Emotion Regulation

A Matter of Time

Pamela M. Cole, Tom Hollenstein, Pamela M. Cole, Tom Hollenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351001304
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

One of the most important advances in the study of emotion regulation is understanding it as a dynamic process that develops across the life span. Emotion Regulation focuses on current conceptual and methodological issues in terms of change over various time scales: developmental change across years, as well as changes from day to day, from situation to situation, and from moment to moment. Written by top experts in the field, the volume is organized around three age periods of the life span: infancy and childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

By taking the matter of time seriously, these chapters represent promising and necessary approaches to broadening our knowledge of emotion regulation as a dynamic process that changes with age. The volume provides guidance for future research that will enable researchers to leave behind facile and static conceptualizations of emotion regulation in favor of richer and more explanatory frameworks.

Part I

Infancy and Childhood

1
A Biopsychosocial Perspective on the Development of Emotion Regulation Across Childhood

Nicole B. Perry and Susan D. Calkins

For the last 30 years, scientists have argued for the importance of studying emotion regulation and its development, specifically noting that children’s ability to control their emotions plays an integral role in normative and atypical development (Cicchetti, Ackerman & Izard, 1995; Dodge & Garber, 1991; Fox, 1994). Since the publication of this early work, hundreds of empirical papers have documented the relation between children’s emotion regulation and their social and emotional adjustment (e.g., Bailey, Denham, Curby, & Bassett, 2016; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Eggum, 2010; Zalewski, Lengua, Wilson, Trancik, & Bazinet, 2011). The magnitude of this body of literature makes clear how imperative it is that we gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the development of emotion regulation. Specifically, how do biology and behavior contribute to children’s ability to regulate their emotions, and how do biobehavioral processes undermine or support developmental pathways to effective and goal-driven emotion management in social contexts?

Although a central and pervasive issue across emotion regulation research has been the lack of consensus regarding an operational definition (Cole et al., 2004), scientists tend to agree that the development of emotion regulation does not simply reflect the control of emotion, but instead is characterized by dynamic processes that serve to monitor and evaluate temporal and intensive features of emotional experience (Thompson, 1994). Researchers still struggle, however, to address methodological challenges that hinder our ability to investigate the development of emotion regulation as a multilevel process. For example, it is often difficult for scientists to address the phenomenon of emotion regulation as a set of processes that incorporate individual components of biology, behavior, and the social environment into an integrative model. In the absence of such a perspective, the complexity and heterogeneity of the processes involved in the regulation of emotion are obscured, and the ability to identify predictable antecedents of these processes is limited.

To shed light on this conceptual and methodological challenge, we use a biopsychosocial perspective as a guiding framework when describing the development of biological, behavioral, and social emotion regulation processes throughout childhood. We also review empirical work examining the development of emotion regulation across multiple levels of analysis and over various dimensions of time. We believe that conceptualizing and investigating the development of emotion regulation in this dynamic way will lead investigators to not only consider the multiple levels of functioning involved in emotion management, but also the differing temporal patterns through which emotion regulatory processes can change. Models investigating the development of emotion regulation in this way will better elucidate pathways to adjustment and maladjustment, highlighting, perhaps, points of entry for prevention and intervention.

Defining Emotion Regulation

Our definition of emotion regulation is consistent with many of our colleagues (Cole et al., 2004; Eisenberg, Hofer, & Vaughn, 2007; Gross & Thompson 2007; Thompson, 1994) and highlights the fundamental role emotional processes play in child functioning, as well as the measurement of these processes in emotionally charged situations (Calkins & Hill, 2007). We define emotion regulation as a set of processes that function at biological, behavioral, and social levels. Specifically, these processes capture dynamic behaviors and complex biological responses that are both automatic and effortful as well as conscious and unconscious. They serve to modulate, maintain, inhibit, or enhance the intensity and valence of emotional experiences in an effort to accomplish an individual’s goals. Thus, emotion regulation processes comprise both a reactive and a control dimension that alter one another across time and levels (Fox & Calkins, 2003). Further, these processes are not only intrinsic to the individual, but also cannot be separated from their social context; emotions can be regulated even as they are regulating (Cole et al., 2004).

