Developmental Characteristics And Mechanisms Of Emotion Regulation In 8 To 12 Years Old Children Based On Different Temperament Characteristics

Emotion regulation refers to the internal and external processes that individuals conduct to monitor,evaluate,and revise emotional responses.Emotion regulation plays an important role in the socio-emotional development of children.Adaptive emotion regulation could promote children to develop better peer relationships,reduce the problem behaviors,and thus contribute to their positive social adaptation and mental health.Temperament is defined as biologically based on individual differences in affect,motor,attention,reactivity and self-regulation.Some dimensions in temperament determine the ability and development of children’s emotion regulation,and are considered as the main influencing factor of children’s social adjustment.Based on previous studies,the present study investigated the developmental characteristics and mechanism of emotion regulation in 8-12 years old children with different temperament characteristics through four experiments.Implications for the assessment and treatment of children emotion regulation were further discussed.Study 1:The influence and developmental characteristics.of temperament on 8-12 years old children’s explicit emotion regulation.The study examined the relationship between temperament and explicit emotion regulation among 752 primary school students aged 8-12.Furthermore,the study investigated the mediating effects of emotion regulation strategies in the relationship between temperament and daily emotion experience.Study 2:The neural mechanism of implicit emotion regulation in children aged 8-12.In order to explore the neural mechanism of implicit emotion regulation in children,we collected event-related potentials(ERPs)from 65 children aged 8-12 via emotion Go/No-go task.In addition,this study also examined the relationship between neurophysiological markers and children temperament.Study 3:The influence of effortful control on children’s cognitive reappraisal.This study included two experiments.Firstly,we used the modified reactivity and regulation-images task to examine the influence of effortful control on cognitive reappraisal.Then,we used eye-tracking technology to assess attentional bias in a sample of 59 children aged 8-12.In addition,this study also examined the relationship among effortful control,attentional bias and cognitive reappraisal.Study 4:The influence of temperament on emotional adjustment of children aged 8-12 years:the role of emotional regulation strategies.Based on previous studies,we examined the relationship between temperament and emotional adaption among 535 primary school students.Furthermore,the study also investigated the mediating effects of cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the relationship between temperament and emotional adaption.The current study generally discussed the developmental pattern and the mechanism of different temperament characteristics children’s emotion regulation.The main conclusions were as follows:1.Dispositional negative affect was positively correlated with suppression,and effortful control was positively correlated with cognitive reappraisal.Children with higher dispositional negative affect would experience more negative emotions,whereas,children with higher effortful control would experience more positive emotions and less negative emotions.Children with different temperament characteristics showed inconsistent age effects in their emotion development.Results indicated that age exerted quadratic effect on cognitive reappraisal in the high-level effortful control group;and age exerted quadratic effect on expression suppression in the low-level negative affect group.In addition,children’s temperament characteristics could further affect their daily emotional experience through emotion regulation strategies.Specifically,expressive suppression strategy played a mediating role between dispositional negative affect and negative emotion experience.Cognitive reappraisal played a mediating role between effortful control and negative emotion experience.2.Nogo P3 could be used as children’s electrophysiological indicator of implicit emotion regulation.In addition,Nogo P3 amplitudes elicited by viewing neutral faces were positively correlated with negative affect and social anxiety,whereas,Nogo P3 amplitudes elicited by viewing neutral faces were negatively correlated with positive emotion experience.In addition,the development of implicit emotion regulation in children aged 8-12 is relatively stable,and there is no significant age difference.3.Effortful control impacted on the effect of children’s cognitive reappraisal significantly Children with higher level of effortful control showed a good regulatory effect when they used cognitive reappraisal to downregulate negative emotion.Results also indicated that,regulatory effect had interaction between groups and age,regulatory effect showed an increasing trend with age.Additionally,attentional bias played a partly mediating role between effortful control and cognitive reappraisal.4.Negative affect was positively correlated with children depression and depression mood,while effortful control was negatively correlated with children depression and depression mood.Cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression played a partly mediating role between effortful control and depression emotion/depression mood.Cognitive reappraisal played a partly mediating role between negative affect and depression emotion.