Age-Related Differences in Emotion Regulation: Examining Emotion Regulation Skill Interactions in Adolescents and Young Adults

Emotion regulation is considered an important process in psychological development and resilience, yet little is known about how specific regulation skills interact across adolescence and young adulthood. This cross-sectional study examined how core emotion regulation skills—such as emotional awareness, understanding, modification, and acceptance—relate to one another in different age groups. A total of 1,041 participants aged 12–25 years (M_age = 18.66; SD = 4.01; 62.8% female) from community samples in Belgium and the Netherlands participated in the current study. Adolescents’ completed measures of seven regulation skills based on the Adaptive Coping with Emotions model. Network analysis identified two distinct age groups (12–16 and 17–25 years) with differing patterns of skill connectivity. While single edge-level differences did not survive correction for multiple comparisons, permutation tests indicated significant age-related differences in patterns of global network connectivity. Young adults displayed more integrated networks of regulation skills, which may reflect a more cohesive regulation system, although causal interpretations are limited by the cross-sectional design. In contrast, overall younger adolescents showed weaker connections between skills. Moreover, the obtained network model for younger adolescents showed a two-cluster structure (vs. absence of distinct clusters in young adults), in which skills related to emotional awareness and understanding were less connected to active regulation strategies such as modification and acceptance. Notably, while modification and acceptance emerged as central in both age groups, emotional awareness was significantly less linked to other skills in the younger group. These findings offer preliminary insights into how emotion regulation skills may become more integrated from early to late adolescence, tentatively pointing to a potential shift toward a more cohesive regulation system.