Emotional Coregulation in Mexican-Origin Parent–Adolescent Dyads: Associations with Adolescent Mental Health

Research on the health benefits and consequences of close relationships has suggested the linkage in daily emotions (i.e., coregulation) between close partners is an important relationship dynamic. While the coupling of daily emotions among family members (parent–child and marital dyads) has been widely documented, research examining emotional coregulation among ethnic minority youth during adolescence, a period marked by heightened emotion and risk for psychopathology, remains an important area in need of exploration. This study examined correlates of emotional coregulation in a sample of Mexican-origin adolescents (M_age?=?15.02, SD?=?.83) and their parents (M_age?=?41.93, SD?=?6.70). Dyads reported on daily levels of distress and happiness for 14 consecutive days across two waves of data collection a year apart (n_wave1?=?428 dyads, n_wave2?=?336 dyads). Dyads who reported getting along were more likely to coregulate their daily happiness. Importantly, coregulation of distress was only present in older adolescents who reported above average levels of internalizing symptoms. The results suggest coregulation of distress may shape or be shaped by poor mental health during the later years of adolescence, a time when youth may be establishing a degree of emotional autonomy from parents.

     

Dual Identity Development and Adjustment in Muslim Minority Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Dual identity (e.g., strong ethnic and national identity) is a psychological resource for minority groups, but how it develops during adolescence is less clear....     

Loring Paul Jones: Life After Foster Care: Improving Outcomes for Former Foster Youth

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

Russia’s ministry of ambivalence: the failure of civic nation-building in post-Soviet Russia

This article argues that the sources of official and societal ambivalence towards civic nationhood in today’s Russia are found in the institutional instability and personalist dynamics of hybrid regime politics in the 1990s. Successful civic nation-building should institutionalize inclusive criteria for citizenship as a basis for policymaking, which in turn should create incentives for dominant ethnicities to embrace civic nationhood. While the shifting views of Boris Yel’tsin on nationalities policy and the constant turmoil in the government’s nationalities ministry have received little scholarly attention, they illuminate the endogenous sources of regime instability in relation to civic nation-building. Russia’s experience thus challenges the traditional view of ethnic nationalism as fostering authoritarianism and civic nationalism as fostering democracy: rather, competitive authoritarianism in the 1990s confounded the regime’s own efforts toward civic nation-building and laid the groundwork for the “ethnic turn” in Russian politics under Vladimir Putin.     

Reciprocal Relationships between Teacher Ratings of Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors in Adolescents with Different Levels of Cognitive Abilities

Are internalizing and externalizing behavior problems interrelated via mutually reinforcing relationships (with each behavior leading to increases over time in levels of the other behavior) or mutually suppressing relationships (with each behavior leading to decreases over time in levels of the other behavior)? Past research on the directionality of these relationships has led to ambiguous results, particularly in adolescence. Furthermore, the extent to which prior results will generalize to adolescents with low levels of cognitive abilities remains unknown. This second limit is particularly important, given that these adolescents are known to present higher levels of externalizing and internalizing behaviors than their peers with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities, and that the mechanisms involved in the reciprocal relationships between these two types of behaviors may differ across both populations. This study examines the directionality of the longitudinal relationships between externalizing and internalizing behavior problems as rated by teachers across three measurement waves (corresponding to Grades 8–10) in matched samples of 138 adolescents (34.78?% girls) with low levels of cognitive abilities and 556 adolescents (44.88?% girls) with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities. The results showed that the measurement structure was fully equivalent across time periods and groups of adolescents, revealing high levels of developmental stability in both types of problems, and moderately high levels of cross-sectional associations. Levels of both internalizing and externalizing behaviors were higher among adolescents with low levels of cognitive abilities relative to those with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities. Finally, the predictive analyses revealed negative reciprocal longitudinal relationships (i.e., mutually suppressing relationships) between externalizing and internalizing problems, a result that was replicated within samples of adolescents with low, and average-to-high levels of cognitive ability.     

Childhood Adversity and Early Initiation of Alcohol Use in Two Representative Samples of Puerto Rican Youth

Early alcohol use is associated with multiple negative outcomes later in life, including substance use disorders. Identification of factors related to this very early risk indicator can help inform early prevention efforts. This study prospectively examined the relationship between childhood adversities and early initiation of alcohol use (by age 14) among Puerto Rican youth, the Latino subgroup at highest risk for alcohol use disorders in adulthood. The data come from the Boricua Youth Study, a longitudinal study of Puerto Rican youth in two sites (South Bronx, New York, and the standard metropolitan area of San Juan, Puerto Rico). We focus on youth who were ages 10 and older at Wave 1 [M _{age at Wave 1} (SE)?=?11.64(0.05), N?=?1259, 48.85?% females]. Twelve childhood adversities were measured at Wave 1 and include 10 adverse childhood experiences commonly studied and two additional ones (exposure to violence and discrimination) that were deemed relevant for this study’s population. Early initiation of alcohol use was determined based on youth report at Waves 1 through 3 (each wave 1 year apart). Cox proportional hazards models showed that, when considered individually, adversities reflecting child maltreatment, parental maladjustment, and sociocultural stressors were related to early initiation of alcohol use. Significant gender interactions were identified for parental emotional problems and exposure to violence, with associations found among girls only. Adversities often co-occurred, and when they were considered jointly, physical and emotional abuse, parental antisocial personality, and exposure to violence had independent associations with early alcohol use, with a stronger influence of exposure to violence in girls compared to boys. The accumulation of adversities, regardless of the specific type of exposure, increased the risk for starting to drink at a young age in a linear way. The associations between childhood adversities and early alcohol use were generally consistent across sociocultural contexts, in spite of differences in the prevalence of exposure to adversity. Our findings highlight the importance of targeting multiple adversities and expanding the notion of adversity to capture the experiences of specific groups more adequately.     

Performing blackness in the “Rainbow Nation”: Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania

This article applies Saidiya Hartman’s framework of performing blackness to South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance series, The Future White Women of Azania, to consider the ways in which the performances index the convoluted imbrications of colonialism, specifically Apartheid policy in South Africa, and postcolonialism, specifically the anti-Apartheid struggle(s) and the current political and economic structure of South African democracy. It argues that Ruga’s performance makes evident political and economic systems that tout black and queer liberation while perpetuating black queer death. Ruga’s work also relocates Hartman’s framework to a transnational, postcolonial context, expanding the notion of performing blackness (and the entangled processes of domination and subordination that it maps) beyond the trans-Atlantic paradigm, suggesting that performing blackness could be used to understand the correlation between broader spatial and temporal phenomena that shape blackness. Finally, situating The Future White Women of Azania as not only a performance of blackness, but of queerness as well, postulates that layering sexuality onto Hartman’s model reveals that the dynamics articulated under performing blackness are evident between oppressors and oppressed and between members of each of these groups as Hartman notes, but also between the contingent axes of subjectivity within an individual’s experience.