Peer-reviewed article
Social relationships, emotion regulation, and emotional wellbeing in adolescence: associations in youth with and without a migratory background
Francesca Federico, Michela Mellone, Sergio Melogno, Margherita Orsolini ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This study looked at how relationships at school, in the family and with peers, and everyday difficulties managing emotions, relate to emotional wellbeing in 79 13-14-year-old middle-school students in Rome. Of these, 37 had at least one foreign-born parent and 42 did not. Among students with a migratory background, better school and family functioning were each linked to greater emotional wellbeing. This was not seen in students without a migratory background. Emotion-regulation difficulties were not independently linked to wellbeing in either group, and the study found no support for an indirect pathway through emotion regulation. The authors describe the results as exploratory.
Key points
- The sample was 79 third-year middle-school students in Rome (mean age 13.80), 37 with and 42 without a migratory background.
- Among adolescents with a migratory background, school (β = 0.44, p = 0.002) and family (β = 0.53, p < 0.001) indicators were independently associated with greater emotional wellbeing.
- No direct relational-context path to emotional wellbeing reached significance in the group without a migratory background.
- Emotion-regulation difficulties were not independently associated with emotional wellbeing in either group.
- Bootstrap confidence intervals (5,000 resamples) did not support indirect pathways through emotion regulation.
Limitations
The sample is small, the design is cross-sectional and the contextual indicators are single items, so the study cannot show cause and effect. The migratory-background category is also mixed, so the results are exploratory and hypothesis-generating.
Abstract
Emotional wellbeing in adolescence develops within interconnected personal and relational systems, but the relative salience of family, peer, and school contexts may vary across sociocultural experiences. The present study examined associations among perceived functioning in school, family, and peer domains, everyday emotion-regulation difficulties, and affective emotional wellbeing in 79 third-year middle-school students in Rome (M age = 13.80 years, SD = 0.45; 45.6% female), including 42 adolescents without and 37 with a migratory background, defined as having at least one foreign-born parent. Participants completed self-report assessments of relational functioning across the three domains, emotion-regulation difficulties, and positive and negative affect. Two separately estimated observed-variable path models were used for exploratory purposes. Among adolescents with a migratory background, school ( β = 0.44, p = 0.002) and family ( β = 0.53, p < 0.001) indicators were independently associated with greater emotional wellbeing. No direct relational-context path to emotional wellbeing reached significance in the group without a migratory background. Emotion-regulation difficulties were not independently associated with emotional wellbeing in either group, and percentile bootstrap confidence intervals based on 5,000 resamples did not support indirect pathways through emotion regulation. The findings point to the possible importance of family and school as interconnected relational systems while providing no support for the hypothesized regulatory pathway in this sample. Given the modest subgroup sizes, cross-sectional design, single-item contextual indicators, and heterogeneous migratory-background category, the results should be considered exploratory and hypothesis-generating.