Childhood Adversity in Adolescent Custodial Grandchildren: A Study of Daily Stressors, Emotional Dynamics, and a Mobile Socio-Emotional Program's Effects on Well-Being

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) commonly experienced by custodial grandchildren, such as childhood abuse and neglect, have been associated with poorer developmental outcomes, which may be a result of disruptions in daily socio-emotional well-being, stressor exposure, and emotional reactivity. Links between ACEs and stressor-emotion mechanisms are particularly relevant for custodial adolescent grandchildren, given that there over two million households where grandmothers, without the present of parents, are caring for them. As such, it is necessary to advance knowledge on the extent to which their daily life experiences are negatively impacted, whether there are identifiable resilience factors that promote positive outcomes, and develop low-cost, accessible programs that meet their socio-emotional needs. Daily diary studies, which are based on collecting repeated measures from individuals across several days, have shown that stressor exposure and emotional reactivity are associated with poorer well-being among adolescents. However, these daily processes have not been examined specifically in custodial adolescent grandchildren, and the impact of ACEs on these processes in adolescence is largely unknown. The role of socio-emotional skills as a resilience factor in the context of daily stress and emotions has not been previously examined either. Moreover, despite custodial adolescent grandchildren being severely at risk, there are few programs that have been shown to improve their socio-emotional well-being. Given these limitations, the proposed study aims to provide new insights into how day-to-day fluctuations in stressors are associated with changes in emotional well-being, whether individual differences in ACEs or socio-emotional skills predict daily fluctuations in stressor-emotion dynamics, and test an online program via a randomized trial with custodial adolescents. Aim 1 will determine whether daily stressors are related to well-being outcomes: (A) on average and (B) in day-to-day analyses indicative of within-person processes. Aim 2 will examine whether ACEs and socio-emotional skills predict overall levels of daily well-being and exposure to daily stressors, and test whether each factor moderates daily (i.e., within-person) associations between stressors and well-being outcomes. Aim 3 will test whether an online social intelligence training intervention can improve adolescents' socio-emotional skills, daily well-being, stressor exposure, and emotional reactivity, and if improvements differ across levels of ACEs. All analyses will be conducted with dynamic structural equation modeling, a statistical tool at the frontiers of modeling intensive longitudinal data. The findings of the proposed study have implications for understanding links between childhood adversity, socio-emotional skills, and several aspects of daily life such as well-being, stressor exposure, and emotional reactivity in adolescence. Furthermore, results may inform future prevention efforts and provide evidence for a low-cost, accessible, and scalable online program that improves the socio- emotional well-being of custodial adolescent grandchildren.