Negative emotionality and emotion regulation: A person-centered approach to predicting socioemotional adjustment in young adolescents

Emotionality and emotion regulation are presumed to interact to produce social behavior. Prior empirical evidence for this interaction has been weak. Researchers have tended to take a variable-centered approach to predicting social behavior and this may have obscured the relations between negative emotionality, emotion regulation, and social behavior. Therefore, a person-centered approach was used to examine the links among these variables. Two-hundred and three adolescents (M age = 13.3 years) completed measures of negative emotionality, emotion regulation, and socioemotional behavior. Cluster analysis suggested four profiles of adolescents: those moderate on regulation and negative emotionality, those low in both, those high in negative emotionality and low in regulation, those low in negative emotionality and high in regulation. LDF analysis suggested that these profiles of adolescents differed along two dimensions on socioemotional behavior.