Show Me How You Feel on Your Face: Preschool Children’s Capacity to Modulate Emotional Expression

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

Integrative Statement

The ability to modulate emotional expressions in accordance with situational demands has been found to be more important for adjustment than reliance on any specific emotion regulation strategy (Bonanno, 2001). What is most adaptive may be the ability to be emotionally flexible, to down-regulate and up-regulate emotions contingent upon context (Bonanno, et al., 2004). While a few studies have empirically investigated emotion regulation flexibility with adults no studies have examined this ability with preschool children. Which may be crucial in determining at what point in development the capacity to expressively up-regulate joins the growing repertoire of regulatory strategies young children can utilize when navigating the increasing complexity and demands of their social world.
The aims of the current study were (1) to assess whether children are capable of purposefully enhancing and suppressing their emotional expression in the emotion regulation flexibility task and (2) to examine whether the ability to enhance and suppress emotional expression on command has implications for children’s ability to regulate their expressive behavior in a real-world situation. The sample included 61 children (32 female) aged 3.5 years-old (M=3.54 years, SD=0.12 years). Children completed an age-adapted version of the emotion regulation flexibility task was modeled after procedures used with adult participants in Bonanno, et al. (2004) and the Disappointing Gift task (Carlson & Wang, 2007). This task is designed to measure children’s ability to inhibit negative expressions upon receiving an undesirable gift.
First, we examined whether children were able to effectively enhance their emotional expressions. Paired samples t tests were conducted to compare children’s emotional expressions prior to any instructions to children’s emotional expressions when explicitly instructed to enhance their emotions. There was a significant difference between these two conditions such that children were able to purposefully enhance their emotional expression for both positive stimuli, t (60)=-3.86,p<.001,d=.50, and for negative stimuli, t (60)=-5.09,p<.001,d=.76. Next, we examined whether children were able to effectively suppress emotional expressions. There was not a significant, suggesting that children were unable to suppress positive or negative emotional expression as instructed. Finally, we were interested in whether children’s emotional expressivity was related to children’s ability to regulate their expressive behavior in a realistic situation, such as receiving an undesirable gift. Children’s general negative expressivity (β=-.27,p=.03) and positive enhancement (β=-.32,p=.01) each uniquely contributed to children’s scores on the Disappointing Gift task, F(2, 58)=5.98,p=.004. In other words, less spontaneous negative emotionality and more positive emotion on command were associated with a better ability to monitor their expressive behavior on the Disappointing Gift task.
Findings from the current study suggest that intentional emotion up-regulation may be an early emerging ability that comes online sooner in development than emotion down-regulation. The preschool period is a time of rapid emergence and improvement of emotion regulation capacities. Being able to identify what strategies children are able to implement in a laboratory task may help us better understand what strategies children have the potential to use in real-life situations, which may have implications for their socioemotional functioning and psychological adjustment.

Authors

• Katie Kao, Harvard Medical School, Brazelton Touchpoints Center
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Tarullo, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author