Specifically, we find that exposure to both peer victimization and stressful life events are associated with increases in response-focused emotion dysregulation among adolescents. Response-focused emotion regulation includes a variety of processes that serve to dampen or modulate the intensity and duration of an emotional experience once an emotion has been activated (Gross 1998; 2001). The response-focused processes examined here include emotional awareness and understanding, expressive modulation, and rumination. Each of these emotion regulation strategies have been linked to youth aggressive behavior in previous studies (Bohnert et al. 2003; Peled and Moretti 2007; Zeman, et al. 2002). Our findings suggest that in addition to eliciting a wide range of negative emotions, experiences of stress and victimization disrupt a variety of emotion regulation processes that serve to modulate these emotional experiences.
