Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Prior research underscores the unique developmental challenges that arise during the transition to adulthood (Hoffman, Guerry, & Albano, 2018). This period of development--often called emerging adulthood--brings both rich opportunity and new challenges, as individuals navigate major life transitions, including increased independence, and new academic or vocational expectations. Indeed, it is during this window that they must meet educational objectives, forge financial and emotional independence, build lasting relationships, and further explore self-identity. One key marker of the transition to adulthood for many individuals is beginning college. While this transition can be exciting and rewarding, it can also be a significant source of stress. In fact, a concerning increase in psychopathology levels of anxiety and depression has been found among U.S. college students over the past decade (Conley, Kirsch, Dickson, & Bryant, 2014; Duffy, Twenge, & Joiner, 2019). However, less is known about what factors exacerbate or attenuate negative mental health outcomes among first-year college students. As such, the present longitudinal study sought to characterize risk and resilience factors that arise during the first year of college. Aside from this developmental period transitioning to adulthood being significant, experiencing a major life event such as living through a pandemic may immensely impact this transition to college. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak has initiated a cycle of events that have caused massive disruptions to college students’ daily routines, from transitioning from in-person classes to remote learning, to living in dense communal residential halls to being back at home with family. This, coupled with the political, social, economic, and public health crises occurring during 2020 has posed innumerable challenges for adjustment and wellbeing. While the magnitude of these experiences may vary by location and institution, understanding how young individuals cope with these challenges while simultaneously striving to establish their independence is a critical test case for characterizing psychological and contextual factors that may give rise to psychological risk and resilience. After initially beginning data collection at the start of the 2019-2020 academic year, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020 just as data collection was concluding. In response to the pandemic, the decision was made to continue tracking participants over time to examine whether the same risk and resilience factors could moderate coping in response to this unprecedented event. We thus also examined how coping strategy usage (i.e., emotion regulation strategy usage) interacted with the transition to college and the onset of the pandemic to predict adjustment and mental health changes in young adults. Understanding what contributes to individual differences in adjustment is essential for developing prevention and intervention programs that optimize outcomes during pivotal and profound life events. Prior work has linked emotion regulation strategy usage to both positive and negative mental health outcomes (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010; Werner & Gross, 2010). Specifically, cognitive reappraisal is commonly referred to as the ability to change the interpretation of an emotionally eliciting event as being an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. Alternatively, expressive suppression involves suppressing the outward expression of an emotion and is linked to more maladaptive outcomes (Cutuli, 2014; Haga, Kraft, & Corby, 2009; Werner & Gross, 2010). To this end, we utilized questionnaire measures to examine how emotion regulation strategy usage and significant life events may interact to predict changes in anxiety five times during the first year of college and the COVID-19 outbreak.