Tom Hollenstein

Queen's University | QueensU · Department of Psychology

Individuals differ in the extent to which they believe that their emotions are controllable or not, and these beliefs have significant impacts on emotional functioning. A strong belief that your emotions are uncontrollable (fixed mindset) is a vulnerability for emotional dysfunction, such as internalizing symptoms; however, the proximal mechanisms...

Although parent-adolescent and peer-adolescent relationship quality are critical for adolescent wellbeing during typical stressful life events, the unique features of the COVID-19 pandemic put into question whether strong parent-adolescent and peer-adolescent relationship quality functioned as protective factors of adolescent mental health in this...

Adolescence is characterized by frequent emotional challenges, intense emotions, and higher levels of expressive suppression use than found in older populations. While evidence suggests that contingent expressive suppression use based on context is the most functional, it remains unclear whether adolescents use expressive suppression differentially...

While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (Ns = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion-regu...

In spite of the importance of emotion regulation for nurses' well-being, little is known about which strategies nurses habitually use, how these strategies combine in order to regulate their emotional distress, and how these are related to their caregiving orientations. The current study aimed to explore the emotion regulation repertoires that char...

Higher affect variability, instability, and inertia in daily life are usually seen as indicators of emotional dysregulation. Research has shown that individuals with such affect dynamic patterns experience more depressive symptoms. However, similar affect dynamics might function differently across individuals. In this study, we propose that the imp...

Successful emotion regulation (ER) is important for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. Specific ER strategies have been identified as being more or less likely to be successful. However, recent evidence suggests significant individual differences in the association between strategy implementation and ER success. Indeed, 2 key factors may play a...

Technology plays an increasingly prominent role in emotional lives. Researchers have begun to study how people use devices to cope with and shape emotions: a phenomenon that has been called Digital Emotion Regulation. We report a study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon young people's digital habits and emotion regulation behaviors. We con...

Higher levels of reliance on cognitive reappraisal to manage daily emotional events are commonly associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms. However, reappraisal is a cognitively demanding regulation strategy, and its efficacy may depend on how successfully an individual is able to employ it. Individual differences in the association betwe...

This volume concerns emotional development and includes contributions from leading experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, primatology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, computer science, and education. This is the first volume of its kind to include such a multidisciplinary group of experts to consider emotional develop...

Cognitive reappraisal—or altering the emotional impact of a situation by changing the way an individual thinks about it—is strongly associated with many indicators of well-being, such as increased physiological health, optimism, life satisfaction, and more active attempts to repair negative mood, as well as decreased experience and expression of ne...

While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (Ns = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion regu...

The study of affect dynamics is very much like trying to infer the movies of people’s emotional lives from random photographs or brief clips. In this chapter, I consider the domain of variability of affect in terms of the dynamics of change inferred from sequences of observations. Specifically, through consideration of time scales, I offer a challe...

The global pandemic and the uncertainty if and when life will return to normality have motivated a series of studies on human mental health. This research has elicited evidence for increasing numbers of anxiety, depression, and overall impaired mental well-being. But, the global COVID-19 pandemic has also created new opportunities for research into...

Mothers (n = 155) and their adolescent children (n = 146; aged 12-13 at pre-COVID wave [Time 1, September 2019 to March 2020]) repeated measures of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and details about the impacts of the pandemic and social distancing at Time 2 (May-June 2020). Average slopes of mother and adolescent depression increased but anxiety s...

Objective: Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent form of psychopathology among youth. Because demand for treatment far exceeds availability, there is a need for alternative approaches that are accessible, engaging, and incorporate practice to reach as many youth as possible. MindLight is a novel videogame intervention that combines evidence-base...

This study evaluated the role of situational factors in emotion regulation (ER) strategy choice and perceived ER success within a sample of adolescents (n = 178, Mage = 13.93, 42.2% female). Experience‐sampling results showed that emotion type and intensity, but not situational control, were associated with strategy use. Instances of anxiety and si...

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic due to the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). While scientists have moved quickly to study the physical health implications of the disease, less attention has been paid to the negative mental health repercussions. The current study utilized a communi...

Objective: Applied games are considered a promising approach to deliver mental health interventions. Nonspecific factors such as expectations and motivation may be crucial to optimize effectiveness yet have not been examined so far. The current study examined the effect of expectations for improvement on (1) experienced fun and positive affect, and...

