Early Emotion Regulation Behavior Questionnaire

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Laboratory-based observations of young children’s behavioral strategies to regulate emotions have been the gold standard in developmental work. Although these observational measures are incredibly useful, they require participants to come into the laboratory. This is not only more difficult for families, but it is also expensive for researchers. In addition, laboratory tasks only provide a snapshot of children’s behavior within a laboratory setting; children’s behavior may differ when in natural environments that are familiar to them.

Questionnaires completed by parents may address some of these concerns, but existing questionnaires often measure the extent to which children are emotionally regulated and fail to consider the specific behavioral strategies that are employed (e.g., Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields and Cicchetti, 1997). Moreover, these questionnaires are often not geared toward young children. To address these gaps, we constructed a parent-report questionnaire designed to assess emotion regulation strategies in children ages 2 to 6 years old.

In this questionnaire, parents are provided everyday situations that elicit negative (“If my child is angry because s/he wants to continue screen time (e.g., T.V., tablet, phone), but it is time to turn it off, s/he would….,” ) and positive (“If my child is excited because friends and family are arriving with gifts for his/her birthday party, s/he would….”) emotion in their children. Parents rate on a Likert scale (1-7) the likelihood their child would engage in 8 different strategies (verbal help-seeking, physical help-seeking, mindfulness, distraction, verbal venting, physical venting, avoidance, self-soothing) to reduce emotional arousal in each scenario.

To pilot this questionnaire, parents of 362 2-6-year-old children from across the United States completed an online survey. Participants were 74% White, 2% Black, 1% Hispanic, 8% Asian, and 15% Multiracial. Alphas were above .75 for each strategy subscale; strategy subscales were correlated with each other in expected directions. A principal component’s analysis supported 2 factors. The first factor, representing more socially adaptive skills, included mindfulness, distraction, and verbal and physical help-seeking. The second factor, representing more socially maladaptive skills, included avoidance, verbal venting, and physical venting. Self-soothing was not a part of either factor. The emotion regulation sum score from the ERC was positively correlated with adaptive behavioral strategies (r =.47**) and negatively correlated with maladaptive strategies (r =-.27**). The negativity/lability sum score from the ERC was negatively correlated with adaptive behavioral strategies (r =-.22**) and positively correlated with maladaptive strategies (r =.53**). The total difficulties sum score from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997) was positively correlated with maladaptive strategies (r = .33**). These correlations remained when looking within each age.

Overall, findings suggest that this newly developed questionnaire may effectively measure behavioral regulatory strategies in children ages 2 through 6 outside of the laboratory. Measurement in this way would better allow researchers to look at the development of behavioral strategies across early childhood in both positive and negative emotion eliciting contexts, in addition to investigating how change in strategy use over time is associated with child outcomes.

Authors

• Nicole Perry, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Jessica Dollar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author