Frustration inducing tasks as tools for assessing adolescent emotion regulation

Adolescents can be at risk for the development of mental health symptoms which can be exacerbated by emotion regulation problems. Hence, empirically validated tools to assess emotion regulation among adolescents in experimental settings are needed, but so far potential differences between already existing frustration inducing tasks are not well understood.
The aim of the present study was thus to compare the efficacy of two non-verbal distress tolerance tasks – the Behavioural Indicator of Resiliency to Distress (BIRD, Lejuez et al.), and the Mirror Tracing Persistence Task (MPTP; Strong et al., 2003), in inducing frustration in a sample of 72 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 16.
Adolescents’ subjective, physiological and behavioural emotion responses were assessed via self-report (PANAS-C; Laurent et al., 1999), heart rate monitoring and persistence on the task respectively, and associated with their self-reported emotion regulation difficulties (DERS-SF, Gullone & Taffe, 2012) as well as strategy use during the task (ERQ-state; Egloff et al., 2006).
Both tasks were found to be subjectively frustrating, as evidenced by significant differences between pre- and post- reported negative affect. Beyond the similar self-reported psychological distress for both tasks, stronger negative physiological and behavioural reactions were however found for the BIRD task with higher heart rates as well as a tendency towards a shorter persistence on this task. The emotional responses were found to be correlated with adolescents reported difficulties, above all with their reported impulsiveness. Adolescents’ strategy use of reappraisal and suppression did not differ between tasks.
Due to the similar self-reported negative affect after both tasks, these findings validate the use of both tasks in an adolescent population. In addition, they highlight potential differences between tasks in terms of emotion responses. These discrepancies should be taken into account in further studies due to their implications for the interpretation of findings.