A Person-Centred Approach to Adolescent Emotion Regulation Motives, Strategies, and Perceived Efficacies.

The present research utilised the new Process of Emotion Regulation Measure (PERM) to assess emotion regulation motives, selected strategies, and perceived efficacies in a longitudinal community sample of 951 adolescents. We conducted Latent Profile Analyses (LPA) to identify distinct emotion regulation styles and random intercept-latent transition analysis (RI-LTA) to reveal rates of stability and change of profile membership over time. Both LPA and RI-LTA suggested the optimal profile solution was constituted by five emotion regulation profiles: hypo-regulating, hyper-regulating, adaptive, maladaptive, and normative. Each profile evidenced a unique relationship to mental health outcomes, both concurrently and longitudinally. Valenced emotion regulation patterns (evident in the adaptive and maladaptive groups) appeared to manifest the strongest relationships with adolescent mental health. As expected, maladaptive emotion regulation styles were related to poorer wellbeing outcomes, and adaptive emotion regulation styles were related to better wellbeing outcomes. Using a hypo- or hyper-regulating style appeared to influence deviations from the norm for negative outcomes such as anxiety and depression, but they had a minimal influence on positive outcomes such as optimism and resilience. RI-LTA exhibited a general trend toward adaptiveness and showed that unhelpful emotion regulation styles were considerably more transient than helpful emotion regulation styles over a five-month period. Our findings underscore the importance of utilising process-based measures and person-centered analyses when studying adolescent emotion regulation.