Bewitched to Be Happy? The Impact of Pretend Play on Emotion Regulation of Expression in 3- to 6-Year-Olds

Abstract

As a means of psychological distancing, pretend play may facilitate emotion regulation. Up to now, however, the empirical evidence for a relation between these two is not consistent. The present study examines the impact of pretend play on reflective emotion regulation of expression with a disappointing gift task using the strategy of role-taking. Fifty-two children aged 3 to 6 years were motivated to deceive the experimenter volitionally by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive gift, an unattractive gift, or no gift. Twenty-five of the children accomplished the task in the context of a pretend play where they were playfully guided to take on a role assumed to facilitate reflective emotion regulation of expression. The other 27 children received only a direct verbal instruction. As an indication of successful reflective emotion regulation of expression, twelve adult naïve observers judged children’s videotaped behavior according to the quality of emotion that the children seemed to experience. This impression analysis showed no impact of experimental variation and thus no facilitating effect of pretend play with a given task-convenient role. While happiness ratings in the pretend play group did not correlate to children’s quality of play, they positively correlated to children’s joy of playing.

Keywords:

• Emotion regulation
• emotion regulation of expression
• pretend play
• disappointing gift
• impression analysis

Acknowledgments

We thank all student assistants who contributed to this project, with special thanks to Sabrina Büßemaker who carried out the impression analysis and to Janina Hemsing-Ünlü who contributed greatly to the assessment of pretend play characteristics. Finally, we would like to express our great appreciation to all children who participated in this study as well as to the preschools whose cooperation made this research possible.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helena Petersen

Helena Petersen (née Kromm) received her PhD in Psychology at the University of Münster, Germany. In her PhD project, she examined the development of emotion regulation in preschool and elementary school age. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research focuses on interrelations between emotional, social-cognitive, moral, and prosocial development.

Manfred Holodynski

Manfred Holodynski is a Professor in the department of Development and Education at the University of Münster, Germany. He obtained his PhD in Psychology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His research focuses on the socio-cultural development of emotions and emotion regulation and their promotion through pretend play during preschool age. He is Associate Editor of the journal Social Development.