The affective, cognitive, and physiological effects of implementing antecedent‐focused emotion regulation strategies in childhood

Abstract

Different components of emotional responding may be affected by using specific emotion regulation strategies that enable children's volitional self‐regulation. This study examined the affective, cognitive, and physiological effects of experimentally instructing children to deploy distraction or reappraisal to regulate negative emotion during an evocative film clip. One‐hundred eighty‐four 4‐ to 11‐year‐old children [M = 7.66 years; SD = 2.33 years; 94 girls; mixed race (36%), Latino/Latina (30%), European American (19%), African American (11%), Asian American (2%), or other (2%)] participated. Neither strategy affected observed distress or self‐reported negative emotion. Relative to a control condition, children instructed to use reappraisal reported attenuated rumination. Distraction also predicted attenuated rumination, as well as a pattern of parasympathetic reactivity indicative of disengagement that correlated with parents' reported use of minimizing and punitive emotion socialization practices. Findings underscore the utility of multi‐method approaches that examine parasympathetic activity in conjunction with volitional measures of self‐regulation.