Physiology and functioning: Parents' vagal tone, emotion socialization, and children's emotion knowledge

This study examined relationships among parents’ physiological regulation, their emotion socialization behaviors, and their children’s emotion knowledge. Parents’ resting cardiac vagal tone was measured, and parents provided information regarding their socialization behaviors and family emotional expressiveness. Their 4- or 5-year-old children (N = 42) participated in a laboratory session in which their knowledge of emotional facial expressions and situations was tested and their own resting vagal tone was monitored. Results showed that parents’ vagal tone was related to their socialization behaviors, and several parent socialization variables were related to their children’s emotion knowledge. These findings suggest that parents’ physiological regulation may affect the emotional development of their children by influencing their parenting behaviors.     

Individual differences in physiological flexibility predict spontaneous avoidance

People often regulate their emotions by resorting to avoidance, a putatively maladaptive strategy. Prior work suggests that increased psychopathology symptoms predict greater spontaneous utilisation of this strategy. Extending this work, we examined whether heightened resting cardiac vagal tone (which reflects a general ability to regulate emotions in line with contextual demands) predicts decreased spontaneous avoidance. In Study 1, greater resting vagal tone was associated with reduced spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting pictures, beyond anxiety and depression symptoms and emotional reactivity. In Study 2, resting vagal tone interacted with anxiety and depression symptoms to predict spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting film clips. The positive association between symptoms and spontaneous avoidance was more pronounced among participants with reduced resting vagal tone. Thus, increased resting vagal tone might protect against the use of avoidance. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing both subjective and biological processes when studying individual differences in emotion regulation.     

Executive attention and self-regulation in infancy

This study investigates early executive attention in infancy by studying the relations between infant sequential looking and other behaviors predictive of later self-regulation. One early marker of executive attention development is anticipatory looking, the act of looking to the location of a target prior to its appearance in that location, a process that involves endogenous control of visual orienting. Previous studies have shown that anticipatory looking is positively related to executive attention as assessed by the ability to resolve spatial conflict in 3–4-year-old children. In the current study, anticipatory looking was positively related to cautious behavioral approach in response to non-threatening novel objects in 6- and 7-month-old infants. This finding and previous findings showing the presence of error detection in infancy are consistent with the hypothesis that there is some degree of executive attention in the first year of life. Anticipatory looking was also related to the frequency of distress, to looking away from disturbing stimuli, and to some self-regulatory behaviors. These results may indicate either early attentional regulation of emotion or close relations between early developing fear and later self-regulation. Overall, the results suggest the presence of rudimentary systems of executive attention in infants and support further studies using anticipatory looking as a measure of individual differences in attention in infancy.     

The Role of Maternal Communication Patterns About Interparental Disputes in Associations Between Interparental Conflict and Child Psychological Maladjustment

The present study examined the role of mothers’ communication with children about interparental disputes in associations between interparental conflict and child psychological maladjustment in a sample of 227 children and their parents followed over a one-year span. Most of the time (i.e., 79.8%) mothers reported that they would communicate with their children following interparental disputes, with the vast majority of those communications containing relatively constructive depictions of interparental conflict. Post-conflict communications were not associated with children’s adjustment above and beyond the impact of interparental conflict. However, maternal communications underscoring family cohesion and warmth, emphasizing remorse for engaging in the interparental disagreement, and denying the occurrence of the dispute each moderated associations between interparental conflict and child externalizing symptoms in distinct, complex ways. The findings in general suggest that not all positive communications have the beneficial impact on children that parents may have intended.     

Vagal activity, early growth and emotional development

A review of the research on infant vagal tone suggests that vagal activity is associated with both infant growth and infant socioemotional development. Vagal activity has been noted to increase following the stimulation of pressure receptors as in massage therapy. Vagal activity, in turn, stimulates gastric motility which mediates weight gain in infants. Vagal activity has also been notably elevated during synchronous mother–infant interactions and positive affect, providing confirmatory data for the Porges “social engagement system” model. In contrast, low vagal activity has been noted in prenatally depressed mothers (and prenatally angry and anxious mothers) and their infants, as well as in children with autism. These studies highlight the relations between vagal activity and the social behaviors of attentiveness, facial expressions and vocalizations.     

