EMOTION REGULATION AND SYMPTOMS’ CHANGES AMONG LIGURIAN ADOLESCENTS DURING PANDEMIC OUTBREAK: A BRIEF LONGITUDINAL STUDY

Background: Several experts underlined the potential risk of the outbreak related measures for adolescents’ mental health (Racine et al., 2020). However, longitudinal data investigating and explaining this issue is still lacking. Methods: Between March and June 2021 (Time 1) -when “stay-at-home” measures were severe- and after four months (Time 2) -when they became softer- 100 community Ligurian adolescents (Mage=14.94; SD=1.64; 45% males) fulfilled self-report questionnaires for measuring their psychological symptoms (i.e., internalizing and externalizing symptoms, binge eating, social media disorder) and emotion regulation (i.e., expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal strategies, alexithymia, reflective functioning). Results: ANOVA for repeated measures showed a decreased in symptoms levels except for binge eating that remains stable. Surprisingly, moderation analyses showed that individuals classified as alexithymic experienced a higher reduction of internalizing symptoms, that higher levels of both expressive suppression and alexithymia were predictive of higher reduction of social media disorder, and that lower levels of reflective functioning predict the reduction of externalizing symptomatology. Discussion: Results suggests that Ligurian adolescents’ mental health generally benefits from the end of severe “stay-at-home” measures. In particular, adolescents with poor emotion regulation capacities experienced more benefits from a return to normality, underlying their vulnerability to external stressors. This stresses the interaction between emotion regulation capacities and contextual factors in the prediction of psychopathology