Unraveling the emotion regulation web in adolescents and young adults: A network tree approach

Emotion regulation (ER) forms a key process for managing stress throughout life. To explore age-related differences in ER from early adolescence to young adulthood, a network tree analysis was conducted with 1,041 participants from community based samples in Belgium and The Netherlands (Mage=18.66; SD=4.01; range=12-25; 36.7% boys). Based on The Adaptive Coping with Emotions model, ER skills included Awareness, Identification, Labeling, Understanding, Modification, Acceptance, Tolerance, Readiness to Confront, and Effective Self-Support. Using model-based recursive partitioning, two distinct age groups were identified (12-16 and 17-25 years), indicating different ER patterns across early adolescence and young adulthood. Centrality and clustering of ER skills, and their unique associations were examined across groups. Modification, Identifying & Labeling, and Acceptance & Tolerance were the most influential nodes in both networks. Although the overall network structures were similar, permutation tests showed higher connectivity of ER skills in the 17-25 age group. Moreover, the skill of Awareness was significantly less central in the 12-16 age network compared to that of the 17-25 age network. In line with this, only in the 12-16 age group, a two-dimensional community structure was obtained, clustering Identification & Labeling, Awareness and Understanding (community 1), and Acceptance & Tolerance, Modification, Readiness to Confront, and Effective Self-Support (community 2). This distinction disappeared with increased connectivity in the 17-25 age group. Taken together, the current findings demonstrate that maturation goes hand in hand with higher levels of interconnectivity between ER skills, revealing developmental differences in ER skill connectivity among adolescents and young adults.