Changing Emotions

Dirk Hermans, Bernard Rimé, Batja Mesquita, Dirk Hermans, Bernard Rimé, Batja Mesquita

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135121273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The question 'how far can emotions be changed?' lies at the heart of innumerable psychological interventions. Although often viewed as static, changes in the intensity, quality, and complexity of emotion can occur from moment to moment, and also over longer periods of time, often as a result of developmental, social or cultural factors.

Changing Emotions highlights several recent developments in this intriguing domain, and provides a comprehensive guide for understanding how and why emotions change. The chapters are organized into five parts:

• Lifespan Perspective
• Learning Perspective
• Social-Cultural Perspective
• Emotional-Dynamics Perspective
• Intervention Perspective.

In each chapter an internationally renowned scholar presents a concise review of key findings from their own research perspective. The book will be of great interest to researchers in the area of emotion and emotion regulation as well as related fields such as developmental psychology, educational psychology, social, clinical psychology and psychotherapy. It may also be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, and economists interested in learning more about emotions.

Part 1

Lifespan Perspective

1 How kids keep their cool

Young children's use of cognitive strategies to regulate emotion

Linda J. Levine and Robin L. Kaplan
University of California, Irvine

Elizabeth L. Davis
University of California, Riverside

Tina was mad that her friend monopolized the best crayons at preschool; sad that her mother was too busy to look at her picture when she got home; scared of the monster that was surely lurking under her bed as she prepared to go to sleep. In short, it was an ordinary day. Upsetting events occur frequently and are impossible to avoid at any age. Adults faced with upsetting events can often keep their cool by drawing flexibly from an extensive toolbox of strategies for managing their emotional responses. But what emotion regulatory tools do young children have the knowledge and skills to use? This question is important because learning to manage emotion is one of the central accomplishments of childhood. Better emotion regulation skills predict fewer behavior problems, better peer relationships, and higher academic achievement (e.g., Cole, Martin, and Dennis, 2004; Graziano, Reavis, Keane, and Calkins, 2007). Moreover, as attested to by the growth of school-based emotion education programs, there is promise that these skills can be taught (Davis and Levine, in press; Rice, Levine, and Pizarro, 2007). Research on the regulatory strengths and limitations that young children bring to such programs may contribute to fulfilling this promise. This chapter reviews research on young children's ability to use a particular set of emotion regulation tools, cognitive strategies, and factors that promote and hinder their acquisition of this ability.

Behavioral and cognitive strategies for regulating emotion

Emotion regulation refers to the processes people use to modify the type, intensity, duration, or expression of emotion (Koole, 2009). To appreciate how children learn to alter their emotional responses to events, it is useful to consider how emotions are evoked in the first place. According to functionalist theories, people experience emotions when they appraise events as relevant to their goals, values, or wellbeing. The specific emotion experienced depends in part on further appraisals such as whether the event is conducive to or thwarts their goals and whether they can do anything about it (e.g., Scherer, 1999). Because emotions depend on appraisals of the relations between events and goals, two broad classes of strategies can be used to alter emotional experience. People can use behavioral strategies to change external events so that the events conform to their goals, or they can use cognitive strategies to change their goals or appraisals of events (see Koole, 2009 for a more fine-grained analysis of types of emotion regulation strategies).

Use of behavioral strategies to manage emotion remains relatively constant in frequency across the lifespan (Heckhausen, Wrosch, and Schulz, 2010). Even infants can avert their gaze from a stranger who makes them feel wary or increase the intensity of their cries to elicit help from parents. In contrast, deliberate use of cognitive strategies to manage emotion requires an understanding that goals, thoughts, and emotions are interrelated and that changing goals and thoughts can lead to changes in emotional experience. Limitations in children's mental state knowledge raise questions about when and how young children acquire the ability to use such strategies.

The development of young children's use of cognitive strategies

A rudimentary understanding of the links between emotions and goals or desires emerges early. Children first refer to emotions in spontaneous conversation around two years of age. By the age of three, children can predict that people will feel happy if they get something they want, and sad if they do not (Wellman, Phillips, and Rodriguez, 2000). By four or five years of age, children can predict emotional responses even when protagonists’ desires conflict with their own (Moore, Jarrold, Russell, Lumb, Sapp, and MacCallum, 1995). They also demonstrate an understanding of the association between emotions and beliefs (e.g., Harris, Johnson, Hutton, and Andrews, 1989). This understanding emerges as children get better at inhibiting their own salient mental states (desires and beliefs) and come to appreciate that people's mental representations of the same events can differ.