Biopsychosocial Perspective on Emotion Regulation

The definition we provide for emotion regulation is grounded in a biopsychosocial theoretical framework (Calkins, 2010), a framework that aims to provide a clearer understanding of the coactions and interactions across and within levels that help elucidate the emergence of patterns of adjustment and maladjustment. Central to this perspective is the notion that the child’s biology, behavior, and social context fundamentally change one another continuously over the course of time. By considering development across these levels, this perspective gives scientists a greater appreciation of the reciprocal and complex developmental pathways between biological processes and observed behavior, while also making clear that these pathways are able to influence, and be influenced by, children’s social contexts (Calkins, Perry, & Dollar, 2016). Developmental interactions across any of these pathways may affect children’s adjustment (cf. Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Thibodeau, 2012), including their ability to regulate their emotions. For example, a child who becomes more physiologically aroused but lacks the behavioral skills to modulate that arousal effectively may be less likely to develop healthy interpersonal relationships and engage in social situations; decreased engagement in social interactions further limits children’s opportunity to develop socially appropriate emotion management skills. A biopsychosocial theoretical perspective is therefore well suited to promote developmental theory and empirical work that aims to reveal the dynamic and complex nature of emotion regulation. In the following sections, we utilize this perspective as a guiding framework as we consider the development of emotion regulation across childhood and review empirical work that captures these complex regulatory processes.

The Development of Emotion Regulation

In an influential theoretical piece, Kopp (1982) provided an excellent overview of the development of emotion regulation in infancy. Emotion regulation across the first few months of life is controlled largely by innate and automatic physiological mechanisms (Kopp, 1982), and is almost entirely embedded within the infant–caregiver dyad (Sroufe,1996). Over the course of development, there is a gradual transition from primary reliance on co-regulatory processes between infants and their caregivers, to increasing levels of independent self-regulation (Sameroff, 2010). That is, caregivers assist in the regulation of arousal in-the-moment as infants attempt to find a balance between generating responses to the social and emotional environment and maintaining homeostasis. Over time, however, and through repeated interactions across early childhood, emotion regulation skills, strategies, and abilities that were once facilitated by caregiver support are thought to become engrained in the child’s own self-regulatory skill set.

By 3 months of age, infants can use self-soothing mechanisms independent of caregiver intervention such as sucking, simple motor movements (e.g., turning away), and reflexive signaling in response to discomfort (e.g., crying; Grolnick, McMenamy, & Kurowski, 2006). Empirical work has provided evidence that infants who engage in self-soothing behaviors during emotionally eliciting situations have less negative affect in-the-moment, supporting an immediate regulatory function of physical self-stimulation. For example, Geangu, Benga, Stahl, and Striano (2011) found that 3-month-old infants who used more thumb-sucking in response to another infant’s pain cry manifested less vocal distress, with lower intensity, and less sadness. These associations have also been found when expanding the time scale across months. Rothbart, Ziaie, and O’Boyle (1992), for instance, found that infants’ distress at 3 months predicted greater use of self-soothing behaviors at 13.5 months, highlighting that early distress may facilitate greater refinement of self-soothing strategies across the early infancy period as self-soothing is one of the few self-regulatory tools infants can employ independently.

By 6 months, infants begin to voluntarily control their arousal, and by the start of the second year they are much more active and purposeful in their attempts to manage emotion-eliciting situations. By the end of the second year of life, the transition from primary reliance on a caregiver to more independent methods of emotion regulation occurs more quickly (Kopp, 1982). Although toddlers are not entirely capable of controlling their own emotion and emotional experiences by this age, they can use specific and somewhat more advanced strategies to manage their arousal, albeit sometimes unsuccessfully (Calkins & Dedmon, 2000).

The increased ability to independently manage emotional states that emerges over the second and third year of life is highly dependent on cognitive control mechanisms including attentional, effortful, and other executive control processes. The regulation of attention, however, is thought to be most central (Rothbart & Sheese, 2007). Attentional control is particularly critical because orienting attention toward a stimulus, or away from it, has the effect of amplifying or reducing the emotional valence with which it is associated, therefore changing the emotional experience and potential salience for the child (Rothbart, Posner, & Rosicky, 1994; Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011). In early infancy, when attentional skills are rudimentary and effortful control skills are extremely minimal, infants tend to display simple gaze aversion from emotionally arousing stimuli (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998; Crockenberg & Leerkes, 2004). As attentional neural networks mature, and increased behavioral control emerges, children begin to more effortfully redirect attention using more complex distraction strategies, such as shifting attention to less emotionally relevant aspects of a situation or engaging in an entirely new activity (Grolnick et al., 2006).

