Psychological control, anger dysregulation, and aggressive behaviors: an ecological momentary assessment with Italian adolescents

This study highlights the role of family context in adolescents' emotional development as a key component of character development. In recent years, researchers have tried to clarify emotion-regulation-related mechanisms to identify, prevent, and ameliorate the antecedents and negative consequences of poor psychological adjustment in childhood and adolescence. Anger has received the most attention in child and adolescent samples, especially for the adverse consequences associated with its dysregulated expression (e.g., Chaplin, 2006; Morris et al. 2010). Previous studies also suggest that parenting contributes to youth emotion regulation, which in turn affects adolescent adjustment. For example, negative controlling parenting styles are associated with higher levels of youth negative affect and anger dysregulation, which in turn are associated with more problematic behaviors (O’Neil & Parke, 2000). Research has recently highlighted the importance of studying the day-to-day variability of youths’ emotional experiences (e.g., Garrison et al., 2014; Maciejewski et al., 2017; Silk et al., 2011). General advantages of the ecological momentary assessment approach include higher ecological validity and more reliable measures than laboratory and questionnaire measures; minimization of retrospective reporting biases; and information about the social contexts associated with emotional experiences. Participants included 102 adolescents (M age = 16.77, SD = .78), who were part of an ongoing longitudinal study. For 15 consecutive days (morning, afternoon, and evening), youths were prompted to answer through their mobile phones questions about whether they were feeling angry, mad, and irritated in that moment (1 = “very slightly or not at all” to 5 = “extremely”). If they reported a score above 1 in at least one of the three anger-related items (indicating that they were feeling anger in that moment), they were directed to answer questions about anger-regulation related mechanisms. Items were adapted from the Children Emotional Management Anger Scale (Zeman et al., 2002); the Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Romer, 2004), and the Hostile Rumination Scale (Caprara, 1986). Moreover, youths were also asked once per day three items on parental psychological control (adapted from the Psychological Control and Autonomy Granting Scale; Silk et al., 2003) and on youth aggressive behaviors (adapted from Youth Self-Reports; Achenbach, 1991), both occurring on that day. Path analysis revealed that parental psychological control was associated with more frequent anger experience, more difficulties in anger regulation, higher hostile rumination, and higher dysregulated expression of anger. Only dysregulated expression of anger was associated with higher adolescent aggressive behaviors.