Emotion and Self Regulation

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Emotion and Self Regulation

• Naomi Ekas
• 9/28/09

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Self-Regulation

• Children do not come into this world with all of
  the skills necessary to regulate their behavior
• It is around 2 years that we really start to see
  children monitoring behavior

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Self-Regulation

• Ability to comply with a request, initiate and
  cease activities according to situational
  demands, to modulate the intensity, frequency,
  and duration of verbal and motor acts in social
  and educational settings, to postpone acting upon
  a desired object/goal, and to generate socially
  approved behavior in the absence of external
  monitors (Kopp, 1982)

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Self-Regulation

• Neurophysiological modulation
• Birth to 2-3 months
• Reflexes

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Self-Regulation

• Sensorimotor modulation
• 3 months - 9 months
• Engage in voluntary motor acts (reach grab,
  hand to mouth, etc.) and change that act in
  response to environmental demands
• No awareness of meaning of situation

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Self-Regulation

• Control
• 9-12 months to 18 months
• Emerging ability of children to show awareness of
  social or task demands and modulate
  behavior/emotions
• E.g. compliance to demands

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Self-Regulation

• Emergence of self-control and the progression to
  self-regulation
• 24 months
• Compliance, delay an act on request
• Representational thinking and recall memory
• Limited flexibility

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Self-Regulation

• Self-regulation
• 36 months
• Flexibility!!!

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Emotion Regulation

• In addition to regulating behaviors, children
  must also regulate emotional experiences
• Development of emotion regulation abilities
  follows Kopps description of emergence of
  self-regulation
• Reflexes to flexible management

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Emotion Regulation

• Emotion regulation consists of the extrinsic and
  intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring,
  evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions,
  especially their intensive and temporal features,
  to accomplish ones goals

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Emotion Regulation

• Monitoring, evaluating, modifying
• Not only negative emotions
• Not only dampening emotions, but also increasing

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Emotion Regulation

• Extrinsic influences
• Parents!!!
• Critical in the early months
• Intrinsic influences
• temperament

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Emotion Regulation

• Intensive and temporal features
• Intensity - subdue or enhance
• Speed or slow onset or recovery
• Reduce or increase lability (range)
• Limit or enhance persistence over time

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Emotion Regulation

• Accomplish ones goals
• Must be regarded functionally
• What are regulators goals for that situation?

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Emotion Regulation

• What is regulated?
• Control of underlying arousal processes through
  maturing systems of neurophysiological regulation
• Diffuse excitatory processes decline in lability
  during first year
• Cortical inhibitory controls emerge gradually
  during infancy
• Nervous system reactivity

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Emotion Regulation

• Attention processes
• Emotion can be regulated by managing the intake
  of emotionally arousing information
• Redirecting attention
• As they get older can do things like internal
  redirection of attention (e.g. thinking of
  something pleasant during unpleasant situation)

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Emotion Regulation

• Other components of information processing
• Alter interpretations
• He didnt really die, he just got frightened and
  ran away
• Its just pretend

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Emotion Regulation

• Increase access to coping resources
• Regulating emotional demands of familiar
  situations

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Emotion Regulation

• Importance of social interaction
• Others can help regulate our emotions (e.g.
  mothers soothing young infant)
• Importance of attachment relationship
• Others can help us with our interpretations of
  situations
• Modeling behavior of those around us

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Emotion Regulation

• Individual differences
• Temperament
• Attachment
• Parenting
• Others???

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Emotion Regulation

• Problems with the construct and research area

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Emotion regulation

• viable scientific construct?
• proposes to account for how and why emotions
• organize, facilitate other physiological
  processes (e.g., promote problem solving)
• and/or
• have detrimental effects (harm relationships)
• integrates an understanding of typical and
  atypical development
• emotions relate to cognition and behavior --gt
  developmental outcomes
• Fernandez

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• Concerns
• Use the term without a definition
• define emotion emotion regulation
• Do not distinguish between emotion and emotion
  regulation
• emotions are inherently regulatory
• physiological systems arent clearly distinct
  from emotions
• Use valence to provide information about emotion
  regulation without evidence of regulatory process
  
• regulating regulated
• intra/interdomain
• Optimal functioning only or includes maladaptive
  regulation
• Emotions understood in context
• Fernandez

