Children’s awareness of the context-appropriate nature of emotion regulation strategies across emotions

ABSTRACT

Emotion regulation (ER) substantially develops during the childhood years. This growth includes an increasing awareness that certain ER strategies are more appropriate in some contexts than others, but few studies have explored how children tailor ER strategies across contexts (i.e. context sensitivity). Understanding this could help clarify why some children have difficulties effectively regulating their emotions even when they have a broad strategy repertoire. The current study explored differences in Hispanic children’s ER strategy context sensitivity across three emotions and explored attentional control as a possible moderator of this sensitivity. Children (N = 78; M = 9.91; SD = 1.14; 50% girls; household income M = 31–40k) completed an attentional control task and were interviewed about their ER strategy preferences for sadness, fear, and anger. Context sensitivity was measured as the proportion of endorsed ER strategies that theoretically “fit” the given emotion. Children showed more sensitivity for anger and fear compared to sadness. Attentional control predicted context sensitivity for sadness only, but this was qualified by age. Older children showed more context sensitivity with increasing attentional control. Findings provide insight into emotional development in late childhood by highlighting children’s awareness of the context-appropriate nature of ER strategies across emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• context sensitivity
• childhood
• discrete emotions
• attentional control

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by a Diversity Grant of the Psychological Science Research Grant – APA and by an APF/COGDOP Dr. Judy Kuriansky Scholarship to the first author. The first author was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF DGE-1326120) during data collection and by a National Institute of Mental Health training grant (NIMH T32 MH0100019-06; PIs: Barch and Luby) during manuscript writing. We thank the families who took part in this study. We would also like to thank the undergraduate researchers who helped run the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

The data reported in this paper is available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.