Daly, Leslie (5/15) Yoga and emotion regulation in high school students: the internal relationship (Sara C. Haden, Ph.D.; Nicholas Papouchis, Ph.D.; Paul Ramirez, Ph.D.; Marshall Hagins, PT, Ph.D.)
Even though emotion regulation is thought to be an essential capacity that contributes to healthy and adaptive functioning, interventions that help to develop the skill and research investigating their efficacy are limited. Developmentally, middle adolescents are prone to increased risk taking and emotional instability. They are also undergoing physical, psychological, and neurological changes that make them primed to learn and integrate new emotion regulation skills. Yoga is a popular and feasible intervention that is hypothesized to increase wellbeing through self-regulatory mechanisms, such as emotion regulation. Many schools are using yoga in their curriculums to address an increasing need for stress management and coping strategies, but more research is needed to assess these interventions and to understand the ways in which they work. The present study hypothesized that emotion regulation would increase for adolescents in a yoga group when compared to a physical education (PE) group and posited that mindful awareness, self-compassion, and body awareness would be partially responsible for those changes. Participants included 39 high school students in an urban, public school randomized to participate in a 16-week intervention. Pre-post data analyses revealed that emotion regulation increased in the yoga group as compared to the PE group. The proposed relationship between emotion regulation and mindful awareness, self-compassion, and body awareness was not supported, but important first steps in connecting body awareness and emotion regulation were discovered. Yoga appears to increase the emotion regulation of middle adolescents and provides benefits beyond that of PE alone.
Even though emotion regulation is thought to be an essential capacity that contributes to healthy and adaptive functioning, interventions that help to develop the skill and research investigating their efficacy are limited. Developmentally, middle adolescents are prone to increased risk taking and emotional instability. They are also undergoing physical, psychological, and neurological changes that make them primed to learn and integrate new emotion regulation skills. Yoga is a popular and feasible intervention that is hypothesized to increase wellbeing through self-regulatory mechanisms, such as emotion regulation. Many schools are using yoga in their curriculums to address an increasing need for stress management and coping strategies, but more research is needed to assess these interventions and to understand the ways in which they work. The present study hypothesized that emotion regulation would increase for adolescents in a yoga group when compared to a physical education (PE) group and posited that mindful awareness, self-compassion, and body awareness would be partially responsible for those changes. Participants included 39 high school students in an urban, public school randomized to participate in a 16-week intervention. Pre-post data analyses revealed that emotion regulation increased in the yoga group as compared to the PE group. The proposed relationship between emotion regulation and mindful awareness, self-compassion, and body awareness was not supported, but important first steps in connecting body awareness and emotion regulation were discovered. Yoga appears to increase the emotion regulation of middle adolescents and provides benefits beyond that of PE alone.
