Family relationships, emotion regulation and wellbeing in adolescence

Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by profound biological, cognitive, and social changes, which together intensify emotional experiences. During this stage, youth often report increased negative affect and greater emotional reactivity, making the ability to regulate emotions especially important. Emotion regulation is the capacity to monitor, evaluate, and modify emotional responses in line with one’s goals. It is a key predictor of mental health and social functioning. Difficulties in emotion regulation during adolescence are associated with a higher risk of internalizing problems, such as anxiety and depression, as well as externalizing behaviors like aggression.

Family relationships, particularly those with parents, play a central role in shaping adolescents’ emotion regulation development. Adolescents learn how to manage emotions by observing their parents’ own regulation strategies, by parenting practices that can either foster or hinder the development of adaptive regulation skills, and through the emotional climate of the family, which influences how safe adolescents feel expressing and regulating emotions. Thus, the family is a key context in which emotion regulation skills are learned, practiced, and refined during adolescence.

The current symposium will focus on family processes that explain why some adolescents are better than others at regulating their emotions and how emotion regulation shapes family dynamics. The symposium includes four longitudinal studies from four different countries. The first presentation examines how multiple relational factors including maternal and paternal metaemotion, peer relationship quality, and cumulative risk jointly contribute to adolescents’ self-regulation, while also testing gender differences. The second presentation focuses on the moderating role of emotion dysregulation in the bidirectional associations between adolescents’ daily mood and their interactions with both mothers and fathers. The third study broadens the scope by examining the longitudinal, bidirectional links between parental psychological control, attachment insecurity, and adolescents’ emotional eating. Finally, the fourth study emotion-related cognitive processes, such as affective decision making, rumination, and anger regulation self-efficacy, in predicting adolescent externalizing behavior. Together, these four longitudinal studies provide a comprehensive and multi-level perspective on how family dynamics and emotion regulation are intertwined throughout adolescence.