Abstract

Despite the intimate links between the dysregulation of specific emotions and diagnosis of certain psychopathologies during adolescence, emotion specificity in adolescent emotion regulation remains under-explored. Adopting a person-centered approach, this study identifies profiles of perceived anger, sadness, and worry regulation, and examines how those profiles are related to academic and psychosocial functioning, with a large school sample of early adolescents (45 % female; 47 % male; 4 % non-binary; 31 % sixth grade; 31 % seventh grade; 37 % eighth grade) in the United States. Cluster sampling was conducted. Results from latent profile analysis indicate that a five-profile solution best fits the data: High emotion-general regulation (24.85 %); Average emotion-general regulation (28.57 %); Low emotion-general regulation (12.53 %); Low anger and sadness regulation (25.36 %); and Low worry regulation (8.70 %). Results from latent class modeling (BCH procedure) show that High emotion-general regulation profile has the best outcomes, while Low emotion-general regulation profile has the worst outcomes. Adolescents in the Low anger regulation and Low sadness regulation profile report low persistence and high self-handicapping. Adolescents in the Low worry regulation profile indicate low persistence and high disengagement. Furthermore, female adolescents are under-represented in both Average emotion-general and High emotion-general profiles. Practical implications for understanding and supporting emotion regulation among adolescent students are discussed.