The affective, cognitive, and physiological effects of implementing antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies in childhood

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.