Download pdf
The Relationship Between Early Life Adversity and Emotion Regulation in Different Dimensions: Sleep Quality as a Mediator
- 1 University of Illinois
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Early Life Adversity (ELA) with negative effects on individuals’ emotional and physical health is related to individuals’ emotion regulation abilities. Exposure to ELA can lead to changes in people’s stress response system, affecting people’s behavioral and cognitive ability to respond to negative life events later in their lives. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between early life adversity and emotion regulation under the consideration of sleep quality to identify the extent of influences that different factors exert on emotion regulation strategies. An effective sample size of 424 participants was recruited for this study with an average low score on ELA. Results showed that early life adversity was related to an increase in the utilization of ineffective emotion regulation strategies in response to negative life events. More specifically, evidence pointed out that threats under the subcategories of ELA exerted a bigger influence than deprivation on individuals’ emotion regulation strategies. However, the mediation caused by sleep quality between the relationship of threat, deprivation, and emotion regulation needs to be noted. In this study, sleep quality mediated the relationship between deprivation and ineffective emotion regulation as well as the relationship between threat and effective emotion regulation. The differences in the influence level of different subcategories of ELA (threat and deprivation) on emotion regulation were represented as well. This study can encourage future studies to focus on the relationship between ELA and sleep quality, and the mediation of different factors in the relationship between ELA and emotion regulation.
Keywords
early life adversity, sleep quality, emotion regulation, childhood deprivation, childhood threat
[1]. Elwenspoek, M. M., Kuehn, A., Muller, C. P., & Turner, J. D. (2017). The effects of early life adversity on the immune system. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 82, 140-154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.05.012
[2]. McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1.
[3]. Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current Status and future prospect. Psychological inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.
[4]. Maccari, S., Krugers, H. J., Morley‐Fletcher, S., Szyf, M., & Brunton, P. J. (2014). The consequences of early life adversity: neurobiological, behavioral and epigenetic adaptations. Journal of neuroendocrinology, 26(10), 707-723.
[5]. Dahmen, B., Puetz, V. B., Scharke, W., von Polier, G. G., Herpertz-Dahlmann, B., & Konrad, K. (2018). Effects of early-life adversity on hippocampal structures and associated HPA axis functions. Developmental neuroscience, 40(1), 13-22.
[6]. Hanson, J. L., Nacewicz, B. M., Sutterer, M. J., Cayo, A. A., Schaefer, S. M., Rudolph, K. D., Shirtcliff, E. A., Pollak, S. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2015). Behavioral Problems After Early Life Stress: Contributions of the Hippocampus and Amygdala. Biological Psychiatry, 77(4), 314-323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2014.04.020
[7]. Bolton, J. L., Molet, J., Regev, L., Chen, Y., Rismanchi, N., Haddad, E., Yang, D. Z., Obenaus, A., & Baram, T. Z. (2018). Anhedonia Following Early-Life Adversity Involves Aberrant Interaction of Reward and Anxiety Circuits and Is Reversed by Partial Silencing of Amygdala Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone Gene. Biological Psychiatry, 83(2), 137-147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.08.023
[8]. Barlow, D. H., Ellard, K. K., Fairholme, C. P., Farchione, T. J., Boisseau, C. L., May, J.T.E., & Allen, L. B. (2010). Unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: Workbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383087/
[9]. Lambert, H. K., King, K. M., Monahan, K. C., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2017). Differential associations of threat and deprivation with emotion regulation and cognitive control in adolescence. Development and psychopathology, 29(3), 929-940.
[10]. Pițur, S., & Miu, A. C. (2020). Childhood maltreatment and expressive flexibility: specific effects of threat and deprivation?. Cognition and emotion, 34(8), 1721-1728.
[11]. Mauss, I. B., Troy, A. S., & LeBourgeois, M. K. (2013). Poorer sleep quality is associated with lower emotion-regulation ability in a laboratory paradigm. Cognition & emotion, 27(3), 567-576.
[12]. Bernstein, D. P., Stein, J. A., Newcomb, M. D., Walker, E., Pogge, D., Ahluvalia, T., Stokes, J.
[13]. Garnefski, N., Kraaij, V., & Spinhoven, P. (2001). Negative life events, cognitive emotion regulation and emotional problems. Personality and Individual differences, 30(8), 1311-1327. Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.
[14]. Buysse, D. J., Reynolds III, C. F., Monk, T. H., Berman, S. R., & Kupfer, D. J. (1989). The Pittsburgh sleep quality index: A new instrument for psychiatric practice and research. Psychiatry Research, 28(2), 193–213.
[15]. Abdi, S., Taban, S., & Ghaemian, A. (2012). Cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire: Validity and reliability of Persian translation of CERQ-36 item. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 32, 2-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.01.001
[16]. Kalia, V., & Knauft, K. (2020). Emotion regulation strategies modulate the effect of adverse childhood experiences on perceived chronic stress with implications for cognitive flexibility. PloS one, 15(6), e0235412.
[17]. Milojevich, H., Machlin, L., & Sheridan, M. (2020). Early adversity and children's emotion regulation: Differential roles of parent emotion regulation and adversity exposure. Development and Psychopathology, 32(5), 1788-1798. doi:10.1017/S0954579420001273.
[18]. Milojevich, H. M., Norwalk, K. E., & Sheridan, M. A. (2019). Deprivation and threat, emotion dysregulation, and psychopathology: Concurrent and longitudinal associations. Development and Psychopathology, 31, 847-857.
[19]. Palmer, C. A., & Alfano, C. A. (2017). Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 31, 6-16.
Cite this article
Yang,Y. (2023). The Relationship Between Early Life Adversity and Emotion Regulation in Different Dimensions: Sleep Quality as a Mediator. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,9,100-109.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Psychology and Humanity Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).