Social relationships, emotion regulation, and emotional wellbeing in adolescence: associations in youth with and without a migratory background
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.
Francesca Federico, Michela Mellone, Sergio Melogno et al.