Study On The Development Of Emotion Regulation Strategy And Emotion Regulation Cognition Of 3-5 Year-Old Children

Emotion regulation consists of some certain strategies and processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating and modifying emotion reactions, especially their intensive and temporal features, to accomplish one's goals. The development of emotion regulation, which deeply influences children's follow-up development, plays an important role in the early processes of socialization and emotion development, and had an inherent relationship with self-control and self-regulation.Using two different kinds of methods, this study explored preschool children's use of emotion regulation strategies in different contexts and when feeling different emotions, as well as children's cognition of emotion regulation.In the first study,93 children, ages 3-5,were given 6 hypothetical situations which elicited positive/negative emotion. Their responses to different situations, different emotions, as well as their cognition of emotion regulation were examined.In the second study,63 children, ages 3-5, participated in the observation procedure. Their behavior in cope with the frustration task was videotaped and analyzed.The result of the two studies showed:First, there's a remarkable increase of children's use of positive emotion regulation strategies, and a decrease of negative ones, which shows the development of children's emotion regulation during 3-5. Second, preschoolers'cognition of emotion regulation strategy is better than their actual practice. Third, children's use of emotion regulation strategy is influenced by the situation they are in. Fourth, children's cognition of the reason and result of emotion regulation processes develop continuously during 3 to 5.