Emerging emotion regulation: Describing behavioral strategies children and their caregivers use during emotionally challenging situations

Emotion regulation has been the topic of increasing numbers of research projects in the past decade, but little research has described how children and their caregivers manage emotional challenges in their everyday lives. This dissertation focused on three dimensions of mother-infant interaction around emotion regulation: (a) behavioral strategies children used to regulate their emotions in their everyday lives; (b) changes in strategy use during toddlerhood, a period of time thought to involve increasing emotional self-regulation; and (c) strategy use related to caregiver support and caregiver-child relationship quality.; To accomplish these goals, videotapes of children and their caregivers were first analyzed to identify episodes of emotionally challenging situations (i.e., the time from the event preceding or causing distress until the child could actively engage with the environment displaying no signs of distress). Rating scales were developed, based on attachment theory, to capture variation in the degree to which mothers and their children interacted around the child's distress and the roles that both mothers and their children played in the child's eventual ability to re-engage with the environment.; Once ratings had been developed and applied, associations between children's strategies, mothers' strategies, and the roles that children's and their mothers played in episode resolutions were explored. At 14 months, children's strategies were neither highly inter-correlated nor highly correlated with mothers' strategies. By 24 months, however, children's strategies were increasingly interrelated with mothers' strategies. Mothers' strategies were highly interrelated when their children were both 14- and 24-months old.; A model to explore whether the quality of the attachment relationship influenced children's strategies was tested using path analysis. The model was tested for 14 month olds. Because several children experienced no emotionally challenging episodes at 24 months, however, the sample size was too small to explore the association between quality of attachment and emotion regulation strategies at this later age. Path analyses suggested that the quality of the attachment relationship had only an indirect effect on children's ability to jointly resolve episodes by first influencing the mothers' strategies which, in turn, influenced joint resolutions.