The association between attentional control and emotion regulation has been investigated across different dimensions of time using laboratory tasks designed to elicit emotion. When looking at the association concurrently, Calkins, Smith, Gill, and Johnson (1998) found that during tasks eliciting frustration (i.e., restrictive high chair and goal block episode), 24-month-olds who displayed greater negative reactivity were also more likely to engage in less distraction and more aggression/venting; results from this study support the idea that distracting away from the source of arousal may serve to down-regulate children’s negative reactivity in-the-moment. In a longitudinal investigation, we demonstrated that infants with greater neural activity within the executive attention network, as well as greater behavioral attention at 10 months, demonstrated less negative affect during a frustrating puzzle task at age 3 (Perry, Swingler, Calkins, & Bell, 2016). Thus, there is evidence suggesting that the development of basic biological and behavioral attentional control may set the stage, or even constrain, the subsequent development of complex, effortful, and effective regulation of emotion that occurs over childhood (Calkins, 2011).

As children become more systematic in their deployment of attention, they also gain skills that allow them to effortfully inhibit behavioral responses to the environment in the pursuit of their desired goals. This more active or effortful control of behavior allows children to align their responses to environmental stimuli with certain contextual rules and social expectations (Fox & Calkins, 2003). It is not surprising then that as inhibitory and attentional processes become increasingly integrated, skills such as delay of gratification and compliance to adult demands emerge during this period.

More advanced executive cognitive processes, including representational skills, also increase during the preschool period and aid in children’s ability to deal with emotional content (Fox & Calkins, 2003; Grolnick et al., 2006). The ability to anticipate the effectiveness of particular regulatory strategies also increases as children acquire greater planning and reflection skills. In infancy, for example, self-soothing regulatory strategies are primarily physical in nature (e.g., sucking). By early childhood, however, children may use their representational capabilities to regulate and comfort themselves by mentally transforming a distressing emotional situation into a manageable one. They may also develop a game-like activity around the source of distress, pretend that they have obtained a desired object, or put together an alternative plan to achieve a desired goal (Grolnick et al., 2006).

Although it is clear that cognitive processes such as attention, response inhibition, executive control, and representational skills all contribute to the regulation of emotion in early childhood, the extent to which cognition and emotional functioning become increasingly integrated across this time period is thought to play a crucial role in the development of emotion regulation into middle childhood and adolescence (Calkins & Bell, 2010). Specifically, the practice of managing emotional experiences and behavior, while also incorporating newly emerging cognitive abilities to aid in this management, may lead to increased automaticity in emotionally taxing situations. By the time children enter school, they should be able to modulate their own arousal in socially appropriate ways without having to tax valuable cognitive resources (Calkins & Marcovitch, 2010). This increased integration and greater automaticity in the management of emotion is likely to be important because the school environment requires children to direct a great deal of effort toward academic and social challenges—tasks that are much harder under significant emotional arousal or distress. Although theorized, very little empirical work examines the transition from explicit to more automatic strategy use across childhood. Future work that focuses on the dynamic associations between the level of effort required to employ specific regulatory strategies and the effective modulation of arousal is needed to investigate this important shift.

Emotion regulation develops less rapidly and becomes more stable from early childhood on (e.g., Raffaelli, Crocket, & Shen, 2005). Both biological and behavioral aspects of emotion regulation, however, continue to be refined into middle childhood and adolescence. As children mature and become better able to identify long-term consequences of their behavior, they are better able to distinguish the effectiveness of long- and short-term regulatory strategies (Moilanen, 2007). Middle childhood and adolescence is also a time during which children increasing identify more goals, specifically social goals, for regulating their behaviors. Older children, for example, expect that displays of negative emotion are damaging to peer relationships, particularly when the goal is to take care of another’s feelings; children therefore engage in more sophisticated regulation strategies to “mask” these negative emotions in front of peers (Shipman, Zeman, & Stegall, 2001; Zeman & Shipman, 1998).

To this point, we have described the development of emotion regulation with an emphasis on the behavioral aspects of emotion regulation. However, consistent with our biopsychosocial view of emotion regulation, it is critical to acknowledge that biological processes underlie, and are influenced by, many of the behavioral milestones described above; behavior is at least partially dependent on biological mechanisms, and biological systems are impacted by the behavior of individuals. Next, we discuss the maturation and utility of specific biological mechanisms that contribute to the regulation of emotion.

Biological Processes Supporting the Development of Emotion Regulation

The development of emotion regulation extends from the emergence of basic and automatic regulation of biological processes in infancy to the more self-conscious and intentional regulation of behavior and cognition in middle childhood and adolescence (Ochsner & Gross, 2004). Thus, the development of emotion regulation skills is marked by continuous changes across biological systems that support the behavioral control of emotion. Because of this, scientists freque...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Infancy and Childhood
• Part II Adolescence
• Part III Adulthood
• Index