Current Research Projects

Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Emotion Dynamics 

In the 2011-2012 academic year, we have begun the second annual wave of a SSHRC-funded longitudinal study of 187 male and female adolescents' emotional processes. Using psychophysiological, observational, experimental, and self-report measures, this study examines the development of adolescent emotion regulation in response to social stressors. Our research questions include:

• How do profiles of psychophysiological, observed, and self-reported emotional responses to social stress relate to emotion regulation habits and internalizing problems in adolescence? In a line of research led by Dianna Lanteigne, we are examining individual differences in discordance across the three primary domains of emotional responding: Arousal (e.g., heart rate), Expression (e.g., self-conscious affect), and Experience (self-reported appraisals). In the first study, we showed that girls with high Experience and Expression, but low Arousal had more difficulty regulating their emotions and more internalizing problems (Lanteigne, Flynn, Eastabrook, & Hollenstein, under review). In the second study, we found that giving a spontaneous speech in front of an experimenter rather than alone in an empty room was associated with high Experience and Expression as well as greater discordance, especially at the beginning of the speech (Hollenstein, Lanteigne, Flynn, Mackey, Glozman, & Theriault, under revision). With the current sample, Lanteigne, Eastabrook, & Hollenstein (submitted) have found that adolescents classified as “Experience-Expressive” (high experience, moderate arousal, high expression) or “Suppressive” (high experience, high arousal, low expression) had more problematic socioemotional functioning than those classified as “Expressive” (low experience, moderate arousal, high expression) or “Low-Reactive” (low experience, low arousal, low expression).

• Is a limited repertoire of emotion regulation strategies in adolescence associated with internalizing problems? This line of research is directed by Jessica Lougheed and uses the same analysis approach as Lanteigne, Eastabrook, and Hollenstein (submitted), latent profile analysis. We examined profiles of suppression, reappraisal, concealing, adjusting, and emotional engagement to test whether the beneficial effects of emotion regulation (ER) have less to do with the use of singular, “adaptive” strategies, and more to do with having a range of strategies to flexibly deploy according to situational demands (Lougheed & Hollenstein, submitted). Emotion regulation profiles with high scores on only one or two indicators (e.g., rigid emotion regulation) were associated with higher levels of internalizing problems, whereas profiles with average to high scores on several indicators (e.g., flexible emotion regulation) were associated with lower levels of internalizing problems. 

• Does emotion regulation mediate the association between emotional awareness and internalizing problems? Senior graduate student Jenny Eastabroook has been testing whether emotion regulation is dependent on emotional awareness (Eastabrook, Flynn, & Hollenstein, under review; Eastabrook & Hollenstein, in preparation). We are now examining this in the current sample to further understand how low emotional awareness affects the development of emotion regulation skills and subsequently mental health outcomes.

Shame and Victimization in Adolescence 

This SSHRC-funded collaboration with Dr. Wendy Craig examines how the experience of and proneness to shame can mediate the onset and maintenance of peer victimization. This three-year project (2011-2013) combines large-scale community sampling over three longitudinal waves with examinations of the real-time processes of shame and rejection in a subsample at wave 2. We recently tested this hypothesis in a large cross-sectional sample using the peer rejection game Cyberball and found that both trait and state shame predicted peer victimization above and beyond rejection sensitivity, gender, and age (Craig, Hollenstein, Rinne, & Lanteigne, in preparation).

The Dynamics of Emotional Discordance 

This five year NSERC project is designed to further explore emotional discordance. The primary objective is to better understand emotion and ER through the examination of discordance. Through the manipulation of social and non-social emotion induction techniques within innovative multi-method designs, we will examine synchronized profiles of emotional reactivity and recovery across the physiological, experiential, and behavioural domains. The short-term objectives are to conduct studies to understand the nature of discordance and develop a theoretical model of the emotion system. These projects are designed to answer several questions: What are associations between discordance and specific ER strategies, moderated by gender? How do variations in the social context influence discordance? Does within-individual discordance change as a function of discrete emotional states? How stable are measures of discordance? Does discordance increase from childhood through adulthood?

Affective Flexibility 

Following years of work examining the affective dynamics of dyadic interactions (e.g., Hollenstein, Granic, Snyder, & Stoolmiller, 2004; Hollenstein & Lewis, 2006; Hollenstein, 2007; Lunkenheimer, Olsen, Hollenstein, Sameroff, & Winter, 2011), I have developed a model of flexibility at three time scales (Hollenstein, Lichtwarck-Aschoff, & Potworowski, in preparation). This line of research continues with international collaborations with colleagues Isabel Granic, Erika Lunkenheimer, Tom Dishion, and Jennifer Silk, among others, using state space grids to measure affective dynamics. 

 

Ongoing and Completed Projects