Psychological well-being in adolescents with lower socio-economic status: The roles of emotions and system justification

Previous studies have demonstrated that poverty is negatively related to psychological well-being among adolescents. Although there is an increasing interest in understanding psychological predictors behind well-being of adolescents from poor family backgrounds, most studies have largely focused on the role of family structure, such as parental support and parental cohabitation. However, since poverty occurs in a context of social relations embedded in power inequalities in society, it is also important to understand whether well-being of adolescents coming from lower socioeconomic status (SES) is related with how adolescents with low SES perceive inequality and what emotions they feel toward the affluent. Therefore, in the current thesis, it was focused on the well-being of the adolescents coming from lower SES family background, with a particular emphasis on the roles of emotions and system justification, which taps individuals' tendency to legitimize inequality. Specifically, in terms of emotions, the attention was narrowed to anger and admiration which are two important and prevalent emotions in the context of poverty. Moreover, it was attempted to examine not only admiration and anger as discrete emotions but also as a mixed emotional experience, which refers to affective experiences characterized by the co-activation of two emotions, usually opposite in valence. Combining knowledge from the domains of poverty among adolescents, system justification, admiration, anger, and mixed emotions, the goal of the thesis was to understand whether both system justification and emotions in relation with the affluent peers predicted well-being of adolescents coming from lower SES family. It was argued that justifying economic inequalities would positively predict well-being of adolescents coming from lower SES family. It was also claimed that both anger and admiration as discrete emotions and as a mixed emotional experience would negatively predict well-being. However, it was argued that the link between system justification and well-being would be mediated by both discrete emotions and mixed emotions. To do this, in one correlational study, data was collected from high school adolescents (N =219). As expected, results demonstrated that system justification predicted well-being through anger. However, although admiration and mixed emotion of admiration and anger were negatively associated with well-being, they were not related to system justification. Implications, future directions, and limitations of the study were discussed.