Psychology
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Item Links Between Parental Responses to Adolescent Distress and Adolescent Risk Behavior: The Mediating Role of Thought/Emotion Suppression(2015) Jones, Jason Daniel; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rates of substance use and unsafe sexual practices among America's youth are a major public health concern. The goal of this study was to examine novel inter- and intrapersonal predictors of adolescent risk behavior. Aim 1 of this study was to examine how supportive and unsupportive parental responses to adolescents' negative emotions relate to adolescent substance use and sexual behavior, and to test whether the tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions mediates this link. Aim 2 was to further explore the putative link between suppression and adolescent risk behavior by testing whether physiological arousal when viewing negative emotional stimuli mediates this link. Participants included 115 adolescents (mean age = 17.19 years, SD = 1.27; 48% female) and 109 mothers. Aim 1 analyses revealed limited support for the hypothesized links: (a) adolescent-reported unsupportive maternal responses were associated with greater self-reported suppression (but not the other two measures of suppression), which in turn was related to more frequent sexual behavior in the past year and (b) adolescent-reported supportive maternal responses were negatively associated with adolescent substance use in the past year. Aim 2 analyses did not support any links between suppression and physiological arousal or between physiological arousal and adolescent risk behavior. Overall, these results suggest some potential links among parents' responses to their adolescents' negative emotions, suppression, and adolescent risk behavior. However, the hypothesized links that were significant in the path models were between variables measured by adolescent self-reports; therefore, the findings should be viewed as preliminary. I discuss these findings in the context of the available literature on parental emotion socialization, suppression, and adolescent risk behavior, and suggest directions for future research that could move this area of inquiry forward.Item Distress and risk behavior in borderline personality disorder: Motivation and self-efficacy for emotion regulation(2014) Matusiewicz, Alexis Katherine; Lejuez, Carl W; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a persistent psychological disorder characterized by pervasive emotional difficulties, unstable relationships, identity disturbance and high rates of engagement in self-damaging risk behavior. Prominent theoretical perspectives on BPD suggest that the primary motivational basis for risk behavior is the regulation of negative emotional states. The goal of this study was to test several of the hypotheses suggested by emotion regulation models of risk behavior, using a rigorous experimental design. Specifically, we sought to demonstrate the causal effect of distress on risk behavior among individuals with and without BPD, and to examine motivational and self-regulatory mediators of: a) the relationship between emotion and engagement in risk behavior; and b) the relationship between BPD and distress-induced change in risk behavior. To this end, participants with and without BPD provided ratings of emotion, motivation for emotion regulation and risk behavior in the context of induced calm and distress, and completed a self-report measure of trait self-efficacy for emotion regulation. Results provide partial support for the study hypotheses. Only women with BPD showed an increase in risk behavior in the distress condition, and distress-induced change in risk behavior was predicted by both the intensity of emotion regulation goals and self-efficacy for emotion regulation. Findings support the perspective that risk behavior is enacted strategically in response to negative emotions and associated motivational states. For those with BPD, distress-induced risk behavior may reflect a type of emotion-regulatory resourcefulness that becomes maladaptive when used inflexibly or to the exclusion of other strategies.Item Distress and risk-taking in borderline personality disorder: An examination of neurocognitive mechanisms(2010) Matusiewicz, Alexis Katherine; Lejuez, Carl W; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental illness characterized by high rates of engagement in distress-induced risk behavior. Unfortunately, extant laboratory-based risk paradigms have failed to account for the role of distress in precipitating risk behavior, so many questions remain about processes mechanisms that underlie this behavior. The current study examined affect as a moderator of the relationship between diagnostic status and risk behavior, as measured by a behavioral risk task, and affective and non-affective neurocognitive functioning as potential mediators of this relationship. Results indicated that individuals with BPD engaged in more risk behavior in the distress condition than in the neutral condition, whereas individuals without BPD showed a decrease in risk behavior across the two conditions. However, corresponding changes in executive functioning were not observed, suggesting the need for continued research to identify alternative mechanisms (e.g., neurocognitive, motivational) to explain this effect.