This study investigated the importance of emotion-eliciting context (positive and negative) and mother's behaviors (constrained and involved) on toddlers’ emotion regulation behavioral strategies, emotional expressiveness and intensity, during three episodes eliciting fear, frustration/anger and positive affect. Fifty-five children between 18 and 26 months of age and their mothers participated in the study. Toddlers’ regulatory strategies varied as function of emotion-eliciting context (children exhibited behavioral strategies more frequently during positive affect and frustration/anger episodes and less frequently during fear episodes) and maternal involvement. Toddlers’ expression of emotion varied as function of emotion-eliciting context (children exhibited more emotional expressions, both negative and positive during fear and frustration/anger episodes compared to positive affect episodes). Toddlers’ expression of emotion was not strongly related to maternal involvement, however, the intensity of emotional expression was related to the interaction of context and maternal involvement.
Rothbart and Sheese (2007) argue that emotion regulation should be construed as a biopsychosocial behavioral system responsible for the modulation of emotional reactions, including its inhibition, activation or graded modulation. This system involves changes in latency, rise times, magnitudes and durations of responses in behavior, experience and physiology, depending on an individual's goals (Gross and Thompson, 2007 and Thompson and Meyer, 2007). According to the functionalist perspective (Campos, Mumme, Kermoian, & Campos, 1994) emotion regulation is concerned with relations between emotion(s) and the person's immediate or long-term objectives. When emotions are experienced in a flexible and controlled manner (i.e., regulated), they are useful in mobilizing the individual's behavioral resources in the service of goal attainment, including establishing inter-personal relationships, engaging in pro-social initiatives, self-assertiveness, etc., according to the social and cultural demands of the context and the individual's objectives. In principle, advances in emotion regulation skills promote adaptive behaviors and appropriate and flexible responses to the initiations of others (Denham, 1998 and Fox, 1994). Failure to attain age-appropriate emotion regulatory skills (i.e., dysregulation) is reflected by the use of developmentally primitive regulatory strategies and the inability to make decisions regarding appropriate conduct across diverse social contexts (Denham, 1998 and Fox, 1994). Furthermore, emotional dysregulation has been associated with psychopathological symptoms and/or deviant developmental trajectories in childhood and adolescence (Cole et al., 1994 and Maughan and Cicchetti, 2002).
