EXAMINING EMOTION-REGULATION AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTION SKILLS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
Project no. 953 · Status: Kapanmış · 2016
Summary
The understanding of emotional displays in early childhood emerges at age 3 and grows at age 4 and 5 in a way that children are able to match emotional reactions to their sources. The understanding of the discrepancy between the emotional expression and the true feelings is an important step towards self-regulation. To explore such ability, children were presented with short vignettes, in which a character’s anticipation for an outcome of the situation was not met but he or she was expected to alter emotional expression due to social norms. These stories aimed to assess children’s grasp of the emotion-regulation and was called Scale of Understanding of Regulation of Emotions (SURE). Children whose age ranged from 3-to 5-years-old were tested in a study (N=107) in which the performance in SURE was compared with the domains of social understanding and behavioural control which were assessed through four types of behaviour: the child’s responses to a positive event and a negative event and responses in a range of conflict inhibition and delay inhibition tasks. The results show that children as young as 4-years-old performed above chance across the new SURE test, showing that they were able to attribute regulated emotional displays for story characters which did not match their true feelings at an earlier age than is suggested in the literature. The child’s understanding of the possibility that how you look may not identify how you feel emerges at the same time as their ability understanding false belief.