Several studies suggest, however, that children do not understand that emotions can be controlled by thoughts alone until middle childhood. For example, when asked how a protagonist could stop a negative emotion, eight-and 12-year-olds routinely described strategies to change mental states such as forgetting about an aversive event but five-year-olds referred primarily to behavioral strategies for changing the environment (e.g., Pons, Harris, and de Rosnay, 2004). Similarly, when five-and eight-year-olds and adults were asked to explain how a story protagonist's emotion could change with no external cause, only two out of 20 five-year-olds indicated that cognitive strategies, such as merely thinking about something happy or reappraising a negative situation, could change a person's emotional state without any external input (Flavell, Flavell, and Green, 2001). Findings such as these have contributed to a growing consensus that, until middle childhood, limited understanding of the relations between thinking and feeling restricts children's ability to generate cognitive strategies for regulating emotion (e.g., Cole et al., 2004; Pons et al., 2004).

Factors other than lack of knowledge may contribute to these findings, however. Children produce more sophisticated emotion regulation strategies when asked about situations with which they have had extensive prior experience (Lagattuta, Wellman, and Flavell, 1997). Moreover, when possible, both children and adults prefer to change troubling situations directly, so that situations conform to their desires, rather than accept situations and change their goals or appraisals instead (Heckhausen et al., 2010). With limited prompting, then, young children may produce behavioral strategies even if they are capable of producing cognitive strategies. The roots of children's understanding of cognitive strategies may be more apparent when children are asked about highly familiar situations and given ample opportunity to display their knowledge. Studies that have taken this approach reveal a more nuanced developmental progression from appreciating the usefulness of cognitive strategies suggested by others, to being able to produce such strategies with prompting, to being able to produce cognitive strategies in appropriate situations without prompting.

Children as young as three possess a rudimentary understanding that remembering and forgetting events can influence people's emotions (Lagattuta et al., 1997). Extending these findings, Dennis and Kelemen (2009) assessed preschool children's understanding of cognitive strategies using a task that limited the verbal and memory demands on the child. Children watched as puppets described and acted out different strategies for alleviating negative feelings. Children then rated the effectiveness of each strategy. Three and four-year-old children rated distraction as more effective than rumination, suggesting that preschoolers recognize the relative effectiveness of some cognitive regulatory strategies.

Davis, Levine, Lench, and Quas (2010) investigated five-and six-year-old children's ability to generate cognitive strategies like changing thoughts (e.g., deciding to think about something else) and changing goals (e.g., deciding to want something else) to regulate negative emotions. Children were presented with familiar hypothetical scenarios such as being unable to go outside to play or having to eat a disliked food. They were asked twice to suggest strategies that protagonists could use to make their sad or mad feelings go away (e.g., “If Billy couldn't do [insert child's strategy], then what could he do to make his sad/mad feelings go away?”). Children were also asked about strategies they had used in their own lives when faced with situations that made them mad, sad, or afraid. Over half of the children described at least one cognitive strategy to reduce negative emotion. Specifically, children described changing thoughts by forgetting, using distraction, or going to sleep (e.g., “Go to sleep, because when you sleep you don't know if you have good days or bad”) and reappraising negative outcomes as positive, temporary, or unimportant (e.g., “He'll eat the thing he doesn't like knowing there's something else he likes coming on”). They also described changing goals or desires (e.g., “He decided he didn't want to go outside and play”). When relating their own personal experiences, cognitive strategies were the most frequent type of strategy that children reported. Moreover, the strategies children described were tailored to the emotion they intended to regulate. Consistent with functional theories of emotion, children were most likely to describe taking action when angry about obstacles to their goals, changing thoughts when frightened by situations characterized by uncertainty, and changing goals when saddened by irrevocable goal loss.

If children are capable of describing cognitive strategies by five or six years of age, why has other research suggested that they do not typically do so until age eight or ten? Babb, Levine, and Arseneault (2010) examined developmental changes in coping flexibility. Six-to 11-year-olds responded to hypothetical vignettes about problematic interactions with peers that shifted from controllable to uncontrollable over time. As situations became uncontrollable, older children were much more likely than younger children to shift flexibly from behavioral strategies directed toward changing external situations to cognitive strategies directed toward changing their thoughts or goals. This age difference in flexibility was mediated by younger children's difficulty in gauging the extent to which situations were controllable. Thus, even though young children are capable of generating cognitive strategies, they may have difficulty recognizing when it is adaptive to use cognitive strategies without prompting from adults. In late childhood and adolescence, greater flexibility and further differentiation of cognitive strategies is seen (Fields and Prinz, 1997; Garnefski, Kraaij, and Spinhoven, 2001). In summary, recent studies have made use of familiar situations and have given children ample opportunity to display their knowledge. The results have helped clarify young children's competencies and limitations in the use of cognitive strategies to regulate emotion.

