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Background and Objectives: Negative cognitive emotion regulation (ER) strategies are particularly important within the framework of anxiety problems amongst youths and how they cope with stressful events. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between both negative and positive ER style and cardiac regulation under stressful conditions.Design: Eighty-nine adolescents (M = 13.31 years, SD = 0.68, 44.94% girls) were exposed to a socially relevant stress induction protocol.Methods: Participants' emotion regulation strategies were assessed and their cardiac function was recorded.Results: A negative ER style predicted heart rate (HR) entropy at the stressful stage after controlling for anxiety scores. In addition, heart rate variability reactivity and recovery and HR entropy recovery were larger (p < .05) in the low negative ER style group (n = 16) than in the high negative ER style group (n = 23).Conclusions: Results suggest that individuals with a highly negative ER style have diminished autonomic flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Diminished heart rate variability has been found to be associated with high anxiety symptomatology. Since adolescence is the period of onset for many anxiety disorders, this study aimed to determine sex- and anxiety-related differences in heart rate variability and complexity in adolescents.Methods: We created four groups according to sex and anxiety symptomatology: high-anxiety girls (n = 24) and boys (n = 25), and low-anxiety girls (n = 22) and boys (n = 24) and recorded their cardiac function while they performed regular school activities. A series of two-way (sex and anxiety) MANOVAs were performed on time domain variability, frequency domain variability, and non-linear complexity.Results: We obtained no multivariate interaction effects between sex and anxiety, but highly anxious participants had lower heart rate variability than the low-anxiety group. Regarding sex, girls showed lower heart rate variability and complexity than boys.Conclusions: The results suggest that adolescent girls have a less flexible cardiac system that could be a marker of the girls' vulnerability to developing anxiety disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]