Ambulatory Assessment of Adolescent Coping: It's a Complicated Process

Daily use of digital technologies to feel better: Adolescents' digital emotion regulation, emotions, loneliness, and recovery, considering prior emotional problems

INTRODUCTION

Adolescents report using digital technologies for emotion regulation (digital ER), with the aim of feeling better (i.e., improving emotions and reducing loneliness). In this 7-day diary study, we investigated associations of digital ER, emotions, and loneliness, and tested whether prior emotional problems moderated these associations.

METHOD

Participants were 312 Australian adolescents (Mage = 13.91, SD = 1.52; 44% boys). Daily surveys measured digital ER; end-of-day happiness, sadness, worry, anger, and loneliness; and peak sadness, worry, and anger. End-of day emotions were subtracted from peak emotions to calculate emotion recovery for sadness, worry, and anger. Participants were randomly selected from two symptom strata (high/low) defined by depression and social anxiety measures collected before the diary. Data were analyzed using multilevel path modeling. Cross-level interactions tested whether symptom strata moderated associations.

RESULTS

Digital ER was associated with more recovery from peak to end-of-day sadness and worry, but also with increased sadness, worry, anger, and loneliness by the next end-of-day. Higher end-of-day loneliness was associated with increased next-day digital ER. Prior emotional symptoms were not a significant moderator of daily digital ER and emotion associations.

CONCLUSION

Adolescents who report more digital ER in a day show more recovery from the peak of negative emotion that day, but this recovery dissipates, with digital ER also associated with increased negative emotion and loneliness by the next day for all adolescents, regardless of prior symptom status. Lonelier adolescents use more digital ER by the next day, suggesting they need support to make social connections-online or offline.

A collaborative realist review of remote measurement technologies for depression in young people

Digital mental health is becoming increasingly common. This includes use of smartphones and wearables to collect data in real time during day-to-day life (remote measurement technologies, RMT). Such data could capture changes relevant to depression for use in objective screening, symptom management and relapse prevention. This approach may be particularly accessible to young people of today as the smartphone generation. However, there is limited research on how such a complex intervention would work in the real world. We conducted a collaborative realist review of RMT for depression in young people. Here we describe how, why, for whom and in what contexts RMT appear to work or not work for depression in young people and make recommendations for future research and practice. Ethical, data protection and methodological issues need to be resolved and standardized; without this, RMT may be currently best used for self-monitoring and feedback to the healthcare professional where possible, to increase emotional self-awareness, enhance the therapeutic relationship and monitor the effectiveness of other interventions.

Adapting to Lockdown: Exploring Stress Coping Strategies on Short Video Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

The study addresses a gap in research on media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the overlooked role of short video social media platforms in stress management. It builds on transactional stress model and coping flexibility to advance the understanding of the strategy-situation fit, particularly the alignment of coping strategies with platform affordances.

Methods

Our study investigated the detailed use of short video platforms and coping strategies during the pandemic lockdown through an online survey of 1569 respondents conducted immediately after the lockdown. We characterized lockdown duration as a situational stressor attribute and explored variations in the coping process. Assessing changes in user behavior across the top four Chinese short video platforms, we examined anxiety induced by lockdown and the use of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies.

Results

Significant changes in user behavior in response to lockdown-induced stress were observed. Structural model analyses reveal that people employed both coping strategies to manage heightened anxiety, primarily through increased viewing behavior over interaction behavior.

Discussion

The findings underscore the positive implications of short video platforms on individual well-being. This study argues for a deeper research focus on coping flexibility within the realm of social media, accompanied by a comprehensive assessment of platform user behavior. Future research should also consider the influence of algorithms on platform functionality.

Child development in real time: The power of ambulatory assessment for investigating dynamic developmental processes and behavior longitudinally

Ambulatory assessment methods used to capture "real-world" microprocesses through self-report or passive data collection are used to assess child and adolescent behavior in context. This chapter begins by introducing the researcher to ambulatory assessment methods and describes these methods for use in child and adolescent developmental and behavioral research. Next, the importance of attention to timing is discussed. We then suggest appropriate analytic methods for putting ambulatory assessment data to best use to answer developmental research questions. We end with comments on the ethics of ambulatory assessment data and some concluding remarks for researchers wanting to use these methods in their own work.

Coping with Relationship Stress in Adolescence: A Decade in Review

At a moment in history when stress levels among adolescents are high and coping capacities are taxed, it seems timely and important to review a decade's accomplishments in elucidating how, and with what effects, adolescents cope with relationship stress. We provide an update on research about coping with parent, peer, and romantic stress and discuss the effectiveness of coping strategies across cultures, developmental periods, and levels of social stress. We explore relations between coping and other automatic and reflective responses to stress and highlight innovations in lab-based and ambulatory assessments. We recommend studies of variability in the success of coping at different intensities of relationship stress and research with real-time and repeated assessments to capture the process of coping.

Coping flexibility: Variability, fit and associations with efficacy, emotion regulation, decentering and responses to stress

Coping flexibility is a promising approach to understanding risk and resilience, but it has been conceptualized in various ways. The aim of this study was to test convergence of coping-related flexibility measures with other coping-related competencies (coping self-efficacy, emotion regulation, decentering) and ways of coping. Participants were 885 students (M_age  = 21.5 years) who completed measures of flexibility (seven subscales), coping self-efficacy, emotion dysregulation, decentering, and ways of coping with recent interpersonal stressors. Breadth of coping was also examined, given its past use as a measure of flexibility. The seven flexibility subscales converged with each other as expected, and all were associated with greater coping-related competence, with moderate or large positive associations between the four measures of coping flexibility ability and other measures of coping-related competence. Regarding associations with ways of coping, multivariate models showed that perceived ability in coping flexibility had positive associations with engagement and negative associations with disengagement coping, but multiple situational/adaptive coping flexibility subscales were associated positively with both engagement and disengagement ways of coping. In addition, some findings were weak or counterintuitive, especially when ways of coping and breadth were considered, suggesting a need for more attention to precisely conceptualizing and appropriately measuring coping flexibility.