COMPLEXITY OF EMOTIONAL REGULATION IN ADOLESCENTS AT ANXIETY RISK: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Despite the high prevalence of anxiety disorders and its socio-economic impact, there are still uncertainties surrounding its etiology. The high incidence of these disorders during adolescence, and the inconclusive data on emotional deregulation in the childhood and youth literature, one of the main mechanisms involved in its development, justify their study in this population. Through this work we pretended improve the understanding of emotional deregulation in adolescents at risk of developing anxiety disorders from the Theory of Dynamic Systems. Our main objective was to study the behavioural, social and physiological (multilevel) involved in emotional deregulation in laboratory conditions. For this, two studies were carried out in one sample of 90 adolescents (30 at risk of developing a disorder of anxiety, 30 with average scores on risk factors and 30 with low scores on the same variables): (a) in the first, the cardiac pattern of the participants with different levels of risk before a task of stress and the relationship between cardiac complexity and the automatic emotional deregulation in the same stressful conditions; and (b) in the second, emotional flexibility and its cardiac concomitants were studied in the socio-emotional interactions of adolescents with their parents and mothers This was intended to analyze, simultaneously, the processes biological and social factors involved in emotional deregulation. In the symposium the results obtained will be presented and the processes will be discussed which relate the emotional deregulation and the risk of initiating anxiety disorders.

María Balle has a degree and a PhD in Psychology from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), and has a teaching and research career of 14 and 17 years respectively. During the first years she combined her academic career with other professional activities, framed in the field of clinical, educational and family child and adolescent psychology. Currently, she is a Contracted Professor in the UIB and a researcher at the University Institute of Research in Health Sciences (IUNICS). Regarding her teaching experience, she teaches different subjects in the area of ​​Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment of the Department of Psychology of the UIB in Bachelor, Degree and in the Master in General Health Psychology. On the other hand, she has also been a consultant in the subjects Psychopathology for Children and Assessment and Clinical Intervention in Adults at the Open University of Catalonia. Regarding her research career, her main line of research has focused on Developmental Psychopathology, specifically in the temperamental and emotional regulation aspects linked to the development of anxiety disorders in adolescents, as well as in their prevention. The study in this field has given rise to her doctoral thesis, to scientific publications in journals of international prestige with impact index (researcher ID: G-1664-2016), and to the active contribution in national and international congresses. Currently, she is the principal investigator of a competitive project focused on multi-method and multilevel analysis of the emotional regulation of adolescents at risk of anxiety.