Emotion regulation and anxiety disorder symptoms: Within-person relations from ages 6 to 18 in a birth cohort.
Abstract
Background
Emotion regulation difficulties have been implicated as a risk factor for anxiety disorders in youth, but prospective studies disentangling within-person from between-person effects are needed to substantiate such a claim. We therefore tested the bidirectional, within-person relations between emotion regulation and symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobia, and social anxiety from 1st grade to late adolescence.
Methods
Participants were 911 children and adolescents from the Trondheim Early Secure Study, a Norwegian birth cohort sample assessed biennially from ages 6 to 18. Emotion regulation was reported by parents and teachers. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using structured diagnostic interviews. Results from Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (RI-CLPM) were contrasted with those from ordinary Cross-lagged Panel Models (CLPM). Age and sex differences were examined.
Results
According to CLPM, lower emotion regulation, as reported by both parents and teachers and across ages and sexes, predicted a higher number of anxiety symptoms two years later, and vice versa. However, according to RI-CLPM, apart from two paths in the model of parent-reported emotion regulation with specific phobia, no prospective within-person associations were found.
Conclusions
Prospective relations between emotion regulation and anxiety may primarily be due to common factors linking the two, as these associations are no longer significant when time-invariant confounding is accounted for and within- and between-person effects are disentangled. Our results do not support the hypothesis that poor emotion regulation increases the risk of developing anxiety disorder symptoms.