Longitudinal Associations Between Resilience, Emotion Regulation and Mental Health in Adolescents

Abstract

The adolescent phase, which is already challenging, has been exacerbated by the psychological impact and social restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the onset of psychiatric disorders. Strengthening psychological resilience (PR) and emotion regulation (ER) during challenging periods is vital to foster protective factors and cultivating effective coping strategies. This study aimed to longitudinally examine the association between ER and PR in Turkish adolescents while considering mental health as a control variable. Data collection took place twice, with an interval of three months, from December 2021 to March 2022, involving 929 students, comprising 465 girls and 464 boys, all aged between 10 and 15 years (M = 12, SE = 0.92). The data were analyzed using SPSS 26.00 and MPlus 8.7. We performed an autoregressive cross-lagged analysis to investigate the association between ER and PR. Our findings indicated that higher levels of PR were positively associated with internal functional ER (ER-IF) and negatively associated with internal dysfunctional ER (ER-ID) both at T1 and T2 cross-sectionally. Longitudinally, baseline PR was positively associated with ER-IF three months later, without significant gender differences. No longitudinal association was observed between PR and ER-ID. Moreover, greater mental health problems at T1 were positively associated with T2 ER-ID among women. Overall, our findings suggest that mental health professionals, teachers, and others working with adolescents should incorporate practices that strengthen psychological resilience to improve their well-being and quality of life.

Keywords: Adolescence; COVID-19; Emotion regulation; Longitudinal; Mental health; Psychological resilience.