In addition to being largely atheoretical, empirical work on youth digital experiences has been notably adevelopmental, dominated by researchers and authors with little to no training in developmental science. Moreover, studies focusing on novel digital issues within the developmental field itself have been surprisingly sparse. Thus, our hope is th...

Digital natives (i.e., those who have grown up in the digital age) are likely to receive emotional support through digital means, such as texting and video calling. However, virtually all studies assessing the benefits of emotional support have focused on in-person support; the relative efficacy of digital support remains unclear. This study assess...

Despite strong evidence of the influence of implicit theories of emotion (ITE) on mental health symptoms among adult samples, scant attention has been paid to this important relation during adolescence. Moreover, it remains unclear which proximal processes may help to explain the link between ITE and mental health. As such, the current study had tw...

Sexual concordance—the agreement between physiological (genital) and psychological (emotional) sexual arousal—is, on average, substantially lower in women than men. Following social role theory, the gender difference in sexual concordance may manifest because women and men are responding in a way that accommodates gender norms. We examined genital...

Neuroticism is one of the major traits describing human personality, and a predictor of mental and physical disorders with profound public health significance. Individual differences in emotional variability are thought to reflect the core of neuroticism. However, the empirical relation between emotional variability and neuroticism may be partially...

In the current digital age, emotional support is increasingly received through digital devices. However, virtually all studies assessing the benefits of emotional support have focused on in-person support. Using an experience sampling methodology, we assessed participants’ negative emotions, digital and in-person support for those emotions, and suc...

Researchers are increasingly using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to investigate how people regulate their emotions from moment-to-moment in daily life. However, existing self-report measures of emotion regulation have been designed and validated to assess habitual/trait use of emotion regulation strategies and may therefore not be suited to...

Emotion regulation (ER) helps to maintain mental health and achieve optimal functioning. Whether people benefit from various ER strategies may depend on individual difference variables. A sample of undergraduates (N = 378, Mage = 18.6) underwent a negative emotion induction and then were assigned to learn about and perform an ER strategy (cognitive...

Emotion regulation (ER) repertoire—the range of different ER strategies an individual utilizes across situations—is assumed to enable more adaptive ER and greater well-being. ER repertoire has been operationalized by a quantitative index (sum of ER strategies across situations) or by applying a person-centered approach to global self-reports of dis...

An individual's emotions system can be conceived of as a synchronized, coordinated, and/or emergent combination of physiology, experience, and behavioral components. Together, the interplay among these components produce emotional experiences through coordinated excitatory positive feedback (i.e., the mutual amplification of emotion concordance) an...

Emotion-related socialization behaviors that occur during parent-child interactions are dynamic. According to Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad’s (1998) model, on-going parental reactions to emotions and discussions of emotion indirectly shape children’s socioemotional competence throughout childhood and adolescence. Typically-developing adolescen...

Emotion-related socialization behaviors that occur during parent-child interactions are dynamic. According to Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad’s (1998) model, on-going parental reactions to emotions and discussions of emotion indirectly shape children’s socioemotional competence throughout childhood and adolescence. Typically-developing adolescen...

Bullying and peer victimization are stressful experiences for youth, and are associated with increased risk for psychopathology. Physiological differences in the body’s stress response system may help us to understand vulnerability for depressive symptoms among youth involved with bullying. The current study examined both sympathetic and parasympat...

The specific strategies that individuals use to regulate their emotions have shown strong associations with various indices of well-being. However, theoretical accounts suggest that strategy use, and the associations between strategy use and well-being, may change across the life span. Attempts have been made to assess whether levels of strategy us...

The crucial role of teacher-student relationships has been reported in many studies. Yet, how teacher-student relationships develop from moment-to-moment interactions during lessons remains understudied. The present study combined insights from interpersonal theory and dynamic systems approaches to study indices of interpersonal content and structu...

Previous research using clinical samples has shown a positive relationship between women’s sexual functioning and sexual concordance (i.e., agreement between genital and subjective sexual arousal). We further examined this relationship using concurrent measures of vaginal, clitoral, and subjective sexual responses in a community sample of women (N...

An individual’s emotions system can be conceived of as a synchronized, coordinated, and/or emergent combination of physiology, experience, and behavioral components. Together, the interplay among these components produce emotional experiences through coordinated excitatory positive feedback (i.e., the mutual amplification of emotion concordance) an...

