Abstract
The primary goal of this study was to examine whether electronic diaries are a feasible method of monitoring transitory emotional states with a school-age, community sample of youth. A second goal was to examine preliminary relations between indices of emotional functioning captured via electronic diaries and other measures of child emotional and psychological functioning. Participants included 38 youth between the ages of 7 and 12 (51% males, M age = 9 [1.52] years and 49% females, M age = 9 [1.94] years) and their mothers (M age = 39 years) and fathers (M age = 42 years). Children were prompted to indicate the intensity of their current emotion four times a day for 1 week using Palm Tungsten E2s. Youth also completed self-report measures of emotion intensity, awareness, and dysregulation. Parents completed measures of child emotion regulation and symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. Sixty percent of the prompts were answered as intended. Higher levels of positive emotion intensity based on electronic diary ratings were negatively related to parent reports of adaptive emotion regulation and were positively related to youths’ reports of emotion dysregulation and poor emotion awareness. Given that the electronic diary data offered unique information on youth emotional functioning, strategies to increase compliance with the diaries are suggested.
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Notes
Gender differences were examined on each of the study variables (i.e., Emotion Regulation, Poor Emotion Awareness, Emotion Dysregulation, Externalizing Symptoms, Internalizing Symptoms, Electronic Diary Negative and Positive Intensity, PANAS-C Negative and Positive Intensity). Bonferroni corrections were conducted accordingly (for emotion functioning measures .05/3 = .016, for emotion intensity measures .05/4 = .012, for psychopathology measures .05/2 = .025). Results indicated non-significant differences among boys and girls for all study measures. It is unclear why no gender effects emerged. One explanation is a lack of power due to the small sample size. However, the means were quite comparable suggesting that there were simply no differences on the majority of the variables. It could also be that in this age group gender differences have yet to emerge. Perhaps as the children approach early adolescence such differences will become evident.
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Suveg, C., Payne, M., Thomassin, K. et al. Electronic Diaries: A Feasible Method of Assessing Emotional Experiences in Youth?. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 32, 57–67 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9162-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9162-0