Abstract
The current study examined the prospective relations between emotion suppression and maladjustment (i.e., depressive symptoms, family stress events, peer stress events, and family and peer support) among Vietnamese American (n = 372) and European American adolescents (n = 304). We found that at baseline Vietnamese Americans adolescents reported greater use of emotion suppression coping than European American adolescents. Multi-group structural equation modeling indicated that for European American teens emotion suppression was significantly related to increased depression symptoms and decreased quality of peer relationships. In contrast, for the Vietnamese Americans teens emotion suppression relations to later maladjustment was either nonsignificant or attenuated relative to the European American. These findings suggest ethnic group differences in both the utilization, and consequences and function of emotion suppression among Vietnamese American and European American adolescents.
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Notes
Although not part of the study design, these students were included because administrators in two schools required that we extend the research opportunity to all students regardless of ethnicity.
We examined potential gender differences. We found that the cross-lagged path from T1 emotion suppression to T2 depressive symptoms was significant for males (β = 0.11, p < 0.05) but not significant for females (β = 0.08, p = ns). A model with a multi-group constraint on this parameter did not differ in fit compared to the initial unconstrained model, indicating that the estimates were not significantly different across groups. Across the models testing associations between emotion suppression and other outcomes (e.g., family support), there were no differences between path estimates for males versus females.
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The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
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This study was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH077697), Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (NCATS/NIH UL1 TR000445); the Peabody College of Education and Human Development (PIF 4–26–999-6402), and the University of California Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center. Correspondence concerning this article can be sent via email to William Tsai at wtsai@csusm.edu.
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Tsai, W., Nguyen, D.J., Weiss, B. et al. Cultural Differences in the Reciprocal Relations between Emotion Suppression Coping, Depressive Symptoms and Interpersonal Functioning among Adolescents. J Abnorm Child Psychol 45, 657–669 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0192-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0192-2