1: Utrecht University, dept. Methodology & Statistics
Funded by NWO Veni grant VI.Veni.191G.090

Emotion regulation in adolescence

Developmentally sensitive period for emotion regulation (Zimmermann and Iwanski 2014)

20% develop psychopathology (Lee et al. 2014)

Potentially lifelong implications for mental health and well-being

What phenomena are associated with adolescents’ emotion regulation?

Knowledge gap

Substantial empirical research has addressed this topic, but:

  • Different (sub)disciplines have approached the topic in disparate ways (Riediger and Klipker 2014)
  • No consistent terminology (Bariola, Gullone, and Hughes 2011)
  • No conceptual frameworks (Stifter and Augustine 2019)
  • No overarching theoretical framework (Buss, Cole, and Zhou 2019)

Knowledge across research areas must be integrated and consolidated into overarching theory.

Moving forward

First step in Theory Construction Methods is identifying relevant phenomena (Borsboom et al. 2020)

  • Phenomena: stable and general features of the world

Few tools for identifying relevant phenomena

  • aside from expert opinion

Text mining systematic reviews are a suitable and relatively objective method for phenomena detection.

Why text mining?

Narrative reviews: small samples, confirmation bias, emphasis on positive results (Littell 2008)

Text mining systematic review (TMSR):

  • No limit on sample size
  • Transparent, objective, reproducible process
  • Assumes that term frequency indicates relevance of phenomena
  • Assumes that co-occurrence frequency indicates association
    • Co-occurrence graph ~= rudimentary nomological network

Baseline

Manual selection of key constructs from relevant theory and prior reviews (Bariola, Gullone, and Hughes 2011; Coe-Odess, Narr, and Allen 2019):

  • Bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2007)
  • Transactional model (Sameroff 2010)
  • Hall’s notion of “storm and stress”
  • Theory of normative emotional development (Sroufe 1995)
  • Tripartite model (Morris et al. 2007)
  • Internalization model (Holodynski and Friedlmeier 2006)
  • Polyvagal theory (Porges 1995).
  • Model of social-affective engagement and goal flexibility (Crone and Dahl 2012)
  • Process model of emotion regulation (Gross 2013)
  • Social Information Processing Theory (Lemerise and Arsenio 2000)

Baseline network

Phenomena relevant to adolescents' emotion regulation according to theory (a) and narrative reviews (b; transparent nodes indicate constructs also present in the theory).

Phenomena relevant to adolescents’ emotion regulation according to theory (a) and narrative reviews (b; transparent nodes indicate constructs also present in the theory).

  1. Theory (b) narrative reviews; transparent nodes indicate constructs also present in theory.

Limitations of relevant theory

  • Few explicitly address adolescence
  • Few comprehensively address predictors of emotion regulation
  • None directly guide contemporary research
  • Theories vary widely in scope: Some are broad and non-specific; others describe a specific phenomenon in detail, but lack a broader perspective.
    • Broad theories can frame any research, specific theories generate hypotheses.
    • It would be beneficial to bridge these levels of analysis.

Methods

Open science

Search strategy

Based on procedures by Staaks (Staaks 2019)

Web of Science

Reference set of 29 articles

Search string constructed to retrieve this set (synonyms of emotion regulation and adolescence)

6653 results including 25 of the reference set

Screening

Addresses emotion regulation in population overlapping with age range [10-24]

Method

Analysis 1: Author keywords

  • Extract author keywords
  • Exclude methodological terms etc: 5031 documents with 8080 terms
  • Dictionary of 108 terms with 464 regular expression queries
  • Remaining unique terms: 5292
  • Pruned terms exceeding \(97.5^{th}\) percentile of negative binomial distribution (= 21+ documents)
  • Most pruned terms (4004) occurred only once
  • 2498 term co-occurrence relationships
  • Pruned using negative binomial (25+ documents)

Final data: 4827 documents with 84 terms and 106 co-occurrence relationships

Categorized causes, outcomes, protective factors, and indicators

Analysis 2: Abstract text mining

  • Selected nouns and adjectives using “part-of-speech tagging”
  • Stemmed terms to their root
  • Identified trigrams using textrank (Wijffels 2019)
  • 5097 documents with 11448 unique words
  • Pruned \(97.5^{th}\) percentile (6+ documents)
  • 850 co-occurrence relationships
  • Pruned \(97.5^{th}\) percentile (10+ documents)

Final data: 3096 documents with 71 and 43 co-occurrence relationships

Co-occurrence graph

Author keywords (a) and abstracts (b)

Results

  • Both analyses reflected some constructs from theoretical literature
    • Particularly related to neurodevelopment and socialization
  • Mental health-related outcomes feature prominently
    • Emotion regulation implicated in mental health problems (Lee et al. 2014),
    • This underlines the importance of research in this area
  • Substantial correspondence between keywords and abstracts, suggesting validity of method
  • Networks are sparse; few connections among constructs: fragmented literature

Undertheorized themes

  • Developmental disorders
  • Physical health (sic)
  • External stressors
  • Structural disadvantage
  • Addictive behavior
  • Identity and moral development
  • Sexual development

Implications

  • Empirical research relies on theory; under-theorized phenomena may be overlooked
    • This study offers guidance for phenomena to consider as confounders/causes
  • Unembedded terms indicate promising areas of future research
  • Present study serves as starting point for theory development

