Children’s perceptions of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness: links with attachment security (original) (raw)
Related papers
Children's awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies: Effects of attachment status
Social Development, 2017
The current study evaluated the effects of preschoolers' attachment status on their awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies. A total of 212 children between 3 and 5 years participated in this study and completed two self-report tasks. The first was the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), which assessed children's internal working models concerning parent-child attachment; the second evaluated children's ability to generate emotion regulation strategies in relation to three negative emotions (anger, sadness, and fear). Statistical analyses involved a mixed models multilinear regression approach controlling for age and gender. The results consistently revealed that the insecure avoidant group was significantly less likely than securely attached children to generate both comforting and self-regulatory strategies. Surprisingly, the insecure ambivalent group showed no deficits across measured outcomes. When the analyses were conducted separately for each negative emotion, findings for co-regulatory strategies for fear, and self-regulatory strategies for anger also suggested that avoidantly attached children exhibited the lowest levels of awareness compared with children from the secure attachment group. These findings stress the importance of children's attachment status, and implicitly, the quality of the parent-child interactions for children's awareness of emotion regulation strategies related to negative emotions.
Children's perceptions of the effectiveness of strategies for regulating anger and sadness
Children may be capable of understanding the value of emotion regulation strategies before they can enlist these strategies in emotionevoking situations. This study was designed to extend understanding of children's judgment of the efficacy of alternative emotion regulation strategies. Children aged six and nine (N ¼ 97) were presented with illustrated storyboards of anger-and sadness-evoking situations and rated the effectiveness of eight emotion regulation strategies. Children endorsed some strategies on an emotion-specific basis: they rated problem-solving as more effective for anger, and seeking adult support and venting emotion as more effective for sadness. Younger children rated cognitively sophisticated emotion regulatory strategies comparably to older children, but they endorsed relatively ineffective strategies as more effective. Early evidence of gender differences was also apparent as girls reported emotion-focused strategies as more effective than boys did. These findings contribute to understanding children's nuanced estimates of the value of alternative strategies of emotion regulation based on emotion context, age, and gender.
Infant Behavior and Development, 2013
This study investigated the relationships between children's secure base and emotion regulation, namely their behavioral strategies and emotional expressiveness, during different situational and social contexts in naturalistic settings. Fifty-five children ranging in age from 18 to 26 months of age and their mothers participated in this study. Children were exposed to three situational (fear, positive affect and frustration/anger) and two social (maternal constraint and involvement) contexts. Toddlers' behavioral strategies differed as function of emotion-eliciting context, maternal involvement and attachment quality. Emotional expressiveness varied as function of an interaction involving situational contexts, maternal involvement and children's attachment security.
Emotion Regulation and Attachment: Unpacking Two Constructs and Their Association
This study examined the association between the security of attachment and processes influencing the development of emotion regulation in young children. A sample of 73 4 1/2-year-olds and their mothers were observed in an emotion regulation probe involving mild frustration for children, and mothers and children were later independently interviewed about how the child had felt. Fewer than half the mothers agreed with children's selfreports in the emotion they attributed to children (a lower rate than the concordance of observer ratings with children's selfreports), and higher mother-child concordance was associated with secure attachment and mother's beliefs about the importance of attending to and accepting their own emotions. Mother-child conversations about recent events evoking children's negative emotion were also analyzed. Children were less likely to avoid conversing about negative feelings when they were in secure attachments and when mothers were more validating of the child's perspective. Children's greater understanding of negative emotions was also significantly associated with higher motherchild concordance and less child conversational avoidance. Taken together, these findings underscore the multiple influences of attachment on emotion regulation and the importance of children's emotion understanding to these processes.
Research in Human Development, 2006
In this study, we examined characteristics of the mother-child context that may support young children's emotion expressions and emotion regulation. We observed children (N= 154) in four emotion-eliciting episodes to measure their emotion expressions and mother-focused regulation strategies. Mothers reported on the toddlers' attachment security. Lower levels of maternal controlling behaviors and higher levels of attachment security were associated with more adaptive emotion expressions by toddlers, and more maternal positive behavior was associated with more mother-focused regulation. Toddlers' use of mother-focused regulation was also associated with decreased levels of negative affect in positive and fear emotion-eliciting tasks but not in frustration tasks. The associations differed for boys and girls and differed depending on the context of the specific emotion elicited. Article: Recently, the definition of emotion regulation and its relation to emotion expressions has been a topic of debate (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). Given that children learn styles of dealing with emotions from early parent-child interactions (Calkins, 1994; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), it seems clear that relationships play a strong role in children's emotional development. Emotional self-regulation is one component of children's self-regulation (Grolnick & Farkas, 2002) and is a major developmental task during toddlerhood (Kopp, 1982, 1989). Children's emotional self-regulation has been identified as important to later optimal development because problems with emotionality and emotion regulation play a significant role in young children's behavior problems (Calkins & Dedmon, 2000; Cole, Michel, & O'Donnell, 1994). As Panneton, Kitamura, Mattock, and Burnham (this issue) discuss, emotion communication in the parent-child context begins early in child development. During toddlerhood, children are further expected to learn to control their emotions in a socially acceptable manner, and toddlers rely on parents to help them master emotional self-regulation (Kopp, 1982, 1989). Examining the links among children's emotion expressions, emotion regulation, and the characteristics within the parent-child dyad is important to identifying potential antecedents to more serious problems later in development.
