Metacognitive emotion regulation: children's awareness that changing thoughts and goals can alleviate negative emotions.

Metacognitive emotion regulation strategies involve deliberately changing thoughts or goals to alleviate negative emotions. Adults commonly engage in this type of emotion regulation, but little is known about the developmental roots of this ability. Two studies were designed to assess whether 5- and 6-year-old children can generate such strategies and, if so, the types of metacognitive strategies they use. In Study 1, children described how story protagonists could alleviate negative emotions. In Study 2, children recalled times that they personally had felt sad, angry, and scared and described how they had regulated their emotions. In contrast to research suggesting that young children cannot use metacognitive regulation strategies, the majority of children in both studies described such strategies. Children were surprisingly sophisticated in their suggestions for how to cope with negative emotions and tailored their regulatory responses to specific emotional situations.

[1]  H. Wellman,et al.  Preschoolers' understanding of the link between thinking and feeling: cognitive cuing and emotional change. , 1997, Child development.

[2]  Carolyn M. Aldwin,et al.  Stress, Coping, and Development: An Integrative Perspective , 1994 .

[3]  Paul L. Harris,et al.  Children's understanding of emotion , 1989 .

[4]  H. Wellman,et al.  Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: the truth about false belief. , 2001, Child development.

[5]  P. Salovey,et al.  Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications. , 1997 .

[6]  P. Harris,et al.  Children's knowledge of emotion. , 1981, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[7]  J. Flavell,et al.  Young children's knowledge about thinking. , 1995, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[8]  R. Lazarus,et al.  Toward better research on stress and coping. , 2000, The American psychologist.

[9]  S. Calkins Origins and outcomes of individual differences in emotion regulation. , 1994, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[10]  John H. Flavell,et al.  Development of Children's Awareness of Their Own Thoughts , 2000 .

[11]  H. Wellman,et al.  Thinking about the past: early knowledge about links between prior experience, thinking, and emotion. , 2001, Child development.

[12]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  The Handbook of Mental Control , 1992 .

[13]  J. Metcalfe,et al.  A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower. , 1999, Psychological review.

[14]  Nancy L. Stein,et al.  The Causal Organisation of Emotional Knowledge: A Developmental Study , 1989 .

[15]  Heather C. Lench,et al.  Arousal at encoding, arousal at retrieval, interviewer support, and children's memory for a mild stressor , 2007 .

[16]  Walter Mischel,et al.  The Development of Children’s Knowledge of Self-Control Strategies , 1983 .

[17]  M. Ford,et al.  Children's strategies for controlling affective responses to aversive social experience , 1983 .

[18]  C. Kohlmann,et al.  Gender Differences in Coping Strategies in Children and Adolescents , 2007 .

[19]  D. C. Howell Statistical Methods for Psychology , 1987 .

[20]  Children's perspective on the emotional process , 2021, The Social Child.

[21]  P. Harris,et al.  Emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years: Developmental periods and hierarchical organization , 2004 .

[22]  Robin S. Edelstein,et al.  My child is better than average: The extension and restriction of unrealistic optimism , 2006 .

[23]  P Haggard,et al.  The psychology of action. , 2001, British journal of psychology.

[24]  A. Campbell,et al.  The Social Child , 2021 .

[25]  J. C. Masters,et al.  The development of children's strategies for the social control of emotion. , 1985, Child development.

[26]  L. Camras,et al.  Emotional Development: Action, Communication, and Understanding , 2007 .

[27]  L. Levine,et al.  Young children's understanding of the causes of anger and sadness. , 1995, Child development.

[28]  Nathan A. Fox,et al.  The Development of Self-Control of Emotion: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Influences , 2003 .

[29]  J. Flavell Development of children’s knowledge about the mental world , 2000 .

[30]  P. Harris,et al.  Young Children's Theory of Mind and Emotion , 1989 .

[31]  Ross A. Thompson,et al.  Emotion regulation: a theme in search of definition. , 1994, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[32]  W. Gerrod Parrott,et al.  Beyond hedonism: Motives for inhibiting good moods and for maintaining bad moods. , 1993 .

[33]  C. Saarni The Development of Emotional Competence. The Guilford Series on Social and Emotional Development. , 1999 .

[34]  G. W. Milligan,et al.  The Use of the Arc-Sine Transformation in the Analysis of Variance , 1987 .

[35]  J. Flavell,et al.  Children's understanding of the stream of consciousness. , 1993, Child development.

[36]  Tracy L. Spinrad,et al.  The relations of effortful control and impulsivity to children's resiliency and adjustment. , 2004, Child development.

[37]  K. Scherer,et al.  Handbook of affective sciences. , 2003 .

[38]  Craig A. Smith,et al.  Appraisal components, core relational themes, and the emotions , 1993 .

[39]  Åse Innes-Ker,et al.  Emotional response categorization. , 1999 .

[40]  Tracy L. Spinrad,et al.  Emotion-related regulation: sharpening the definition. , 2004, Child development.

[41]  K. Scherer,et al.  Appraisal processes in emotion. , 2003 .

[42]  Ira J. Roseman Appraisal Determinants of Emotions: Constructing a More Accurate and Comprehensive Theory , 1996 .

[43]  K. Lambert Handbook of Emotion Regulation , 2007 .

[44]  J. Flavell,et al.  Development of Children's Understanding of Connections Between Thinking and Feeling , 2001, Psychological science.

[45]  The regulation of negative reactivity in infancy: function and development , 1995 .

[46]  Joel Bradmetz,et al.  Is Little Red Riding Hood afraid of her grandmother? Cognitive vs. emotional response to a false belief , 1999 .

[47]  P. Salovey,et al.  The wisdom in feeling: psychological processes in emotional intelligence , 2002 .

[48]  L. F. Barrett,et al.  Handbook of Emotions , 1993 .

[49]  C. Saarni The Development of Emotional Competence. The Guilford Series on Social and Emotional Development. , 1999 .

[50]  L. Levine The Anatomy of Disappointment: A Naturalistic Test of Appraisal Models of Sadness, Anger, and Hope , 1996 .

[51]  Tracy A. Dennis,et al.  Emotion regulation as a scientific construct: methodological challenges and directions for child development research. , 2004, Child development.

[52]  P. Harris Children and emotion , 1989 .

[53]  Walter Mischel,et al.  From good intentions to willpower. , 1996 .

[54]  S. Calkins,et al.  Predicting Kindergarten Peer Social Status from Toddler and Preschool Problem Behavior , 2004, Journal of abnormal child psychology.

[55]  H. Wellman,et al.  Children Talk About the Mind , 1995 .

[56]  J. Stainer,et al.  The Emotions , 1922, Nature.

[57]  Adam A. Augustine,et al.  On the relative effectiveness of affect regulation strategies: A meta-analysis , 2009 .

[58]  D. Estes,et al.  Young children's awareness of their mental activity: the case of mental rotation. , 1998, Child development.

[59]  M. Terwogt,et al.  Emotion regulation and its effects on mood improvement in response to an in vivo peer rejection challenge. , 2006, Emotion.

[60]  J. Gross The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review , 1998 .

[61]  S. Calkins,et al.  The role of emotion regulation in children's early academic success. , 2007 .

[62]  J. Flavell,et al.  Development of intuitions about the controllability of different mental states , 1999 .

[63]  W. Mischel,et al.  Delay of gratification in children. , 1989, Science.

[64]  D. Ruble,et al.  Developmental changes in children's awareness of strategies for coping with uncontrollable stress. , 1989, Child development.

[65]  Mark Meerum Terwogt,et al.  Awareness and regulation of emotion in typical and atypical development , 2007 .