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The importance of emotional awareness (EA) and emotion regulation (ER) for children's and adolescents' development has been suggested in numerous studies, but longitudinal trajectories of these aspects of emotional competence have rarely been examined. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate developmental trends of EA and ER in early and middle adolescence over a 1-year period. Longitudinal increases of different aspects of EA (emotion differentiation, bodily unawareness, attention to others', and analyses of own emotions) and dysfunctional ER, and decreases of functional ER were expected. Furthermore, it was explored whether these trajectories as well as their initial levels were associated with gender and age. Three-wave longitudinal self-report data of N = 1,225 German adolescents (aged 10-15 years at initial assessment, 54% female) who had completed the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire and the Regulation of Emotions Questionnaire were analyzed. After establishing at least partial scalar measurement invariance for the longitudinal models, the second-order Latent Growth Curve Models (LGCMs) were computed. Regarding EA, increases of emotion differentiation and bodily unawareness, as well as adolescents' attention to others' emotions, but also a decrease of their willingness to analyze own emotions were found. For ER, results suggested stability of dysfunctional and decreases of functional strategies. Conditional LGCMs (including gender, age, and the interaction between both) indicated that the increase of emotion differentiation and the decrease in the use of selected functional ER strategies were more pronounced for younger participants. Gender differences were found only for baseline but not for developmental trends, and no significant interaction with age was found. Overall, this study illustrates the developmental trajectories of EA and ER over the course of 1 year and emphasizes that adolescents have difficulties in applying functional ER strategies with increasing age, despite improvements in EA.

The existing literature has focused little on the health-promoting role of resources for sleep. Mainly risk factors have been highlighted regarding mental health in general. Moreover, for the vulnerable age group of adolescents, resources and their relation to sleep have hardly been explored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the predictive role of personal/social resources for the likelihood of having chronic sleep problems in adolescents. A sample of n = 131 adolescents (M = 14.31 years, SD = 1.84) completed the Sleep Disturbance Scale for Children and the Questionnaire to Assess Resources for Children and Adolescents at two measurement points about 8 months apart. Binomial logistic regressions controlling for age and sex revealed that higher levels of personal and social resources were associated with a lower likelihood of having chronic sleep problems. Especially optimism and school integration were associated with not experiencing chronic sleep problems. For the first time, this study highlighted multiple resources and their health-promoting role in adolescent sleep. Both personal and social resources seem to be relevant for preventing adolescents from chronic sleep problems. Prevention and intervention programs for sleep disorders in teenagers should especially promote optimism and school integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of emotional awareness (EA) and emotion regulation (ER) for children's and adolescents' development has been suggested in numerous studies, but longitudinal trajectories of these aspects of emotional competence have rarely been examined. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate developmental trends of EA and ER in early and middle adolescence over a 1-year period. Longitudinal increases of different aspects of EA (emotion differentiation, bodily unawareness, attention to others', and analyses of own emotions) and dysfunctional ER, and decreases of functional ER were expected. Furthermore, it was explored whether these trajectories as well as their initial levels were associated with gender and age. Three-wave longitudinal self-report data of N = 1,225 German adolescents (aged 10–15 years at initial assessment, 54% female) who had completed the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire and the Regulation of Emotions Questionnaire were analyzed. After establishing at least partial scalar measurement invariance for the longitudinal models, the second-order Latent Growth Curve Models (LGCMs) were computed. Regarding EA, increases of emotion differentiation and bodily unawareness, as well as adolescents' attention to others' emotions, but also a decrease of their willingness to analyze own emotions were found. For ER, results suggested stability of dysfunctional and decreases of functional strategies. Conditional LGCMs (including gender, age, and the interaction between both) indicated that the increase of emotion differentiation and the decrease in the use of selected functional ER strategies were more pronounced for younger participants. Gender differences were found only for baseline but not for developmental trends, and no significant interaction with age was found. Overall, this study illustrates the developmental trajectories of EA and ER over the course of 1 year and emphasizes that adolescents have difficulties in applying functional ER strategies with increasing age, despite improvements in EA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multilevel analysis, Level-1 predictors that also explain variance at a higher level are called contextual predictors. In the multilevel manifest covariate model, the Level-2 component is modeled as the average of the Level-1 predictor scores within a cluster. In the multilevel latent covariate model, the predictor is decomposed into two latent variables at Level-1 and Level-2. Performance conditions of these modeling approaches for three-level models are largely unexplored. We investigate the two approaches' performance with respect to bias, coverage, and power in a three-level random intercept model. Results reveal differences in estimation quality and required sample sizes. We provide sampling recommendations for both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]