Adolescents’ future orientation and anticipatory emotion regulation in daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic: An experience sampling study

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a challenge to young people’s positive future orientation and mental health. The current study’s objective was to understand the role of daily-life future orientation and anticipatory emotion regulation in mental health during the pandemic. We used the Experience Sampling Method to investigate Belgian adolescents’ (aged 13 – 21) daily life future orientation and anticipatory emotion regulation in relation to psychopathology symptoms in 2020 (N = 136, 121 females) and 2021 (N = 53, 48 females). Adolescents generally perceived immediate future events more positively than negatively throughout the pandemic. However, differences in future orientation between phases of the pandemic were also observed. Higher psychopathology symptom levels were associated with looking forward to future events less and dreading them more early in the pandemic and with perceiving immediate future events as less positive in a later phase of the pandemic. Furthermore, the expected intensity and importance of immediate future events were related to anticipatory emotion regulation in daily life during the pandemic. The results suggest that adolescents with higher psychopathology symptoms perceived the immediate future more negatively during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, clinical interventions to target future orientation during a crisis could be beneficial in supporting and improving young people’s mental health.