Browsing by Author "Turner, K. Amber"

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    Angry rumination and effortful control: Mediating effects on reactive but not proactive aggression
    White, Bradley A.; Turner, K. Amber (2013-08-01)
    Anger rumination and self-regulation deficits have been previously identified as risk factors for aggression. We hypothesized that anger rumination would relate to reactive but not proactive aggression, and that this association would be mediated by lower levels of trait selfregulation. Undergraduate students (N = 359) completed self-report measures of anger rumination, effortful control, and aggression. Mediation was tested using PROCESS (Hayes, 2012). After controlling for proactive aggression, anger rumination was associated with reactive aggression, and this relationship was partially mediated by effortful control. Anger rumination was also uniquely related to proactive aggression, but without mediation by effortful control. Gender did not moderate these relationships. Effortful control may be a viable treatment target for reactive aggression, whereas addressing anger rumination may help reduce both reactive and proactive aggression.
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    Emotion Regulation Treatment of Disruptive Behavior: A Preliminary Investigation
    Turner, K. Amber (Virginia Tech, 2017-09-20)
    Children with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) can have heterogeneous presentations due to varying combinations of the eight criterion A symptoms. Researchers have identified a subtype of ODD for children with primarily angry/irritable mood symptoms and who are at risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders. Despite the prevalence of anger and mood issues in children with ODD, established treatments for disruptive behavior disorders typically focus primarily on teaching caregivers more effective parenting strategies to address oppositional and defiant behaviors, rather than directly targeting children's difficulties with emotions. To address the dearth of emotion-focused treatments for ODD, a novel emotion regulation intervention was developed based on a framework offered by Southam-Gerow (2013). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the initial feasibility of this intervention and to explore its efficacy for reducing ODD and associated emotion regulation problems in middle childhood. Following a non-concurrent multiple baseline design, children ages 8-12 were assessed with semi-structured diagnostic interviews to determine study eligibility, and subsequently enrolled in a 13-week intervention with their caregivers. Treatment feasibility was supported by participant satisfaction ratings as well as treatment fidelity results. Treatment protocol adherence in terms of delivery by the therapist was high, but caregiver symptom reporting was less consistent. Nevertheless, multiple metrics support the efficacy of the intervention in reducing symptoms of ODD as well as some efficacy in improving child emotion regulation abilities. Overall, results support further research into emotion regulation-focused intervention for ODD.
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    Negative Affect in the Relationship between Internalizing Symptoms and Aggression: The Role of Effortful Control
    Turner, K. Amber (Virginia Tech, 2013-03-01)
    Although comorbidity is common between internalizing symptoms such as anxiety and depression and externalizing symptoms such as aggression, the reason for this co-occurrence remains unclear. High negative affect is one factor that has been proposed to explain the connection between anxiety and depression, as well as between these internalizing symptoms and externalizing symptoms including aggression; however, on its own, it may not explain the common association between symptoms. Research on anxiety suggests that effortful control moderates the relationship between negative affect and anxiety. Low levels of effortful control have also been tied to symptoms of depression and aggression. It was hypothesized that effortful control would moderate the impact of negative affect in associations between internalizing symptoms (anxiety and depression) and aggression such that individuals who have both high levels of negative affect and low levels of effortful control will be more likely to experience both internalizing symptoms and aggression. It was further proposed that, among the functional subtypes of aggression, this relationship would hold only for reactive aggression, and not for proactive aggression. These predictions were tested via hierarchical regression analyses of self-report data from a large sample of undergraduate students. Findings suggest that effortful control moderates the relationship between negative affect and depression; however, it functions as an additive predictor for both anxiety and reactive aggression. These findings and their implications are discussed.