| Adolescent state of mind with regard to attachment has frequently been correlated with emotion regulation processes, but the attachment system and emotion regulation systems are still conceived of and researched as distinct, independent constructs. The current study addressed the question of whether measures of attachment security and emotion regulation capture the same or different psychological phenomena in adolescence by testing whether they function similarly or differently in relation to a range of outcomes. Multi-method data on a diverse community sample of 184 adolescents were collected annually for 9 years beginning when participants were 13. Primary measures used included the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), the Ego-Resiliency Scale, and the Trait Meta-Mood Scale. It was hypothesized that teen-mother interaction behaviors would be linked to AAI security, mental health outcomes would be linked to emotional intelligence, and social relationships with peers would be linked to ego-resiliency.;Results indicated that AAI security, ego-resiliency, and emotional intelligence generally function differently, although not always in the ways hypothesized. Mother-teen exchange of emotional support, teen externalizing behavior, teens' engagement with close friends, and teen popularity are all domains linked distinctly to AAI security, whereas depression and anxiety in late adolescence and teens' negativity in conversations with mothers and friends are all distinctly linked to emotion regulation. Results indicate several areas of convergence, however. Mothers' and teens' engagement in interactions with each other, teens' ability to ask for emotional support from friends, and teen's depression in early- and mid-adolescence all show evidence of links to both AAI security and emotion regulation. In one particular domain, depression, evidence demonstrates a developmental course in which both attachment and emotion regulation have unique links to depression in early adolescence, then they converge in mid-adolescence, and later only emotion regulation remains as a significant predictor. While results indicate that AAI security operates differently from the measures of emotion regulation used in this study, it remains an open question whether its predictive power comes entirely through attachment processes or whether it is sensitively capturing emotion regulation processes that may also be involved. |
