Early Adolescent Social Anxiety and (mal)Adaptive Responses to Interpersonal Stress: Exploring Associations in Daily Life

Anxiety, broadly, has been found to relate to emotion regulation strategy use; however, there is limited understanding of how discrete types of anxiety are associated with emotion regulation. The current study addressed this gap by examining associations between social and physical anxiety symptoms and adolescents’ use of maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation strategies in response to daily-life interpersonal stress. Participants included 146 adolescents from a midwestern city from the United States (52.1% girls; 47.9% boys; age 10–14, M [ SD ] = 12.71[0.86]). Youth emotion regulation in response to daily interpersonal and non-interpersonal stress was assessed over 9 days using experience sampling methods. Results of multilevel models indicated that youth social anxiety symptoms predicted maladaptive, but not adaptive, emotion regulation in response to daily stressors. Results were specific to social relative to physical anxiety symptoms. Implications for understanding developmental mechanisms of risk are discussed.