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Negative and Positive Emotion Responses to Daily School Problems: Links to Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms

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Abstract

Examining emotion reactivity and recovery following minor problems in daily life can deepen our understanding of how stress affects child mental health. This study assessed children’s immediate and delayed emotion responses to daily problems at school, and examined their correlations with psychological symptoms. On 5 consecutive weekdays, 83 fifth graders (M = 10.91 years, SD = 0.53, 51% female) completed brief diary forms 5 times per day, providing repeated ratings of school problems and emotions. They also completed a one-time questionnaire about symptoms of depression, and parents and teachers rated child internalizing and externalizing problems. Using multilevel modeling techniques, we assessed within-person daily associations between school problems and negative and positive emotion at school and again at bedtime. On days when children experienced more school problems, they reported more negative emotion and less positive emotion at school, and at bedtime. There were reliable individual differences in emotion reactivity and recovery. Individual-level indices of emotion responses derived from multilevel models were correlated with child psychological symptoms. Children who showed more negative emotion reactivity reported more depressive symptoms. Multiple informants described fewer internalizing problems among children who showed better recovery by bedtime, even after controlling for children’s average levels of exposure to school problems. Diary methods can extend our understanding of the links between daily stress, emotions and child mental health. Recovery following stressful events may be an important target of research and intervention for child internalizing problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1563, USA

    Sunhye Bai & Rena L. Repetti

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  1. Sunhye Bai
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  2. Rena L. Repetti
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Correspondence to Sunhye Bai.

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Funding

The study described here was funded by R29 MH048593-02 from NIMH awarded to Rena L. Repetti. Work on this study was also supported by the UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship awarded to the first author.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Bai, S., Repetti, R.L. Negative and Positive Emotion Responses to Daily School Problems: Links to Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms. J Abnorm Child Psychol 46, 423–435 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-017-0311-8

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