4 - (SYM 58) Initial Exploration of the Structure of Emotion Socialization in College Students

Mental health problems in college students have increased over the last decade (Buizza et al., 2022). Up to 75% of students go to a peer first to seek help when they are in distress (APA, 2022); peers, thus, exert considerable influence via their emotion socialization (ES), or how they respond to their friends’ emotions. Despite the importance of this construct in emerging adulthood, there is no empirically validated measure of ES in this age group. As such, the goal of this study was to explore the factor structure and psychometric properties of a measure of friend-provided socialization (You and Your Friends Scale, or YYF; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014) in college students.

Participants were N=770 college students (M age=22.01; 60.3% women, 35.2% men, 3.8% non-binary; 61.8% White; 17% Black; 9.0% Asian/Asian-American; 6.4% Multiracial; additional racial identities were reported but comprised < 4% of the sample). Participants completed the YYF, a self-report measure of friend-provided socialization for three emotions: anger, sadness, and worry. We split the sample and conducted exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and tests of invariance based on gender identity (men/women) and racial identity (white/black).

EFA revealed and CFA confirmed the presence of three factors for anger and sadness: punishment (e.g., my friends say something like you’re being ridiculous); neglect (e.g., ignore the fact you feel this way); and explore (e.g., help you deal with what’s made you angry). For anger only, a fourth factor, distract, emerged (e.g., say something like ‘cheer up.’). Fit indices for these solutions suggested good model fit (CFI >.943; RMSEA< .057; SRMR< .049). However, we were unable to confirm a factor structure for the worry items. We found evidence for partial invariance by gender and race, although the pattern of results differed by emotion. Finally, scores on the above subscales were small to moderately correlated with aspects of emotion regulation and social support (r=.114–.321), providing evidence for convergent validity.

Our results provide an empirical basis for use of the anger and sadness subscales and inform researchers and practitioners that the basic structure of peers’ responses to these emotions is similar. ES is worthy of further investigation in this age group as colleges pivot from promoting traditional therapy services to peer-run workshops and brief counseling (APA, 2022), and thus, aim to promote adaptive socialization in facilitators of these workshops and college communities at large.