Adolescence is marked by significant challenges, with critical implications for emotional health. During this stage, youth, especially girls, are exposed to increasing stress and show heightened emotional sensitivity, particularly within social contexts. Some adolescents may not yet have developed effective regulatory strategies, leading to difficulties managing these more intense emotions and consequent maladaptive health outcomes. Such health issues inhibit the ability of adolescents to reach their potential and create a significant societal burden. However, recent models of adolescent brain development highlight the potential for cognitive flexibility and growth during this period of rapid change. Given these potential risks and resources of adolescence, significant scientific and practical advances can be made by identifying individual differences that predict healthy vs. unhealthy emotional functioning during this stage. This research seeks to identify one psychological factor, mindsets about emotion, that may contribute to adolescent emotional risk or resilience. The guiding scientific premise for this research is that a growth emotion mindset (GEM) will promote adaptive emotion processing (EP), whereas a fixed emotion mindset (FEM) will disrupt EP. Because stress exposure and emotional sensitivity are particularly salient in adolescent girls, the research will focus on this group. Using an experimental design, girls scoring high on a FEM will be randomly assigned to either a mindset manipulation or a control group (brain education). Each group will complete a 25-minute computer-based lesson followed by a social stressor and an fMRI session that includes resting state, an emotional challenge, and a task assessing cognitive control within an emotional context.
Two specific aims will be addressed: (1) to determine whether a laboratory-induced GEM, relative to a FEM, predicts more adaptive EP at the neural, behavioral, and psychological levels of processing; and (2) to determine whether neural processing of emotion accounts for the effect of a GEM manipulation on behavioral and psychological processing of emotion. Integrating across the fields of developmental psychology and social affective neuroscience, this exploratory proof-of-concept research will provide insight into the influence of mindsets on multiple levels of EP, a key step to refining theories of adolescent emotional development and furthering basic science efforts to understand cognition-emotion interactions during adolescence. This study builds on a strong empirical database establishing the effect of mindsets on multiple domains of functioning but will be the first to examine the implications of a growth vs. fixed mindset about emotion for EP in adolescent girls, thereby elucidating one specific youth attribute that can support or disrupt emotional development. More broadly, this line of research can yield clear and compelling implications for policy and practice guidelines aimed at optimizing long-term emotional health in adolescent girls and easing societal burden associated with compromised health outcomes.
Adolescence is a high-risk stage for the emergence of difficulties managing negative emotions and stress, which can contribute to a range of psychological and physical health problems that often become recurrent or chronic throughout the lifespan. Because emotional risk is particularly high in adolescent girls, who are more susceptible to the development of emotional difficulties such as anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, it is critical to identify and target individual differences in girls that predict healthy vs. unhealthy emotional functioning during this stage. Aiming to identify one factor, namely mindsets about emotion, that may help shape patterns of effective or ineffective emotion processing, this research can inform practical efforts to develop time- and cost-efficient programs with the potential to optimize emotional health in adolescent girls.
