Elizabeth L. Davis

Different components of emotional responding may be affected by using specific emotion regulation strategies that enable children's volitional self‐regulation. This study examined the affective, cognitive, and physiological effects of experimentally instructing children to deploy distraction or reappraisal to regulate negative emotion during an evocative film clip. One‐hundred eighty‐four 4‐ to 11‐year‐old children [ M = 7.66 years; SD = 2.33 years; 94 girls; mixed race (36%), Latino/Latina (30%), European American (19%), African American (11%), Asian American (2%), or other (2%)] participated. Neither strategy affected observed distress or self‐reported negative emotion. Relative to a control condition, children instructed to use reappraisal reported attenuated rumination. Distraction also predicted attenuated rumination, as well as a pattern of parasympathetic reactivity indicative of disengagement that correlated with parents' reported use of minimizing and punitive emotion socialization practices. Findings underscore the utility of multi‐method approaches that examine parasympathetic activity in conjunction with volitional measures of self‐regulation.

The current study examined parental autonomy support in relation to the quality of youths’ interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) experiences with parents. 194 emerging adult college students ( M age = 19.6 years; 52.1% women) recounted a recent instance of receiving IER from a parent. Youth reported on their parent’s IER behaviors (emotional responsiveness and cognitive support), the perceived effectiveness of the IER, who initiated it, and how autonomy supportive their parent typically was. As expected, parental autonomy support moderated the relation between IER and its perceived effectiveness, such that at higher levels of support, parental emotional responsiveness and cognitive support related to higher perceived IER effectiveness. Likewise, in conditions of low autonomy support, youth perceived unsolicited IER to be less effective than did youth who sought the support. Autonomy support likely plays a meaningful role in the effectiveness of various IER processes, thus furthering our understanding of emerging adults’ socioemotional development.