Dynamic Associations Among Emotion Regulation, Expressed Affect, and Inhibitory Control in Preschoolers from Immigrant Families

• In Event: 3-109 - Understanding Processes underlying Children's Emotional Development and Emotion Regulation Using Intensive Longitudinal Approaches

Integrative Statement

In the midst of challenges in defining emotion and emotion regulation, Cole et al. (2004) purported two types of regulatory phenomena: emotion as regulating and emotion as regulated. The former refers to the changes following emotion arousal such as regulatory behaviors (i.e., self-soothing, gaze aversion, and fidgeting), and the latter to the changes in the aroused emotion following regulations (i.e., valence, intensity, and duration). Previous research on emotion and emotion regulation (especially those from the temperament framework) tended to examine these as trait-level constructs and focused on the between-person associations. The present study used temporal analysis to understand the dynamic, moment-to-moment associations between young children’s expressed affect and emotion regulatory behaviors, which can shed light on the intra-personal associations between emotion and emotion regulation. We also examined inhibitory control, a trait-level executive function construct, as a potential moderator in the relation between expressed affect and regulatory behaviors. Furthermore, although previous studies have found cultural differences in trait-level emotion expression and regulatory behaviors in children, few researchers have examined the dynamic relations between emotion and emotion regulation across different cultural groups. Such studies can reveal a rich picture of the complex roles of culture in shaping children’s socioemotional development. The present study examined the dynamic relations among expressed affect, emotion regulation, inhibitory control, and culture in preschools from Mexican American (MA) and Chinese American (CA) immigrant families, which are the two largest immigrant groups in the United States.

The sample consisted of 46 MA and 44 CA parent-child dyads (see Table 1 for demographics) recruited from Head Start preschool centers in a metropolitan area in northern California. Emotion regulation was measured using Not-Sharing task from the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith et al., 1999). Children’s expressed negative and positive affect and emotion-related regulatory behaviors (e.g., attention to the assessor, gaze aversion, self-soothing, fidgeting, and using language) were coded for each 10-second epoch using an established coding scheme (Spinrad & Eisenberg, 2007) by two trained observers. Inter-rater reliabilities as measured by intra-class correlations were between .94 and .99. These five regulatory behaviors were aggregated as a composite regulatory behavior based on correlation analyses (see Table 2). Inhibitory control was measured using the Silly Sounds Stroop task from the Preschool Executive Function Battery (Willoughby et al., 2012).

Generalized multilevel modeling was conducted to predict regulatory behaviors at epoch t from the two valences of affectivity at epoch t-1. Positive affect predicted an increase in the composite regulatory behavior in the next epoch (β = .13, p = .02), whereas negative affect at epoch t-1 was not associated with the composite regulatory behavior at epoch t-1 (β = -.04, p = .57). Cultural differences were found in the use of the composite regulatory behavior (β = -.98, p < .01), such that the CA children deployed less regulatory behaviors compared to the MA children. However, culture did not moderate the associations between positive and negative affect and the composite regulatory behavior.

Authors

• Yeunjoo Vanessa Kim, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Aya Inamori Williams, University of California, Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chang Liu, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Qing Zhou, University of California Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author