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ASIDE: Adolescents' Social Interpretations Determine their Experiences

Author: Reuma Gadassi Polack
Jonas Everaert
Michael V. Bronstein
Publication venue
Publication date: 2021
Field of study

Authors Michael V. Bronstein, Reuma Gadassi Polack, Jonas Everaert, Jutta Joormann, & Sophia Vinogradov Description Everyday life is replete with ambiguous social situations; ambiguity in these situations can be resolved via interpretation (Blanchette & Richards, 2010). Cognitive models of depression and social anxiety have traditionally held that these forms of psychopathology may be caused, at least in part, by a tendency to infer more negative and fewer positive interpretations of ambiguous situations (Clark et al., 1999; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). More recent models have extended this account by asserting that the impact of interpretation bias may depend upon the resulting fit between interpretations and evolving situations (Mehu & Scherer, 2015). Accordingly, the consequences of interpretation for psychological wellbeing may depend not only on whether and to what extent interpretations tend to be resolved in a particular direction (“interpretation bias”), but also on the degree to which interpretations are revised as situations change (“interpretation flexibility”). In support of this possibility, previous work by our group has found that, in adults, less flexible interpretations of ambiguous social situations, above and beyond interpretation bias, are consistently associated with depression and social anxiety (Everaert et al., 2018, 2020). Moreover, we have found that the relation between inflexible interpretations and depression/social anxiety is mediated by dampening of positive emotions (the tendency to reduce the intensity/duration of positive emotions, for example by thinking “I should not be happy; good things won’t last for me”) (Everaert et al., 2020). Here, we extend this line of research to adolescents using a developmentally-appropriate version of the Emotional Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE) Task (which we developed to disentangle the effects of bias and inflexibility in the interpretation of ambiguous social situations). Using this task, we will examine whether inflexible interpretations (above and beyond biased ones) are related to depression and social anxiety in adolescents, and whether this relation is mediated by dampening of positive emotions, as was found for adults. This investigation of the relations between inflexible/biased interpretations of ambiguous social situations and psychopathology in adolescents is important because it will set the stage for future work clarifying whether inflexible interpretations of these situations might contribute to depression/social anxiety as well as future work determining how interpretation bias/inflexibility fluctuate across development. Adolescence is an ideal developmental period to clarify whether this is the case for several reasons. First, the rate of onset for these pathologies increases rapidly during adolescence (vs. earlier developmental stages; see Luking et al., 2016), making studies examining whether inflexible interpretations temporally precede depression (a requirement for causation) more feasible. Second, adolescents (vs. people in other developmental periods) are more sensitive to social situations (Rodman, Powers, & Somerville, 2017; Somerville, 2013), and this increased sensitivity has been tied with higher risk for psychopathology (Rapee et al., 2019). Thus, adolescence is likely to be a developmental period where it may be easier to detect any causal effect of inflexible interpretations on depression/social anxiety

Emotions and social experiences : A multi-wave daily-diary study in youth (Wave 3)

Author: Reuma Gadassi Polack
Publication venue
Publication date: 2024
Field of study

Adolescence is a time of increased sensitivity to social situations (Rodman, Powers, & Somerville, 2017; Somerville, 2013), as well as an imbalance between heightened emotional response and protracted regulatory abilities (Casey et al., 2019); the combination of imbalanced emotionality and increased sensitivity has been tied with higher risk for psychopathology (Rapee et al., 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic restricted adolescence social contact with their peers and created a powerful stressor in a time in which stress reactivity is particularly high (Cohodes et al., 2021). The study preregistered here followed children and adolescents social-emotional functioning from a year prior to the emergence of COVID (Wave 1 of data collection) to during the initial stages of the pandemic (Wave 2 of data collection; for more details see Gadassi-Polack et al., 2021b). The goal of Wave 3 of data collection (15 month following the beginning of school closures due to the pandemic) is examining (1) youths’ social-emotional developmental trajectories and (2) characterizing long-term influences of the pandemic on youth development