Difficulties in emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms in Swedish youth

Sammanfattning: Psychological research has in the last few decades moved away from viewing psychopathology as distinct categories towards a hierarchical, dimensional model where an empirically based structure reflects the similarities among disorders. New tools, such as the second version of The Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS-II) have been developed to capture this dimensionality. In this time period there has also been a considerable development of research on emotion regulation, and emotion dysregulation has been proposed as a possibly unifying factor that could explain a wide range of psychopathological difficulties. This study explored the relationship between difficulties in emotion regulation and four symptom dimensions – dysphoria, ill temper, social anxiety and panic – from the IDAS-II in a sample of 633 Swedish children and adolescents aged 10-19 years. The results showed that difficulties in emotion regulation were statistically significantly associated with each of the symptom dimensions. Dysphoria, that captures core emotional and cognitive symptoms of depression and anxiety, had a stronger association with emotion regulation than the other symptom dimensions. These findings indicate that difficulties in emotion regulation are most strongly linked to broad psychopathology in youth, but less clearly linked to more specific symptom dimensions.