Implicit theories of emotions, their links with emotional regulation and their roles in school adaptation on first years of middle school’s students.
Keywords : cognitive emotion regulation – implicit beliefs- early adolescents- school adaptation
Aim. Dropping out of school is a growing concern in the educational field. For many years, research has mostly been focusing on cognitive factors that could predict school difficulties. However, it now has been shown that other factors could be predictive, such as conative and affective factors. The present study’s aim is to extend current knowledge on early adolescents’s emotional development by evaluating the role of implicit beliefs about emotions, their links with emotional regulation and their roles in school adaptation after the transition to middle school.
Theoretical background. The transition to middle school coincides with the beginning of adolescence which includes lots of modifications. Due to those changes, old behaviors might not be relevant, and so adaptation capacities are required. In the literature “school adaptation” is defined as encompassing adaptive behavior, academic performances and social capacities (Congard et al., 2016). Emotion regulation is a growing preoccupation as it appears to be a good adaptation tool. Indeed, emotions are known to be an everyday life adaptative tool and particularly the capacity to regulate one’s emotions. The cognitive emotional regulation model by Garnefski which introduces nine cognitive strategies to regulate one’s emotion (acceptance, self-blame, blame of others, rumination, positive focus, action focus, positive reappraisal, dramatization and putting into perspective), will be used as a reference in this work. However, the lack of an existing tool to evaluate those strategies is highlighted. Emotional regulation can also be influenced by beliefs, that’s why implicit theories will also be studied. Ford et al. (2018) proposed a meditative model in which some regulation strategies had a meditative action on the link between implicit theories and well-being. An adaptation of this model will be proposed in this study.
Method. Participants in this study were 148 children from six classes of 6th Grade (“classe de 6ème”). First, students had a booklet to complete with a french translation of the Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire for kids (CERQ-k, Garnefski et al., 2007), that were made just for this study, and a scale to evaluate their implicit beliefs on emotions (Tamir et al., 2007). Then, lead teachers had to fill out the School Adjustment Scale (Congard et al., 2016) for each student.
Analyses in the first part consisted of psychometric properties of the CERQ-k’s traduction. Then, in the second part, analyses focused on the links between our three variables (implicit beliefs,cognitive emotion regulation strategies and school adaptation).
Results. The psychometric properties of the traduction of the CERQ we proposed for this study were not sufficiently good and so did not replicate the same factorial structure as the original version. As a result some items were then excluded.
Implicit theories were only linked with adaptive strategies (r= 0.181). Therefore, implicit theories and cognitive emotion regulation strategies were only partially related.
Then, children’s implicit theories were shown to be related to school adaptation. An analysis of the school adaptation’s components, show a specific link between blame of others and school motivation and a link between acceptance and well-being at school.
The adaptation of the meditative model found in literature did not resonate in our data. Implicit theories are related to school adaptation but this relation did not seem to be mediated by cognitive strategies of emotion regulation.
Discussion. The results must be considered with precautions. The psychometric properties of the traduction we proposed can be and must be improved. The distinction between adaptive strategies and non adaptive strategies can be discussed as our results and precedent studies showed that it might not be that permanent and would rather depend on the context. That way, strategies must be considered on their own and not classified as adaptive or non adaptive as it might depend on the context studied.
Research Limitations. The translation of the CERQ is not very representative of the original model of Graniefski. Thus, correlation between school adaptation and cognitive emotion regulation strategies must be considered with precautions.
Conclusion. The inadequacy with the theory raises the need of a better tool or a better knowledge of the cognitive emotional regulation for young adolescents and further evaluation of the role of emotion on school adaptation.
Practical Implications. This study shows that it might be more interesting to work on young adolescents’ implicit theories rather than on cognitive regulation strategies. For instance, with some psychoeducation intervention on how our beliefs can control our behaviors.
Originality. Overall, this study offers a first view of this subject and demonstrates the lack of an adapted tool to evaluate cognitive emotional regulation for young adolescents, and to do so correctly, a need of a better knowledge of the development of young adolescence emotional regulation.
Words I have learned :
factorial structures – structure factorielle
implicit theories/ beliefs on emotions – les théories/ croyances implicites sur les émotions
encompassing – englobant