea that attention is a multicomponent process, consisting of at least two mechanisms: selection and inhibition. Therefore, this study aims to investigate interference and inhibition toward angry and happy stimuli in dysphoric adolescents compared to nondysphoric adolescents. To examine interference and inhibition of emotional information in 21 dysphoric (17 girls) and 28 nondysphoric adolescents (17 girls), 10-16 years of age, a Negative Affective Priming task was used. In this task, a target has to be evaluated as positive or negative while ignoring a distractor. As expected, dysphoric adolescents showed both higher interference from and higher inhibition of angry stimuli relative to nondysphoric adolescents. In contrast, happy stimuli did not lead to interference and consequently did not have to be inhibited in either group. Finally, a positive relation was found between interference and the subsequent inhibition of emotional stimuli. These observations confirm the existence of a bias toward angry faces in dysphoric adolescents and indicate a higher inhibition of angry faces in dysphoric adolescents compared to nondysphoric adolescents. The obtained results are different from those of similar previous studies in depressed or dysphoric adults using sad faces or negatively valenced words and might reveal important emotion-specific or age-specific inhibitory biases.

Internal shifting impairments in response to emotional information in dysphoric adolescents.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have suggested that internal cognitive control impairments may play an important role in the development of depression. Despite a growing body of research in adults, the ability to shift internal attention between mental representations in working memory has received little attention in younger populations. This study investigated internal shifting capacity between emotional and non-emotional information in dysphoric and non-dysphoric adolescents. METHODS: Twenty dysphoric and 34 non-dysphoric adolescents (10-17 years) completed an Internal Shifting Task, with pictures of angry and neutral faces, to measure the ability to shift attention between information held in working memory. RESULTS: Dysphoric adolescents showed specific shifting impairments when processing emotional material relative to non-dysphoric adolescents. Valence-specific analyses revealed that shifting was particularly impaired when shifting from negative to neutral information. By comparison, relative to non-dysphoric adolescents, dysphoric adolescents did not show shifting impairments when non-emotional features of the pictures had to be processed. LIMITATIONS: The study is limited by the absence of a structured clinical interview as dysphoria was determined dimensionally. Furthermore, a comparison of the effects of different negative stimuli on shifting could not be made since sad stimuli were not included in the stimulus set. CONCLUSIONS: The results confirm the link between depressive symptoms and emotion-specific shifting impairments in adolescents and indicate that targeting shifting ability in response to emotional stimuli may be a promising avenue for prevention programs. Longitudinal research is needed to replicate results and to explore the role of internal shifting impairments in the etiology and maintenance of depression.

The mediating effect of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies on executive functioning impairment and depressive symptoms among adolescents.

Past research results suggest that executive functioning (EF) impairment represents an important vulnerability factor in depression. Little research, however, has examined mechanisms underlying this association. The current study investigates the associations between EF impairment, emotion regulation (ER) strategies, and depressive symptoms in a sample of 579 adolescents (320 females, mean age = 12.06 years). Parents reported on adolescents' EF and general psychopathology, and adolescents self-reported ER strategies and depressive symptoms. The results indicate that greater EF impairment is associated with more depressive symptoms. Youth with greater EF impairment reported more maladaptive ER and less adaptive ER, and maladaptive and adaptive ER strategies jointly mediated the association between EF impairment and depressive symptoms. The results highlight an important role of both maladaptive and adaptive ER in explaining the relationship between EF and depressive symptoms and suggest that clinical interventions targeting ER skills may provide one strategy for the prevention and treatment of depression. Further longitudinal research is needed to replicate these results and evaluate the causality of the relations.

Is the cognitive triad a clear marker of depressive symptoms in youngsters?

Research on depression showed patterns of maladaptive thinking reflecting themes of negative self-evaluation, a pessimistic view on the world and hopelessness regarding the future, the so-called cognitive triad. However, it is still unclear if these cognitive aspects are also a clear marker of depressive symptoms in children. Therefore in the current study we will investigate to what extent the cognitive triad contributes to the prediction of depressive symptoms. Four hundred and seventy-one youngsters with a mean age of 12.41 years, of which 53% were male, participated in this study. They filled in self-report questionnaires to measure depressive symptoms, anxious symptoms, emotional and behavioral problem behavior and the cognitive triad. The cognitive triad explained 43.5% of the variance in depressive symptoms as reported by the children themselves without controlling for comorbid psychopathology. When controlling for comorbid anxiety and externalizing behavior problems, adding the cognitive triad contributes to depressive symptoms with 11% on top of the 45% explained variance by comorbid problems. The findings were observed both in the child (10-12 years) and adolescent (13-15 years) subsample. The standardized betas for the view on the World were low and did only reach the significance level in the adolescent sample. The cognitive triad represents a key component of depressive symptoms, also in younger age groups. Specifically the negative view on the Self and the negative view on the Future is already associated with depressive symptoms in both the child and adolescent subsample. The common variance among different psychopathologies (depression, anxiety and behavioral problems) still needs to be sorted out clearly.