(PS2-D76) Exploring the Effects of Parent Validation and Invalidation on Emotion Regulation Among Suicidal Cisgender and Non-cisgender Youth

Adolescence presents several developmental challenges, including understanding one’s gender identity and learning how to regulate one’s emotions. Moreover, suicidal behaviors have steadily increased over the past decade for youth and are higher amongst non-cisgender individuals (Narang et al., 2018). The minority stress model and the transactional model for emotion dysregulation both highlight the impact of a chronically invalidating response on emotion regulation, which can then lead to suicidal behaviors. It has been found that non-cisgender individuals are at a greater risk of emotion dysregulation as they tend to experience invalidating social and/or family environments, such as having more traumatic events and harassment, while having fewer adaptive emotional regulation strategies (Lefevor et al., 2019; Pearl et al., 2021; Shipherd et al., 2011). Previous research has shown that females and males experience emotions differently, but little is known about the differences in emotion regulation and the role that parent invalidation plays in non-cisgender individuals. This study aimed to examine the relationship between gender identity (cis-gender males, cis-gender females and non cis-gender youth) and emotion regulation and to begin to determine whether parent invalidation moderated this relationship. Data were collected from a residential program for individuals between the ages of 14 and 22 years old (N=166). Participants completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and Validation and Invalidation Response Scale (rating their parents). A one-way ANOVA found that groups were statistically different on emotion dysregulation, where there were higher levels of difficulties regulating their emotions for non cis-gender youth than cis-gender males. Although there were no significant differences between groups for parent invalidation, non-cisgender youth had higher parent invalidation mean ratings than cisgender youth. A multiple regression model was employed to investigate whether the association between gender identity and emotion regulation depended on parent invalidation. Results indicated that gender identity was associated with emotion regulation. However, the interaction between emotion regulation and parent invalidation was not significant, suggesting that parent invalidation does not moderate the relationship between gender identity and emotion regulation. Implications for understanding the relationship between emotion regulation, parent invalidation and gender identity will be discussed. This study highlighted that although parent invalidation did not contribute to higher levels of emotion dysregulation among non-cisgender individuals, larger invalidating family and social environment factors may still be at play and contributing to the distress that these individuals face. Future studies should use longitudinal methods to understand the causal impact of invalidation on emotion regulation for non-cisgender individuals to further expand or combine the transactional model and minority stress model.