Understanding children's emotional processes and behavioral strategies in the context of marital conflict

Marital conflict is a distressing context in which children must regulate their emotion and behavior; however, the associations between the multidimensionality of conflict and children’s regulatory processes need to be examined. The current study examined differences in children’s (N = 207, mean age = 8.02 years) emotions (mad, sad, scared, and happy) and behavioral strategies to regulate conflict exposure during resolved, unresolved, escalating, and child-rearing marital conflict vignettes. Children’s cortisol levels were assessed in relation to child-rearing and resolved conflict vignettes. Anger and sadness were associated with escalating and child-rearing conflicts, fearfulness was related to escalating and unresolved conflicts, and happiness was associated with resolution. Anger was associated with children’s strategies to stop conflict, whereas sadness was associated with monitoring and avoidant strategies. Cortisol recovery moderated the link between fearfulness and behavioral regulation. These results highlight the importance of children’s emotions and regulatory processes in understanding the impact of marital conflict.     

Emotion regulation and the temporal dynamics of emotions: Effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on emotional inertia

The tendency for emotions to be predictable over time, labelled emotional inertia, has been linked to low well-being and is thought to reflect impaired emotion regulation. However, almost no studies have examined how emotion regulation relates to emotional inertia. We examined the effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the inertia of behavioural, subjective and physiological measures of emotion. In Study 1 (N = 111), trait suppression was associated with higher inertia of negative behaviours. We replicated this finding experimentally in Study 2 (N = 186). Furthermore, in Study 2, instructed suppressors and reappraisers both showed higher inertia of positive behaviours, and reappraisers displayed higher inertia of heart rate. Neither suppression nor reappraisal were associated with the inertia of subjective feelings in either study. Thus, the effects of suppression and reappraisal on the temporal dynamics of emotions depend on the valence and emotional response component in question.     

Children and Violence: The Role of Children’s Regulation in the Marital Aggression–Child Adjustment Link

Exposure to marital psychological and physical abuse has been established as a risk factor for children’s socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Understanding the processes by which children develop symptoms of psychopathology and deficits in cognitive functioning in the context of marital aggression is imperative for developing efficient and effective treatment programs for children and families, and has far-reaching mental health implications. The present paper outlines our research program, Child Regulation and Exposure to Marital Aggression, which focuses on children’s emotional and physiological reactivity and regulation as pathways in the marital aggression–child development link. Findings from our research program, which highlight the importance of children’s regulatory processes for understanding children’s adjustment in contexts of intimate partner violence, are presented, and future directions in this line of inquiry are outlined.     

Methods and measures in developmental emotions research: some assembly required

The remarkable contributors to this special issue highlight the importance of developmental research on emotion and its regulation, as well as its conceptual and methodological challenges. This commentary offers some additional thoughts, especially concerning alternative views of the convergence of multiple measures of emotional responding, the conceptualization of emotion and emotion regulation, and future directions for work in this field. In the end, in light of the complex construction of emotion and its development, we may learn from studying the divergence among multiple components of emotional responding as we do from expectations of their convergence. In each case, some assembly is required.     

Emotion regulation through listening to music in everyday situations

Music is a stimulus capable of triggering an array of basic and complex emotions. We investigated whether and how individuals employ music to induce specific emotional states in everyday situations for the purpose of emotion regulation. Furthermore, we wanted to examine whether specific emotion-regulation styles influence music selection in specific situations. Participants indicated how likely it would be that they would want to listen to various pieces of music (which are known to elicit specific emotions) in various emotional situations. Data analyses by means of non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a clear preference for pieces of music that were emotionally congruent with an emotional situation. In addition, we found that specific emotion-regulation styles might influence the selection of pieces of music characterised by specific emotions. Our findings demonstrate emotion-congruent music selection and highlight the important role of specific emotion-regulation styles in the selection of music in everyday situations.     