Stengths

  • More comprehensive than previous narrative reviews (cf. Bariola, Gullone, and Hughes 2011; Coe-Odess, Narr, and Allen 2019)
    • Used systematic search and included much larger corpus
  • TMSR can process samples of any size, derive insights by transparent and reproducible procedures

Limitations

  • These techniques do not extract meaning from the literature
  • No access to full text articles (paywalls)
  • Subjective decisions in analysis process (Wagenmakers, Dutilh, and Sarafoglou 2018)

Conclusion

Text mining systematic reviews can complement theory and narrative reviews

  • Identify (undertheorized) relevant phenomena
  • Map potential associations

Future theoretical work should integrate undertheorized themes into an overarching framework

Empirical research might consider them as promising areas for future research, or potential confounders and contributing causes

We produce more research than we can read - assisted reviewing methods may become more important

References

Bariola, Emily, Eleonora Gullone, and Elizabeth K. Hughes. 2011. “Child and Adolescent Emotion Regulation: The Role of Parental Emotion Regulation and Expression.” Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 14 (2): 198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-011-0092-5.

Borsboom, Denny, Jonas Dalege, Rogier A Kievit, and Brian D Haig. 2020. “Theory Construction Methodology: A Practical Framework for Building Theories in Psychology.” PsyArxiv. February 29, 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w5tp8.

Bronfenbrenner, Urie, and Pamela A. Morris. 2007. “The Bioecological Model of Human Development.” In Handbook of Child Psychology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0114.

Buss, Kristin A., Pamela M. Cole, and Anna M. Zhou. 2019. “Theories of Emotional Development: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Now?” In Handbook of Emotional Development, edited by Vanessa LoBue, Koraly Pérez-Edgar, and Kristin A. Buss, 7–25. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17332-6_2.

Coe-Odess, Sarah J., Rachel K. Narr, and Joseph P. Allen. 2019. “Emergent Emotions in Adolescence.” In Handbook of Emotional Development, edited by Vanessa LoBue, Koraly Pérez-Edgar, and Kristin A. Buss, 595–625. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17332-6_23.

Crone, Eveline A., and Ronald E. Dahl. 2012. “Understanding Adolescence as a Period of Social–Affective Engagement and Goal Flexibility.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13 (9): 636–50. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3313.

Gross, James J. 2013. Handbook of Emotion Regulation. Book, Whole. Guilford publications.

Holodynski, Manfred, and Wolfgang Friedlmeier. 2006. Development of Emotions and Emotion Regulation. Springer Science & Business Media. http://books.google.com?id=OvJHncpZEQUC.

Lee, Francis S., Hakon Heimer, Jay N. Giedd, Edward S. Lein, Nenad Šestan, Daniel R. Weinberger, and B. J. Casey. 2014. “Adolescent Mental Health— Opportunity and Obligation.” Science 346 (6209): 547–49. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1260497.

Lemerise, Elizabeth A., and William F. Arsenio. 2000. “An Integrated Model of Emotion Processes and Cognition in Social Information Processing.” Child Development 71 (1): 107–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00124.

Littell, Julia H. 2008. “Evidence-Based or Biased? The Quality of Published Reviews of Evidence-Based Practices.” Children and Youth Services Review 30 (11): 1299–1317. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2008.04.001.

Morris, Amanda Sheffield, Jennifer S. Silk, Laurence Steinberg, Sonya S. Myers, and Lara Rachel Robinson. 2007. “The Role of the Family Context in the Development of Emotion Regulation.” Social Development 16 (2): 361–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2007.00389.x.

Porges, Stephen W. 1995. “Orienting in a Defensive World: Mammalian Modifications of Our Evolutionary Heritage. A Polyvagal Theory.” Psychophysiology 32 (4): 301–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1995.tb01213.x.

Riediger, Michaela, and Kathrin Klipker. 2014. “Emotion Regulation in Adolescence.” In Handbook of Emotion Regulation, 187–202. Guilford Press.

Sameroff, Arnold. 2010. “A Unified Theory of Development: A Dialectic Integration of Nature and Nurture.” Child Development 81 (1): 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01378.x.

Sroufe, L. Alan. 1995. Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years. Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527661.

Staaks, Janneke. 2019. “Systematic Review Search Support.” 2019. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/49T8X.

Stifter, Cynthia, and Mairin Augustine. 2019. “Emotion Regulation.” In Handbook of Emotional Development, edited by Vanessa LoBue, Koraly Pérez-Edgar, and Kristin A. Buss, 405–30. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17332-6_16.

Van Lissa, Caspar J., Andreas M. Brandmaier, Loek Brinkman, Anna-Lena Lamprecht, Aaron Peikert, Marijn E. Struiksma, and Barbara Vreede. 2020. “ WORCS: A Workflow for Open Reproducible Code in Science,” May. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZCVBS.

Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan, Gilles Dutilh, and Alexandra Sarafoglou. 2018. “The Creativity- Verification Cycle in Psychological Science: New Methods to Combat Old Idols.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13 (4): 418–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618771357.

Wijffels, Jan. 2019. Textrank: Summarize Text by Ranking Sentences and Finding Keywords. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=textrank.

Zimmermann, Peter, and Alexandra Iwanski. 2014. “Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and Emotion-Specific Developmental Variations.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 38 (2): 182–94.