Factors that help and hinder children's use of cognitive strategies

Children's growing understanding of the links among desires, beliefs, and emotions provides them with a wider repertoire of emotion regulation strategies to choose from when faced with upsetting events. But mere knowledge is not enough when it comes to regulating emotions in daily life. Using a cognitive strategy such as distraction or reappraisal requires children to preempt their immediate emotional, cognitive, and behavioral impulses (e.g., to strike out angrily and take the crayons) in the service of social or long range goals (e.g., to maintain a friendship with the child monopolizing the crayons). These abilities fall under the umbrella of executive functioning. Between the ages of three and six, children make great strides in future planning, engaging in goal-oriented behavior, and inhibiting impulsive responses. These executive functions depend importantly on the frontal cortex, one of the last regions of the brain to reach maturity. Of direct relevance to emotion regulation, these gains mean that, with age, children are better able to divert their attention from emotion-eliciting events, substitute long term for immediate goals, and reinterpret events in a positive manner (Eisenberg, Spinrad, Fabes, Reiser, Cumberland, Shepard, et al., 2004).

All children show improvements in executive functioning with age, but there are marked individual differences in children's ability to implement cognitive strategies to regulate emotion in their daily lives. Intrinsic factors such as children's temperamental reactivity and inhibitory control, and extrinsic factors such as parenting, contribute to these differences. Children vary with respect to the threshold for the elicitation of negative emotions and in the intensity and persistence of their reactions. Intense negative emotion captures attention, leaving fewer cognitive resources available to devote to cognitive regulation strategies. Thus greater reactivity can make it more difficult for children to down-regulate emotion (Buss and Goldsmith, 2007). Individual differences in inhibitory control also contribute to children's ability to regulate emotion. For example, four-year-olds who could refrain from touching an attractive toy were also better able to hide negative emotion when later given an undesirable toy (Carlson and Wang, 2007). A component of children's more general capacity for self-regulation or executive control, this ability to inhibit a prepotent response continues to predict emotion regulation across childhood. Young children who could not delay eating a treat immediately in order to obtain a larger treat in the near future were rated in adolescence as less capable of regulating frustration and stress (Mischel, Shoda, and Peake, 1988). Thus, intrinsic differences in emotional reactivity and inhibitory control affect children's ability to use cognitive strategies to manage emotions.

Children's social environment also contributes to their ability to alter emotions. Children learn to use regulatory strategies by observing how parents, family members, and peers manage their emotions. Although adults may use a wide range of regulatory strategies, cognitive ones like reappraisal or distraction are less readily observed than behavioral strategies. Because of this, the way parents talk to their children about emotion plays an important role in shaping children's abilities. Parents who talk empathetically with children about their emotional experiences, supporting children's attempts to solve problems, engage in distraction, and reappraise situations, have children who are more proficient at inhibiting impulses and regulating emotion (Thompson and Goodvin, 2007). The development of emotion regulation is compromised when stressors or mental disorders such as depression impair parents’ ability to be responsive to their children (e.g., Blandon, Calkins, Keane, and O'Brien, 2008). In summary, children's ability to grapple with strong emotions can be helped or hindered by individual differences in children's temperament and inhibitory control, and by the extent to which parents promote children's emotional understanding and regulatory efforts.

Conclusions

Exploring young children's ability to regulate their emotions is a critical area of research inquiry with implications for a range of cognitive, behavioral, and mental health outcomes (Cole et al., 2004). With age, children transition from relying on adults for assistance with emotion regulation to assuming greater responsibility for regulating their own emotions (Thompson and Goodvin, 2007). In doing so, they are aided by a growing understanding of mental states which provides them with new regulatory tools to choose from. Children as young as three or four are able to recognize the effectiveness of cognitive strategies such as forgetting and distraction. By five or six, children understand that changing their thoughts and goals can lead to changes in their emotional experience. Moreover, they can use this knowledge to generate a wide range of cognitive strategies for regulating emotions including forgetting, distraction, reappraisal and modifying goals. By middle childhood, children can retrieve these strategies without prompting and they can shift flexibly from behavioral to cognitive strategies as situations demand. Thus, by the time children begin formal schooling, they are capable of both understanding and producing cognitive strategies but need support to retrieve and enact these strategies in appropriate situations. These research findings may prove useful to parents, practitioners, and school-based programs dedicated to helping kids keep their cool. Further research is needed to identify the conditions under which specific cognitive strategies (such as distraction, reappraisal, and rumination) benefit or hinder children's learning and mental health (e.g., Davis and Levine, in press; Garnefski et al., 2001; Wright, Banerjee, Hoek, Rieffe, and Novin, 2010).

References

Babb, K. A., Levine, L. J., and Arseneault, J. M. (2010). Shifting gears: Coping flexibility in children with and without ADHD. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 34, 10–23.

Blandon, A. Y., Calkins, S. D., Keane, S. P., and O'Brien, M...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part 1 Lifespan Perspective
• Part 2 Learning Perspective
• Part 3 Social-Cultural Perspective
• Part 4 Emotional-Dynamics Perspective
• Part 5 Intervention Perspective
• Index