Cross-lagged links between emotional clarity and emotion regulation strategies during the transition to adolescence – a two-wave study

Abstract

Transition to adolescence is characterized by changes in emotional functioning. Changes in emotion regulation and the experienced clarity of emotions may be important for children’s emotional development. The goal of this study is to explore cross-lagged links between emotional clarity and emotion regulation strategies during a period of one year. More specifically, it was explored whether emotional clarity predicts changes in the usage of two emotion regulation strategies – cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, and whether emotion regulation strategies usage predicts changes in emotional clarity. The study was conducted as part of the CHILD-WELL project financed by the Croatian Science Foundation. In this study, 1131 children (mean age at time one is 11.52, SD = 0.88) gave data about their experience of emotional clarity and their usage of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Two autoregressive cross-lagged models were tested separately for each emotion regulation strategy. Additionally, multigroup analyses were employed to explore the stability of regression paths with respect to different age and gender groups. Results showed that emotional clarity predicted changes in reappraisal and suppression usage. Higher emotional clarity predicted increases in reappraisal and decreases in suppression a year later. For girls only, suppression predicted decreases in emotional clarity.