Poster #136 - Extrinsic Emotion Up-Regulation in Infancy and Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) has traditionally focused on intrapersonal processes associated with controlling one’s own emotions. However, of equal importance is how emotion regulation functions in interpersonal contexts (e.g., Campos et al., 2011; Zaki & Williams, 2013). One particularly interesting strategy is extrinsic ER, in which an individual uses their emotional expression to influence another person’s emotional state. This may involve down-regulating or up-regulating others’ positive or negative emotions (Nozaki et al., 2020). For example, an individual may upregulate their expression of sadness in order to elicit social support from a social partner.
Such emotional manipulation is likely familiar to most parents, such as a child sweetly complimenting a parent prior to asking for a treat. Indeed, research indicates that 3-year-old children use various strategies for extrinsic ER (e.g., distracting; López-Pérez et al., 2016), and that even 19-month-old infants can detect upregulated emotions (Walle et al., 2014). However, research to date has not systematically examined how infants and young children utilize extrinsic ER of discrete emotions to achieve specific goals. This study used caregiver reports to explore whether infants and young children use extrinsic ER to influence caregiver emotions to achieve their goals.
Caregivers (n = 28) completed a 30–45-minute online survey that asked questions on their child’s frequency of extrinsic ER, as well as to describe an episode where their child upregulated a specific emotion to influence them. Preliminary descriptive analyses revealed some interesting patterns. Parents reported that their children began upregulating their emotions to engage in extrinsic ER during infancy (M = 17.7 months, SD = 10.4 months). Most caregivers reported their children upregulated their emotions daily to regulate their parents’ emotions (n = 17, 60%). When asked what emotions their children up-regulated, parents reported a wide variety of emotions, and the most frequently upregulated emotions reported were anger (30%), and sadness (29%).
When asked to recall a specific episode of their child’s extrinsic ER, parents reported that their child most frequently upregulated sadness (37%), and anger (34%). In response to their children’s upregulation of anger, most parents reported that it elicited anger (45%) and sadness (36%) in them. In response to their children’s upregulation of sadness, most parents reported experiencing sadness (58%). When asked about the goals their children were trying to achieve when upregulating their emotions, parents most frequently reported their child sought to achieve autonomy/exploring the environment (50%) and sought affection/attention (32%). For both goals, children were more likely to upregulate anger and sadness.
This study contributes to our understanding of the development of extrinsic ER and provides evidence that infants and young children up-regulate their emotions to influence others’ emotions to achieve their goals.

Authors

• Zeynep B Ozden, University of California - Merced
  Presenting Author

• Derrick Ocampo, University of California - Merced

• Sivenesi Subramoney, University of Californ

• Lukas D Lopez, University of Utah

• Eric A Walle, University of California - Merced