Bivins Zachary, Grabell Adam
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences; Amherst, MA, USA.
Transl Issues Psychol Sci. 2024 Dec;10(4):417-434. doi: 10.1037/tps0000439.
Deliberate Emotion Regulation (ER), the effortful regulation of emotions, is strongly linked to psychopathology. In adults, deliberate ER is often experienced as a self-narrative, such as reappraising a negatively perceived scenario. However, researchers have yet to study how young children articulate deliberate ER strategies, whether these strategies relate to real-time ER neurophysiological processes, and how these strategies are associated with psychopathology. We examined preschool-aged children's verbally articulated ER strategies prior to a frustration challenge, and related these strategies to subsequent real-time neural and physiological responses to frustration and psychopathology in a sample of 59 children. We categorized children's responses into two groups: those who articulated any emotion regulation strategy (i.e., "strategy") and those who did not articulate a strategy (i.e., "no strategy"). We found that about 70% of children in our sample were able to articulate an emotion regulation strategy. Children who articulated a strategy had lower psychophysiological stress during a frustration task compared to children who did not articulate a strategy. Children who articulated a strategy also had fewer ADHD symptoms compared to peers who did not, but also significantly smaller variability of symptoms, and when these unequal variances were taken into account the difference was outside of the traditional p < .05 threshold for significance. To our knowledge, this pilot study is the first to show that emotion regulation strategy articulation may be an emerging skill in early childhood connected to successful modulation of physiological stress and fewer symptoms of psychopathology.
刻意情绪调节（ER），即对情绪进行的刻意调节，与精神病理学密切相关。在成年人中，刻意情绪调节通常表现为一种自我叙述，比如对负面感知的情景进行重新评估。然而，研究人员尚未研究幼儿如何阐述刻意情绪调节策略，这些策略是否与实时情绪调节神经生理过程相关，以及这些策略如何与精神病理学相关联。我们在一项挫折挑战之前检查了学龄前儿童口头阐述的情绪调节策略，并将这些策略与随后对59名儿童样本中的挫折和精神病理学的实时神经和生理反应联系起来。我们将儿童的反应分为两组：那些阐述了任何情绪调节策略的儿童（即“有策略组”）和那些未阐述策略的儿童（即“无策略组”）。我们发现，在我们的样本中，约70%的儿童能够阐述情绪调节策略。与未阐述策略的儿童相比，阐述了策略的儿童在挫折任务中的心理生理压力较低。与未阐述策略的同龄人相比，阐述了策略的儿童的注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）症状也更少，但症状的变异性也显著更小，并且当考虑到这些不相等的方差时，差异超出了传统的p <.05显著性阈值。据我们所知，这项初步研究首次表明，情绪调节策略的阐述可能是幼儿期一项新兴技能，与成功调节生理压力和较少的精神病理学症状相关。
