Correlates of adolescents' profiles of cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the school context

Emotion regulation is crucial for managing academic failures. Little research has explored adolescents’ emotion regulation strategy profiles and their correlates at school. Through a person-centered approach, we identified profiles based on four emotion regulation strategies (self-blame, catastrophizing, positive reappraisal, and positive refocusing) and examined their predictors (gender, socioeconomic status, and prior achievement) and outcomes (test anxiety, academic buoyancy, and later achievement). We involved 535 British students in Year 12 (Mage = 16.40 years, 71% girls). A subsample of them (n = 318, 74% girls) was also involved in Year 13. Latent profile analysis revealed four profiles: low self-blame and catastrophizing, balanced average strategy use, high positive reappraisal and positive refocusing, and high self-blame and catastrophizing. The latter profile was more common among girls and associated with higher test anxiety and lower buoyancy. Despite limitations, these findings inform interventions to enhance school-related emotion regulation by considering individual differences.