Emotionality, Emotion Regulation, and School Performance in Middle School Children

This research investigated the connections of middle school students' emotional dispositions and academic-related affect with their school performance. One hundred three 6th-8th grade students completed three self-rated assessments regarding: (a) their academic competency; (b) affective tendencies (both mood and emotion regulation); and (c) negative emotions experienced during school-related tasks. Teachers assessed students' positive and negative moods, and schools provided achievement test results and student grades as measures of cognitive ability/achievement and school performance, respectively. Results indicated that although students' emotion regulation, general affective dispositions, and academic affect were related to each other, each of these variables also made a unique significant contribution to students' GPA, over and above the influence of other cognitive contributors. Overall, these results provide support for the role of socio-emotional factors in students' school performance, while also clarifying some of the uniquely affective contributors (rather than relationships or goals) to that performance.     

Emotion regulation and emotional information processing: The moderating effect of emotional awareness

The aim of this study was to examine the moderating role of emotional awareness in the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and emotional information processing. A total of 120 female students regulated emotions while watching an unpleasant film. Before and after emotion induction, participants completed a set of tasks that required matching facial expressions. The results demonstrated that participants who were high in emotional awareness showed a significantly smaller increase in error responses (i.e., incorrect matches) than participants who were low in emotional awareness. However, this effect was observed only in suppression (i.e., inhibition of an emotionally expressive behavior), masking (i.e., emotion experienced with a happy expression) and control (i.e., no regulation) conditions. Among reappraisers, who were instructed to adopt a neutral attitude toward the film, regardless of whether they were high or low in emotional awareness, there was not a significant increase in error responses. This study shows that the potentially damaging impact of negative emotions on the processing of emotional information can be prevented by a high emotional awareness or with the implementation of reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy.     

Emotional competencies and maladjustment in Singaporean adolescents

This study explores the relationships between four emotional competencies (i.e., intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills, adaptability skills, and stress management skills) and four factors of maladjustment (i.e., antisocial behavior, anger control problems, emotional distress, and negative self problems) in 217 students from Singapore. Multiple regression findings indicated that stress management skills significantly predicted overall maladjustment, antisocial behavior, anger control problems, emotional distress, and negative self problems. With regard to the three remaining emotional competencies, interpersonal skills significantly predicted negative self problems, while intrapersonal skills and adaptability skills were not predictive of any of the four factors of maladjustment. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

Marital conflict and parental responses to infant negative emotions: Relations with toddler emotional regulation

According to family systems theory, children's emotional development is likely to be influenced by family interactions at multiple levels, including marital, mother–child, and father–child interactions, as well as by interrelations between these levels. The purpose of the present study was to examine parents’ marital conflict and mothers’ and fathers’ distressed responses to their infant's negative emotions, assessed when their child was 8 and 24 months old, in addition to interactions between parents’ marital conflict and their distressed responses, as predictors of their toddler's negative and flat/withdrawn affect at 24 months. Higher marital conflict during infancy and toddlerhood predicted both increased negative and increased flat/withdrawn affect during toddlerhood. In addition, toddlers’ negative (but not flat) affect was related to mothers’ distressed responses, but was only related to father's distressed responses when martial conflict was high. Implications of this study for parent education and family intervention were discussed.     

Early antecedents of emotion differentiation and regulation: Experience tunes the appraisal thresholds of emotional development in infancy

In this review, we synthesize evidence to highlight cognitive appraisal as an important developmental antecedent of individual differences in emotion differentiation and adept emotion regulation. Emotion differentiation is the degree to which emotions are experienced in a nuanced or “granular” way—as specific and separable phenomena. More extensive differentiation is related to positive wellbeing and has emerged as a correlate of emotion regulation skill among adults. We argue that the cognitive appraisal processes that underlie these facets of emotional development are instantiated early in the first year of life and tuned by environmental input and experience. Powerful socializing input in the form of caregivers’ contingent and selective responding to infants’ emotional signals carves and calibrates the infant’s appraisal thresholds for what in their world ought to be noticed, deemed as important or personally meaningful, and responded to (whether and how). These appraisal thresholds are thus unique to the individual child despite the ubiquity of the appraisal process in emotional responding. This appraisal infrastructure, while plastic and continually informed by experience across the lifespan, likely tunes subsequent emotion differentiation, with implications for children’s emotion regulatory choices and skills. We end with recommendations for future research in this area, including the urgent need for developmental emotion science to investigate the diverse sociocultural contexts in which children’s cognitive appraisals, differentiation of emotions, and regulatory responses are being built across childhood.     