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• Areas of Research
• Infant Temperament
• Reactivity (speed intensity of initial
  activity)
• Self-regulation (ability to modify the intensity
  duration by engaging in behavioral strategies)
• Mother-Child Interactions
• regulated and regulating in social interactions
• quality of emotional exchanges related to childs
  ability to regulate own behavior
• Early Emotional Self-Regulation
• emergence of new (more complex) use of objects
  and interactions (ages 2-4)
• manner of self-regulation is predictive of later
  outcomes
• Fernandez

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• Direction for New Research
• Independent measures of emotion regulation
• Avoid confounding valence with regulation
• Use of multiple measures
• Analysis of temporal relations between emotion
  regulation
• Demonstration of change over time
• Comparison of emotion regulation in contrasting
  conditions
• Help the researcher infer emotion when its barely
  detectible
• Disentangle activation of emotion regulatory
  process
• Multiple converging measures
• Self-report, expressive behavior, and
  physiological change
• Heightens inferencing
• Fernandez

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Feldman, R. (2009). The development of regulatory
functions from birth to 5 years Insights from
premature infants. Child Development, 80(2),
544-561.

• Different perspectives of regulation
• Posner Rothbart (1998) interplay of
  b/mechanisms of excitation and inhibition
• Calkins Fox (2002) integration of
  physiological, emo, attn, cog processes
• Neuroscience relations b/ brainstem, limbic,
  and cortex to produce behavior
• Fogel (1993) coregulatory function of early
  relationships
• Common assumptions
• Integrated , hierarchically ordered system of
  multiple components of functioning
• Synchronized in time
• Plastic interplay b/ coregulated and
  autoregulated processes in development
• Hierarchical-integrative course of regulation
  development
• 1st year Emotion regulation of external and
  internal stresses
• Based in brain-stem function (sleep-wake cycle,
  vagal tone)
• 2nd year Attention regulation to achieve goals
• Based in both physiological and emotional
  regulation processes
• Preschool years Self-regulation of behavior and
  cognition
• Behavior adaptation, Executive functions,
  Conscience

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Current Study

• Premature infants from birth to 5 yrs
• Difficulties in physiological and behavioral
  regulation

• Goals
• Describe expression of multiple regulatory
  processes in at-risk pop
• Describe longitudinal pattern of associations
  across levels
• - Unique and interactive effects of levels 1-3
  on 4
• Test causal paths to self-regulation
• - Vagal tone ? Attn regulation behavior
  adaptation
• - Sleep-wake cyclicity ? Attn regulation

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Current Study

• High vs. Low Medical Risk
• Neonates less organized sleep-wake cycle, higher
  neg emotion (boys also at risk)
• 1 year worse emotion reg, higher neg emotion
• 2 years worse attn reg
• 5 years poorer EF, no differences in behavior
  adaptation or self-restraint
• Correlations between levels of regulation
• Mild moderate correlations among levels
• Predicting self-regulation at age 5
• Vagal tone, sleep-wake, emo reg, attn reg
  predicted EF
• All but sleep-wake predicted behavior problems
  self-restraint
• Structural modeling

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Results conclusions

• High vs. Low Medical Risk
• Neonates less organized sleep-wake cycle, higher
  neg emotion (boys also at risk)
• 1 year worse emotion reg, higher neg emotion
• 2 years worse attn reg at 12 but not 24 mos,
  worse delayed response at 24 mos
• 5 years poorer EF only, no differences in
  behavior adaptation or self-restraint
• Vulnerability but effects diminish over time due
  to other protective factors
• Correlations between within levels of
  regulation
• Mild moderate correlations between levels
• Regulation construct is continuous across time
• Physiological measures capture basic feature of
  orientation to environment
• Most variance not shared suggests malleability
  in development
• Consistent relationship between low neg
  emotionality and regulatory functions
• (e.g. sleep-wake cyclicity less cry states)
• Bidirectional influence between development of
  negative affect and regulatory functions

Reactivity
Reactivity
Negative Emotionality
Regulation
Environmental stressors
Regulation
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Results conclusions (cont.)

• Predicting self-regulation at age 5

• Structural model
• Sig better fit when indirect paths included
• Consistent with hierarchical-integrative model of
  brain maturation
• Unanswered questions
• Physiological emotional regulatory processes
  across time
• Need for person-centered analysis study of
  predictors of resilience