Self-regulation includes both cognitive and affective components, but few researchers have investigated how these components interact to better explain self-regulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how children's private speech, which is typically related to cognitive ability, was utilized during an emotion-eliciting task. By examining the social and private speech that occurred as children coped with a frustration task, a better understanding of how children regulate their emotional displays can be achieved. Children's speech, emotional expressions (sadness and anger), and emotion regulation strategies (distraction and self-comforting) were coded during a frustration task completed by preschool-aged children (N = 116). Children's social speech to mothers and private speech were transcribed. Children's private speech was categorized according to five mutually exclusive categories: vocalizations, inaudible muttering, task-irrelevant, negatively valenced task-relevant, or facilitative task-relevant. Sadness was associated with more social speech and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech, whereas anger was associated with less distraction and facilitative task-relevant private speech and more vocalizations and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech. Additionally, private speech predicted unique variance beyond that explained by the emotion regulation strategies and moderated the relations of emotion regulation strategies to both anger and sadness. These empirical findings support theoretical propositions that language is a factor in children's emotion regulation. The implications of these findings include support for the encouragement of private speech in the classroom because of its relation to emotional, in addition to cognitive, regulatory functions.
Self-regulation is an important socialization goal because children need to initiate actions autonomously, regulate and engage according to social norms without adult supervision, and do so flexibly (Grolnick & Farkas, 2002). Self-regulation has been conceptualized by Grolnick and Farkas (2002) as including motivational, cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. One aspect of children's cognitive self-regulation is private speech, or audible speech that is directed to the self (Winsler, 2009). Because private speech has been found to support young children's cognitive self-regulation, it has been encouraged for use in classrooms as an aid to cognitive development (Winsler et al., 2000a, Winsler and Diaz, 1995, Winsler et al., 2000b and Winsler et al., 2007). Whereas a lot of the research on private speech has focused on cognitive aspects of self-regulation, the emotional aspects of self-regulation are typically not considered as much.
Emotional regulation includes the process of altering internal feeling states to accomplish a personal goal (Eisenberg and Morris, 2002, Eisenberg and Spinrad, 2004 and Eisenberg et al., 2004). Emotional regulation abilities have been found to be related to children's social skills and peer social status (Calkins et al., 1999, Eisenberg et al., 1993 and Keane and Calkins, 2004) as well as academic success and productivity (Graziano, Reavis, Keane, & Calkins, 2007). Children's emotion and emotion regulation strategies are often observed during tasks that children may find frustrating. These tasks have been used to reliably observe emotion in children (e.g., Dyson et al., 2012, Gagne et al., 2011 and Goldsmith et al., 1993), but researchers have not investigated children's private speech during emotion-eliciting tasks. The purpose of this study was to examine how children's private speech related to their emotionality and emotion regulation during a frustration task.
Past theoretical propositions support the inclusion of private speech in research on children's emotion regulation. According to Thompson (1990), communication abilities and language growth are among the most important cognitive components of emotional regulation. They increase children's ability to use outside regulatory influences to assist in their early self-regulatory abilities. Kopp (1989) also proposed that language was important to toddlers’ ability to self-regulate negative emotions. Improved verbal ability should lead to greater internal regulation because language gives children the ability to describe their feelings and to be able to hear how their emotions affect other people (Kopp, 1989). When children are faced with a frustration task, they can often be observed talking to themselves; however, this speech is typically not examined, even though language can be a tool for regulating frustration (Cole et al., 2010, Eisenberg et al., 2005 and Thompson, 1990). The current study advances our understanding of the speech that occurs during a frustration task by empirically testing the expectation that children's private speech observed in a frustration task would relate to children's emotionality and emotion regulation strategies in meaningful ways.