Development of body emotion perception in infancy: From discrimination to recognition

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is unknown whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life.     

Meaning making during high and low point life story episodes predicts emotion regulation two years later: How the past informs the future

Memory processes are commonly thought to relate to a host of personality systems. The current study specifies a particular way that memory relates to personality. Highly-valenced, identity-rich memories – high and low point episodes in the life story – were analyzed to see if aspects of these memories predicted self-reports of emotion regulation two years later. Meaning making in high and low points predicted emotion regulation. Moreover, valence mattered. Positive meaning making in high and low point stories predicted positive emotion regulation while negative meaning making in low point stories predicted negative emotion regulation. These relationships held while controlling for baseline extraversion, neuroticism, and memory word count. Limitations due to study design are discussed.     

Factor structure and correlates of the Mandarin version of the Managing the Emotions of Others (MEOS) scale

The English‐language version of the Managing the Emotions of Others (MEOS) scale has been found to have a six‐factor structure. This includes two pairs (Enhance, Divert and Worsen, Inauthentic) that respectively describe prosocial and non‐prosocial interpersonal emotion management, together with an emotional concealment factor (Conceal) and a factor assessing poor self‐rated emotional skills. A Mandarin translation of the MEOS was completed by 277 Chinese student participants. Factor analysis indicated a four‐factor structure comprising a merged Enhance/Divert factor, together with Worsen, Inauthentic and Conceal factors. The emergence of a different factor structure compared to Western samples may be related to culture‐dependent attitudes to emotional expression. The associations of the MEOS factors with Five‐Factor model personality, the Dark Triad and trait emotional intelligence (EI) were examined; these were similar to but generally weaker than those found for the English‐language version.     

More than meets the eye: The neural development of emotion face processing during infancy

This study explored the impact of infant temperament and maternal stress on the development of the infant medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) among sixteen 6-8-month-old infants. Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure activation of the infant mPFC in response to angry, happy, and sad faces. Infant temperament and dimensions of maternal stress were measured with the Infant Behavior Questionnaire and the Parenting Stress Index Respectively. Infants with high negative emotionality demonstrated increased mPFC activation in association with all emotion face conditions. Negative emotionality moderated the effect of total maternal stress on mPFC activation to angry and sad faces. Mother-infant dysfunctional interaction was related to increased mPFC activation associated with happy faces, supporting the “novelty hypothesis”, in which the mPFC responds more strongly to unique experiences. Therefore, this study provides additional evidence that infant temperament and the quality of the mother-infant relationship influence the development of the mPFC and how infants process emotions.     

Emotion regulation and aggression

This review considers the impact of deliberate emotion regulation on aggression, by integrating findings from recent emotion regulation research with a contemporary model of aggressive behavior, the General Aggression Model. First, it considers how individuals who under-regulate anger and other emotions may be more likely to behave aggressively in an attempt to repair, terminate, or avoid uncomfortable emotional states. Second, it explores how over-regulation of emotion may lead to aggressive behavior by increasing negative affect, reducing inhibitions against aggression, compromising decision making processes, diminishing social networks, increasing physiological arousal and hindering the resolution of difficult situations. Finally, it reviews three skills thought to underlie deliberate emotion regulation: emotional awareness, emotional acceptance and proficiency in a variety of emotion regulation strategies. Treatment encompassing all of these skills may improve an individual's ability to regulate difficult emotion states more adaptively and thereby lessen aggressive behavior.