Associations Between Preschoolers’ Emotional Self-regulation Skills and the Quality of Their Peer Interactions

• In Event: Peer Play as Developmental Context for Preschool Children’s Social and Emotional Competences

Abstract

Emotional self-regulation behavior encompasses children’s ability to use explicit knowledge about emotions, their strategies to control and modulate the expression of emotions and their ability to meet the social expectations of the situation, which allows them to show adaptive behavior and to get along and resolve conflicts with peers (e.g., Bierman, Nix, Greenberg, Blair, & Domitrovich; Denham et al., 2012). Especially the preschool period is characterized by a rapid growth of children’s self-regulation skills together with an increased orientation and interaction with peers (e.g., Bronson, 2000; McClelland & Cameron, 2012). Emotional self-regulation is a broad construct covering the child’s ability to change the nature, intensity, and time course of emotions that are disruptive for play (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004; Eisenberg & Sulik, 2012), to resolve peer conflicts in a socially acceptable way (de Haan & Singer, 2003; ibid, 2010), and to control their behavior or comply with request form others and the to meet the social expectations of the play situation (Kopp, 1982). Thus, the current study explores the extent to which each of these components contribute to their peer interaction skills.
Data were used from an observational in-depth study which included 113 children (59 boys) and 37 classrooms. Children were in average 37 months ((SD = 3.5; range 28 – 45 months) and the majority of children (62.8%) was monolingual with Dutch as their home language. About half of the classrooms provided a half-day program for 2- and 3-year-olds (preschools), and the other half served 0- to 3-year-old children in a full-day program (daycare centers). Children were videotaped during a play episode with a standardized set of kitchen play materials for 15-20 minutes. The following aspects of the Self-Regulation in Play Scale (SRPS; Slot et al., 2017) rated on a 5-point scale were used to evaluate emotional self-regulation: Emotion Regulation, Resolving Conflicts and Behavioral Self-control. The quality of peer interactions was assessed on a 7-point scale with the inCLASS (Downer et al., 2011) dimensions: Peer Sociability, Peer Communication, Peer Assertiveness and Peer Conflict (alpha=.71). Control variables included: age, gender, and home language (Dutch or (also) another language).
Children scored on average in the midrange for the quality of peer interactions (M = 3.49, SD = .72), and in the mid-to high range for the different aspects of emotional self-regulation: emotion regulation (M = 3.66, SD = 1.08), resolving conflicts (M = 3.78, SD = 1.19), and behavioral self-control (M = 3.54, SD = 1.04). Non-Dutch children scored poorer peer interactions skills. The regression analyses with age, gender and home language as control variables revealed that Emotional Regulation was unrelated to the quality of peer interactions (R2 = .09, beta = .08, p = .52) as was Behavioral Self-control (R2 = .10, beta = .12, p = .24). Resolving Conflicts was positively related to the quality of peer interactions (R2 = .15, beta = .27, p = .01) with a medium-sized effect. Thus, helping children in developing appropriate conflict resolution skills may benefit their interactions with peers, especially for non-Dutch preschoolers.

Author

• Pauline Slot, Universiteit Utrecht
  Presenting Author