Conceptual and Methodological Challenges to Characterizing Children’s Emotion Regulation Strategy Use

• In Event: 2-167 - Multi-dimensional Approaches in Assessing Emotion Regulation in Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

Developmental scientists have traditionally employed a variety of innovative methods to assess how children modify or regulate their negative emotions. Recently, a focus on the specific emotion regulation strategies that children are exposed to, learn, and master in early life has emerged. Emotion regulation strategy use processes encompass a child’s dispositional capacity (e.g., temperament, executive functions), knowledge of different strategies and the contexts in which they might be effective (strategy understanding), and the ability to effectively implement selected strategies (deployment, iterative updating/flexibility of strategy choice). Somewhat surprisingly, little developmental work has sought to decompose emotion regulation strategy use into these component parts. The goal of this presentation is to describe contributions from the ongoing, multi-method empirical efforts of our research group to address this issue and suggest promising directions for current and future theorizing and research into emotion regulation development.
We will describe the pros and cons of different assessment techniques that can be used to capture emotion regulation strategy use in childhood. Research from our group involves acquiring psychophysiology before, during, and after an evocative experience, comparing differences across self-reported emotion ratings collected throughout a lab visit, recording and coding of children’s behavioral distress during evocative laboratory tasks, interviewing parents about their children’s ability to manage emotions, interviewing children about the strategies they have used in the past to manage different emotional situations, assessing children’s knowledge and emotion-related experiences as reported by parents, and comparing children’s use of instructed and self-reported emotion regulation strategies. Methodological coherence across indices of emotion and regulatory processes is often low, adding measurement complexity to the already-complex conceptual problem of assessing emotion regulation as it unfolds. But, assessment at different levels of analysis and time scales (e.g., milliseconds for change in neural signal, minutes for change in behavior during a structured laboratory episode) provides opportunities to better understand when and under what conditions different methods provide complementary information about children’s unfolding emotional experience.
As one example of our approach to combining insight from multiple levels of analysis, we will present multi-method data from a sociodemographically diverse sample of 181 4- to 11-year-old children (91 girls) who participated in an experimental paradigm designed to examine instructed distraction (changing what you think about) and reappraisal (changing the way you think about your feelings). Children were given instructions and shown a negative emotional film clip. Later, children were interviewed about the strategies they used to manage negative emotions. Fewer than 60% of children reported using their instructed strategy, whereas close to 54% reported using at least one strategy of their own choosing. Our ongoing data analysis with behavioral and psychophysiological data collected concurrently to these self-reports will clarify the conditions under which children switched to a different strategy than what they were instructed to use, and parent reports of children’s existing strategy knowledge, regulatory capacity, and socialization experiences will all be leveraged to contextualize this pattern. We conclude by discussing the conceptual and methodological richness that has emerged from our lab’s work in this area.

Authors

• Elizabeth L Davis, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Parisa Parsafar, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author