Journal of Family Psychology, 2000
Although a link between attachment and peer relationships has been established, the mechanisms that account for this link have not been identified. The 1st goal of this study was to test emotion regulation as a mediator of this link in middle childhood. The 2nd goal was to examine how different aspects of emotion regulation relate to peer competence. Fifth graders completed self-report and semiprojective measures to index mother-child attachment, mothers reported on children's emotionality and coping strategies, and teachers reported on children's peer competence. Constructive coping was related to both attachment and peer competence, and mediated the association between attachment and peer competence, suggesting that emotion regulation is one of the mechanisms accounting for attachment-peer links. Constructive coping was more strongly associated with peer competence for children high on negative emotionality than for children low on negative emotionality. According to attachment theory, the quality of parent-child attachments has implications for the nature of children's interactions and relationships with people outside the family, including peers (Bowlby, 1973; Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986). Numerous studies have confirmed a link between parent-child attachment and the quality of peer relationships. Attachment security in mother-child relationships (and, in some studies, father-child relationships) has been related to traitlike patterns of behavior around peers such as tendencies to be aggressive or sociable
Emotion Regulation (ER) is a fundamental aspect of healthy psychological functioning. A sample of 682 children and adolescents aged between 10 and 18 years, participated in this study, which examined the roles of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality and parental attachment in the use of the ER strategies of Reappraisal and Suppression. Higher scores on Extraversion and Openness predicted more Reappraisal use, while higher scores on all FFM variables predicted less Suppression use, with the exception of Neuroticism which was positively related to Suppression use. Regarding attachment, higher Communication predicted more Reappraisal and less Suppression use while higher Alienation predicted less Reappraisal and more Suppression use. The current findings contribute to our understanding of factors underlying the use of specific ER strategies.
Developmental Psychology, 2011
In a sample of 153 children from preschool through second grade, relations between the use of emotion regulation strategy and children's expression of anger and sadness were coded during an observational task in which children were intentionally disappointed in the presence of the mother. Multilevel modeling was used to examine strategy use and current and subsequent expressions of anger and sadness. Results indicate that mothers' use of attention refocusing and joint mother-child cognitive reframing lead to lower intensity of expressed anger and sadness. Younger children expressed more sadness than older children, and maternal attention refocusing was less successful among older children than younger ones. Implications of these results for assessing the socialization of emotion regulation in preschool and school-age children are discussed.
2009
Previous studies show that preschool children view negative emotions as susceptible to intentional control. However, the extent of this understanding and links with child social-emotional adjustment are poorly understood. To examine this, 62 3-and 4-year-olds were presented with puppet scenarios in which characters experienced anger, sadness, and fear. Forty-seven adults were presented with a parallel questionnaire. Participants rated the degree to which six emotion-regulation strategies were effective in decreasing negative emotions. Results showed that even the youngest preschoolers viewed cognitive and behavioral distraction and repairing the situation as relatively effective; compared to adults, however, preschoolers favored relatively "ineffective" strategies such as venting and rumination. Children also showed a functional view of emotion regulation; that effective strategies depend on the emotion being regulated. All participants favored repairing a negative situation to reduce anger and behavioral distraction to reduce sadness and fear. Finally, the more children indicated that venting would reduce negative emotions, the lower their maternal report of social skills. Findings are discussed in terms of functional emotion theory and implications of emotion-regulation understanding for child adjustment.
Parent–child attachment and children’s experience and regulation of emotion: A meta-analytic review
Emotion, 2019
Attachment relationships serve as contexts within which children develop emotional capacities. This meta-analytic review assessed the strength of associations of parent-child attachment patterns with the experience and regulation of emotion in children under age 18 years. In a series of meta-analyses (k ϭ 72 studies, N's ranged from 87 to 9,167), we examined children's positive and negative affective experiences (assessed either globally or elicited in specific contexts), emotion regulation ability, and coping strategies. More securely attached children experienced more global positive affect and less global negative affect, expressed less elicited negative affect, were better able to regulate emotions, and more often used cognitive and social support coping strategies. More avoidantly attached children experienced less global positive affect, were less able to regulate emotions, and were less likely to use cognitive or social support coping strategies. By contrast, more ambivalently attached children experienced more global and more elicited negative affect, and were less able to regulate emotions. More disorganized children experienced less global positive affect and more global negative affect. These robust findings provide evidence that attachments to parents have implications for children's emotional development, although more research is needed on whether insecure attachment patterns are associated with distinct emotion profiles.