10.3

Emotion Regulation

Throughout life, being able to regulate one’s emotions is crucial to successful development across domains, including cognitive and behavioural. Emotion regulation is a set of conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions. Emotion regulation develops gradually over the course of childhood and paves the way for success in social interactions as well as in academic settings.

The Development of Emotion Regulation

When young infants are distressed, frustrated, or frightened, there is little they can do to fix the situation. Their parents typically try to help them regulate their emotional arousal by attempting to soothe or distract them (Gianino & Tronick, 1988). For example, caregivers tend to use caressing and other affectionate behaviour to calm a crying 2-month-old. Over the next few months, they increasingly include vocalizations (e.g., talking, singing, shushing) in their calming efforts, as well as in their attempts to divert the infant’s attention. Holding or rocking upset young infants while talking soothingly to them seems to be the most reliable approach, and feeding them if they are not highly upset is also effective (Jahromi, Putnam, & Stifter, 2004). Thus, the emotional states of young infants are externally controlled by a process known as co-regulation, in which a caregiver provides the needed comfort or distraction to help the child reduce distress.

As children develop in their abilities to control their own bodies and to understand their environments, they are gradually able to take control of regulating their own emotions. By 5 months of age, infants show signs of rudimentary emotion regulation in aversively arousing or uncertain situations. One strategy that infants use is known as self-comforting behaviours, which are repetitive actions that regulate arousal by providing a mildly positive physical sensation; examples include sucking fingers and rubbing hands together (Planalp & Braungart-Rieker, 2015). Another strategy infants use is self-distraction, which involves looking away from the upsetting stimulus in order to regulate their level of arousal (Ekas, Lickenbrock, & Braungart-Rieker, 2013); for instance, an infant may turn his head away from an older sibling jangling a set of keys in front of his face.

Over the course of the first year of life, infants decrease their use of self-comforting behaviours in stressful situations and increase their use of self-distraction (Planalp & Braungart-Rieker, 2015). Parents often help young children regulate themselves by physically calming them or distracting them with an object. These changes in children’s self-regulation are at least partly due to the increasing maturation of the neurological systems—including portions of the frontal lobe that are central to managing attention and inhibiting thought and behaviours (Berger, 2011; Smith et al., 2016). They are also partly due to changes in what adults expect of children. As children age, adults increasingly expect them to manage their own emotional arousal and behaviour. Once children are capable of crawling, for example, they are viewed as being more responsible for their behaviour and for complying with parental expectations (Campos, Kermoian, & Zumbahlen, 1992).

At about 9 to 12 months of age, children start to show awareness of adults’ demands and begin to regulate themselves accordingly (Kopp, 1989). Their compliance grows rapidly in the second year of life (Kaler & Kopp, 1990), and they are increasingly likely to heed simple instructions, such as to not touch dangerous objects. Over the course of the early years, children develop and improve their ability to distract themselves from distress by playing on their own. They also become less likely to seek comfort from their parents when they are upset (Bridges & Grolnick, 1995). And because of their growing ability to use language, when they are upset by parental demands, they are more likely to discuss and negotiate the situation with a parent than to engage in an emotional outburst (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004; Klimes-Dougan & Kopp, 1999; Kopp, 1992). For example, if preschoolers are unhappy when parents tell them to stop playing and instead clean up their rooms, the children may verbally protest and lobby for extra playtime or work out a timetable for cleaning up rather than throwing fits.

Video: Developing Self Control in Early Childhood

When distressed, many young children engage in self-soothing behaviours, such as rubbing their body, sucking a thumb, or clinging to well-loved objects such as a favourite blanket. Children’s ability to regulate their attention improves across the early years (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2011). As a result, children are increasingly able to conform to adults’ expectations, such as not hurting others when angry and staying seated at school when they would much prefer to get up and talk or play with classmates.

In adolescence, the neurological changes that occur in the cortex (see Chapter 3 for details) further contribute to self-regulation and other cognitive functioning. They also likely contribute to the decline in risk-taking and the improvement in judgement that often occur in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood (Steinberg, 2010). Whereas younger children regulate their emotional distress primarily by using behavioural strategies (e.g., distracting themselves with play), older children are also able to use cognitive strategies and problem solving to adjust to emotionally difficult situations (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). Finding themselves caught in unpleasant or threatening circumstances, they may rethink their goals or the meaning of events so that they can adapt gracefully to the situation. This ability helps children avoid acting in ways that might be counterproductive. When older children are teased by peers, for instance, they may be able to defuse the situation by downplaying the importance of the teasing rather than reacting to it in a way that would provoke more teasing.

Video: Development of Self-Control in Middle Childhood

As with emotion recognition, neurodivergent children can have difficulties with emotion regulation. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)—a treatment that helps people recognize their own negative thoughts and thought patterns and learn ways to adjust those thoughts and the related behaviours—has been shown to be effective in improving emotional regulation amongst autistic children (White et al., 2020).

The Relation of Emotion Regulation to Social Competence and Adjustment

The development of emotion regulation has important consequences for children, especially with regard to their social competence. Social competence derives from a set of skills that helps individuals achieve their personal goals in social interactions while maintaining positive relationships with others (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 2006). A variety of studies indicate that children who have the ability to inhibit inappropriate behaviours, delay gratification, and use cognitive methods of controlling their emotion and behaviour tend to be well adjusted and liked by their peers and by adults (Doan, Fuller-Rowell, & Evans, 2012; Olson et al., 2011).

This little girl is using signs to communicate that she wants to take a nap. Children who can indicate their wants and needs with language or signs are less likely to get frustrated and to exhibit unregulated behaviour. Moreover, children and adolescents who can deal constructively with stressful situations—negotiating with others to settle conflicts, planning strategies to resolve upsetting situations, seeking social support, and so on—generally are better adjusted than are children who lack these skills, including those who avoid dealing with stressful situations altogether (Jaser et al., 2007).

Children who are unable to successfully regulate their emotions are at higher risk of becoming victims of bullying compared with their peers who are better at emotion regulation (Morelen, Southam-Gerow, & Zeman, 2016). Well-regulated children also do better in school than their less regulated peers do, likely because they are better able to pay attention and are better behaved and better liked by teachers and peers, and, consequently, like school better (Denham et al., 2012; Duckworth, Quinn, & Tsukayama, 2012).