Consistently, moderate to strong correlations between emotion regulation and depressive symptomology are well documented. This relationship is most often conceptualized as unidirectional, in that poor emotion regulation acts as a pre-existing risk factor for depressive symptomatology. However, explicit examinations of the direction of this relation...

Because emotion regulation (ER) is fundamentally a process that unfolds over time, it should be theoretically and empirically modeled as a dynamic temporal process. In this chapter, we argue that an emotion system framework – the self-organizing process of positive and negative feedback among physiological, behavioral, and cognitive components of e...

Emotional reactions to peer victimization may increase risk for subsequent peer victimization. In the present study, we investigated whether shame mediated the development of chronic peer victimization, i.e., young people’s experiences of being bullied persistently across time. We used a multiple mediation model to test the indirect effects of Time...

The variability of self-esteem is an important characteristic of self-esteem. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie it. The goal of the current study was to empirically explore these underlying mechanisms. It is commonly assumed that state self-esteem (the fleeting experience of the self) is a response to the immediate social...

Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - Interpersonal Emotion Dynamics in Close Relationships - edited by Ashley K. Randall

Successful emotion regulation (ER) is a central aspect of psychosocial functioning and mental health and is thought to improve and be refined in adolescence. Past research on ER has mainly focused on one-time measurements of habitual ER. Linking regulatory strategies to emotions in daily lives is key to understanding adolescents’ emotional lives. U...

Research has shown a link between emotion regulation (ER) repertoire, the range of ER strategies an individual employs and the degree to which they rely on them, and well-being. However, this advancement is hindered by the lack of a single measurement tool capable of assessing multiple ER strategies on a common scale. The current paper reports on t...

Emotions are generated and regulated in the context of close relationships, such as mother-child relationships. Children's emotional development is primarily directed by mother-child emotional processes. In the current review, we examine the advances in understanding how mother-child relationships impact emotion development. In particular, we explo...

Load sharing is the process through which the emotional burdens associated with challenging situations are distributed among members within close relationships. One indicator of load sharing is efficient emotion regulation, and load sharing is related to high physical and relationship closeness between partners. The purpose of the current study was...

While shame is essential for adaptive functioning, experiencing shame more often or intensely than others is strongly associated with psychopathology. To date, no measure of the behavioral expression of shame exists, despite the great potential for use in research and clinical settings. The present study aimed to assess the Shame Code, a new behavi...

Youth who experience peer victimization are at risk of developing mental health problems. However, little is known about the emotional causal mechanisms linking peer victimization with these negative outcomes. This study investigated whether shame mediated this relationship. At three time points (T1-T3), 396 10- to 13-year-olds completed measures o...

The ability to regulate emotions is central to well-being, but healthy emotion regulation may not merely be about using the “right” strategies. According to the strategy-situation-fit hypothesis, emotion-regulation strategies are conducive to well-being only when used in appropriate contexts. This study is the first to test the strategy-situation-f...

Primary caregivers play an important role in emotion socialization. Real-time mother–daughter emotion socialization was examined in 45 mother–daughter dyads with early-adolescent daughters (age M = 11.80, SD = .27) at the first observation point. Maternal supportive emotion regulation and daughters' emotions were coded during two conflict discussio...

Socioemotional flexibility is a dyad-level indicator of adaptive interpersonal emotion regulation, and involves the temporal dynamics of shifting in and out of emotion states over time and the range of emotional states expressed during interpersonal interactions. Higher flexibility is associated with better psychosocial adjustment. In line with the...

SYNOPSIS Objective. Parent–child coercive cycles have been associated with both rigidity and inconsistency in parenting behavior. To explain these mixed findings, we examined real-time variability in maternal responses to children’s off-task behavior to determine whether this common trigger of the coercive cycle (responding to child misbehavior) is...

First presentation in symposium titled ”Losing control: It is time for emotion regulation research to grow up” Presentation at Society for Research on Adolescence, Baltimore, MD, April 2016

Previous studies focused mostly on predicting the adjustment of adolescents based on distinct coping strategies. However, people generally do not use only one coping strategy, but rather select from a repertoire of coping strategies. This study aimed to identify these repertoires by categorizing adolescents by the coping strategies they use and by...

A survey of dynamic systems (DS) methods appropriate for testing systems-based models in developmental psychopathology is provided. First, we review the rationale for developing new methods for the field. In line with other investigators, we highlight the fundamental incompatibility between developmentalists' organismic, open systems models and the...

