Linking Emotion Differentiation to Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood

• In Event: Conceptual and Methodological Advances in Emotion Regulation Development

Abstract

Understanding the antecedents of children’s emotion regulation (ER) choices is of great interest to developmental scientists and practitioners. People vary in the extent to which they experience their emotions as distinct (e.g., feeling sadness versus anger), though little is yet known about how this emotion differentiation (ED) relates to other aspects of children’s emotional competence. Because ED involves experiencing distinct, differentiated emotional states, it has potential consequences for the kinds of ER strategies that can be generated/selected/implemented in the service of reducing unwanted negative emotions. Prior work has focused on ED in adult/adolescent samples, relying extensively on ecological momentary assessment techniques to examine typical emotion patterns. The goal of this research was to explore a novel quantification of ED in childhood and relate this to behavioral and biological facets of children’s ER.

Behavioral and physiological data were collected from a diverse (majority Hispanic) sample of 184 4–11-year-old children (M=7.67, SD=2.30 years; 94 girls) in a larger study of socioemotional development. Video and psychophysiological data were acquired continuously. Children completed multiple structured tasks to assess emotion and ER, including (a) repeated self-reports of their feelings of sadness, anger, and fear; and (b) a detailed interview in which they described sad/angry/fearful experiences and how they had regulated their emotions. Interviews were transcribed and coded in detail for ER strategy types (e.g., Changing Thoughts, Support Seeking) using an established coding scheme from our lab. We computed ED as the average variance in negative emotional intensity across the 5 self-report time points.

ED was not linked to resting psychophysiology (RSA or PEP). Children described Changing Thoughts more as age increased in every negative emotion context (rs>.26, ps<.001), but ED was correlated with specific patterns of ER strategy use in discrete emotion contexts. Specifically, ED was negatively associated with the use of Changing Thoughts to manage sadness and fear, Changing Goals to manage sadness, and with seeking Social Support to manage anger (rs>.16, ps<.05). Greater ED was thus associated with decreased use of ostensibly beneficial ER strategies in specific discrete emotion contexts.

This investigation is one of the first to examine negative ED in childhood as a potential precursor to ER strategy use. Our novel conceptualization of ED here may be capturing emotional lability (instead of differentiation per se), which could explain the link between greater ED and less adaptive ER we uncovered. Because of this intriguing set of initial findings, we will consider additional ED indices in subsequent analyses (e.g., using coding of children’s discrete emotion experience descriptions from the interviews). As well, we will explore age-related differences in the patterns of ED and ER, the role of physiological reactivity during the emotion interview, and probe associations between ED and more specific ER strategies within each of the broad categories (e.g., cognitive reframing within Changing Thoughts) examined here. Findings have scientific and practical implications for our understanding of children’s healthy ER development.

Authors

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

• Parisa Parsafar, SRCD Executive Branch Fellow, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health (NIH)

• Shannon Brady, University of California - Riverside