Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and academic burnout dimensions in children and adolescents: a network analysis approach
摘要
Students experience high levels of academic stress associated with exams, the interaction with teachers, bullying, and parental consequences associated with failure in the academic context. An important question is how can certain people manage stressful academic situations efficiently, whereas other people struggle, eventually developing mental health problems such as academic burnout. Our main objective is to identify how different academic burnout dimensions are interconnected and associated with cognitive emotion regulation strategies (CERS). A secondary objective was to investigate whether the network changes its connectivity across genders. The sample consisted of 710 Romanian youth aged 9-16 (M = 10.67). Networks were estimated using the Gaussian graphical model. Further, we employed a network subgroup analysis in order to test for statistically significant differences between the networks for females and males, respectively. Our results identified emotional exhaustion and cynicism as main dimensions of academic burnout, and catastrophizing and reappraisal as main CERS in the network structure. In terms of important links within the network, the relationship between exhaustion and cynicism, followed by the relationship between exhaustion and inadequacy, self-blame and catastrophizing, and positive reappraisal and refocus on planning was emphasized. There were no statistically significant differences of global strength and edge weights across the networks, although several differences emerged in terms of individual edge differences. Following additional replication of our findings, future prevention and intervention programs should focus on cognitive strategies that would target catastrophizing and train reappraisal strategies in stressful academic settings.