Emotion socialization by close relationship partners plays a role in adolescent depression. In the current study, a microsocial approach was used to examine how adolescents’ emotions are socialized by their mothers and close friends in real time, and how these interpersonal emotion dynamics are related to adolescent depressive symptoms. Participant...

In this chapter, we suggest that methods derived from dynamic systems (DS) theory may be useful in the study of developmental psychopathology. We have three main objectives: (1) to outline key dynamic systems principles and highlight their commensurability with developmental psychopathologists' core conceptual concerns; (2) to provide a survey of r...

According to social baseline theory (Beckes & Coan, 2011), load sharing is a feature of close relationships whereby the burden of emotional distress is distributed across relationship partners. Load sharing varies by physical closeness and relationship quality. We investigated the effect of load sharing on emotional arousal via galvanic skin respon...

Because both emotional arousal and regulation are continuous, ongoing processes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate them. Thus, affective dynamics can reveal the regulation of emotion as it occurs in real time. One way that this can be done is through the examination of intra- and interpersonal flexibility or the transitions into and o...

Affective family processes are associated with the development of depression during adolescence. However, empirical description of these processes is generally based on examining affect at the individual or dyadic level. The purpose of this study was to examine triadic patterns of affect during parent-adolescent interactions in families with or wit...

The relationship between parent and child is an active, self-organizing system in which recurring patterns emerge over time from parent-child interactions. “Coregulation” is one term used to describe the functional operations of this dynamic system, such that the parent influences the child’s emotion, behavior, and physiology in real time, and the...

This study seeks to provide evidence of the dynamics associated with the configurations of discourse-voice regulatory strategies in patient-therapist interactions in relevant episodes within psychotherapeutic sessions. Its central assumption is that discourses manifest themselves differently in terms of their prosodic characteristics according to t...

Temporal contingencies between children's affect and maternal behavior play a role in the development of children's externalizing problems. The goal of the current study was to use a microsocial approach to compare dyads with externalizing dysregulation (N = 191) to healthy controls (N = 54) on maternal supportive regulation of children's negative...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has previously been linked to structural changes in several brain regions, particularly in the medial temporal lobes (Bellani, Baiano, Brambilla, 2010; Bellani, Baiano, Brambilla, 2011). This has been determined using voxel-based morphometry, segmentation algorithms, and analysis of shape deformations (Bell-McGinty e...

Computational neuroanatomical techniques that are used to evaluate the structural correlates of disorders in the brain typically measure regional differences in gray matter or white matter, or measure regional differences in the deformation fields required to warp individual datasets to a standard space. Our aim in this study was to combine measure...

Regulating emotions in interpersonal contexts requires managing one's own emotion, a partner's emotion, and the emotional tone of the relationship (e. g., conflict and intimacy). This multifaceted regulatory challenge, often referred to as "relationship-focused coping,'' has been associated with health outcomes, but the real-time emotional processe...

The tendency for emotions to be predictable over time, labelled emotional inertia, has been linked to low well-being and is thought to reflect impaired emotion regulation. However, almost no studies have examined how emotion regulation relates to emotional inertia. We examined the effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the i...

Emotional variability reflects the ability to flexibly switch among a broad range of positive and negative emotions from moment-to-moment during interactions. Emotional variability during mother-adolescent conflict interactions is considered to be important for healthy socio-emotional functioning of mothers and adolescents. The current observationa...

The sounds of speech are important components of coordination and mutual regulation in psychotherapy. Vocal Quality Patterns (VQP) have been defined as more or less stable configurations of voice parameters that impact the listener in a specific way, regardless of the content of speech (Tomicic et al., 2009, 2011). VQP analyses of relevant psychoth...

The transition into adolescence involves a number of changes that for many adolescents result in increased negative affect and internalizing symptoms, especially for females. In the current study we examined the direct and indirect effects of emotional awareness on internalizing symptoms by exploring the extent to which certain emotion regulation s...

We propose a joint Source-Based Analysis (jSBA) framework to identify brain structural variations in patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). In this framework, features representing position, orientation and size (i.e. pose), shape, and local tissue composition are extracted. Subsequently, simultaneous analysis of these features within a joi...

The purpose of this study was to analyze the coach-athlete interactions in a successful sport program for athletes with disabilities and their able-bodied siblings. The coach and 24 athletes were observed over multiple practice sessions. Measures of interaction content and structure were derived using state space grid (SSG) analysis. Results indica...