The double-edged sword : Emotional regulation for children at risk By :

The capacity to manage emotion is based on the growth of self-regulatory capacities in the early years, but is also affected by situational demands, influences from other people, and the child's goals for regulating emotion in a particular setting. For most children growing up in supportive contexts, the growth of emotional regulation is associated with enhanced psychosocial wellbeing and socioemotional competence. But for children who are at risk for the development of psychopathology owing to environmental stresses or intrinsic vulnerability (or their interaction), emotional regulation often entails inherent trade-offs that make nonoptimal strategies of managing emotion expectable, perhaps inevitable, in a context of difficult environmental demands and conflicting emotional goals. This analysis discusses how emotional regulation in children at risk may simultaneously foster both resiliency and vulnerability by considering how emotion is managed when children (a) are living with a parent who is depressed, (b) witness or experience domestic violence, or (c) are temperamentally inhibited when encountering novel challenges. In each case, the child,s efforts to manage emotion may simultaneously buffer against certain stresses while also enhancing the child's vulnerability to other risks and demands. This double-edged sword of emotional regulation in conditions of risk for children cautions against using "optimal" emotional regulation as an evaluative standard for such children or assuming that emotional regulation necessarily improves psychosocial well-being. It also suggests how the study of emotional regulation must consider the goals for regulating emotion and the contexts in which those goals are sought. Article: Emotions are complex phenomena. They entail constellations of physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal, and expressive activity that interact with situational demands and cultural rules to create subtly nuanced, richly variable subjective and behavioral events. Individual differences in emotion are also multifaceted, fashioned from the interaction of organismic (e.g., temperamental) characteristics, experiential history, construals of oneself and the situation, and the personal goals that shape emotional arousal and its expression. Consequently, although emotion has its roots in the legacy of biological adaptation, it also reflects some of the most sophisticated features of human social cognition, self-understanding, and strategic functioning. It should be no surprise, therefore, that emotional regulation is a complex phenomenon. Although strategies of emotional self-regulation originate in the young infant's simple efforts to cope with distress through self-soothing, they quickly become integrated into a network of behavioral strategies by which children (and adults) seek to maintain personal well-being, manage their relations with others, behave consistently with their self-image, manage their selfpresentation to the social world, and achieve a variety of other goals. And because developing strategies of emotional regulation build on the complex physiological, cognitive, and expressive features of emotion itself, these strategies can alter emotional experience in a remarkable variety of ways (Thompson, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994). When emotion and emotional regulation are viewed in the context of risk for the development of psychopathology, their complexity is further underscored because of the challenges posed by atypical developmental pathways (Thompson, Flood, & Lundquist, 1995). For Down syndrome children whose physiological characteristics undermine their capacities to modulate arousal, for example, emotional signals may be more subdued and emotional regulation may be limited because of neurophysiological challenges as well as cognitive retardation (Cicchetti & Sroufe, 1978; Emde, Katz, & Thorpe, 1978; Thompson, Cicchetti, Lamb, & Malkin, 1985). For maltreated infants and children who experience markedly inconsistent, insensitive, and sometimes abusive care, the expression of emotion and the need to regulate emotion may become part of their complex strategies for managing interactions with caregivers, and of eliciting nurturance while avoiding harm (cf. Cicchetti, 1990; Cicchetti, Ganiban, & Barnett, 1991; Gaensbauer & Sands, 1979). For aggressive boys who tend to construe hostile intent in superficially benign social encounters with peers, problems of emotional regulation may both arise from and contribute to their impaired social skills (Dodge, 1991; Dodge & Somberg, 1987; Graham, Hudley, & Williams, 1992; Thompson, 1994). In each of these cases, and others, a developmental psychopathology perspective highlights how avenues to emotional regulation are forged from the multifaceted interaction of individual strengths and vulnerabilities, socialization processes, situational demands, personal goals and beliefs, and the variety of other factors that contribute to emotional arousal and its management by developing persons. An appreciation of the complex determinants of individual differences in emotional regulation is important not only for a sensitive understanding of the origins of these differences in typically developing and atypical populations. It is important also for appreciating why, in situations that contrib ute to the risk of psychopathology, strategies of emotional regulation can enhance resiliency as they do in typical children, but they may also enhance vulnerability to further harm, sometimes at the same time. In other words, emotional regulatory processes not only provide buffers to psychosocial stressors (as they are usually conceived), but they may also leave children vulnerable to other risks, especially in circumstances that pose challenges to normal sociopersonality growth. Our goal is to elucidate this dual quality of emotional regulation by considering the nature of emotional regulation and the factors contributing to individual differences in self-regulatory strategies in various populations of at-risk children. What Is Emotional Regulation? The view that emotional regulation may provide both strengths and vulnerabilities in the context of risk for the development of psychopathology is surprising, especially in a culture that values emotional self-control and its links to social competence, cognitive performance, and the management of stress. Moreover, the conceptual associations between individual differences in emotional self-management and a variety of desirable personality characteristics (e.g., ego control, emotional stability, agreeableness, etc.) suggest that the development of a broad repertoire of strategies of emotional self-regulation contributes significantly to healthy personality growth. Although this is likely to be true for most children, when the concept of "emotional regulation" is conceptually unpacked, it becomes more apparent how conditions of risk can make the psychosocial outcomes of emotional regulatory strategies less certain. One of us (Thompson, 1994; Thompson et al., 1995) has proposed the following definition of emotional regulation: Emotion regulation consists of the extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially their intensive and temporal features, to accomplish one's goals. (Thompson, 1994, pp. 27-28) There are several features of this definition that require elaboration. According to this portrayal, emotional regulation includes both intrinsic and extrinsic influences — that is, emotions are not only self-regulated, but they are also managed by others. The latter is most apparent early in life, when caregivers devote considerable energy to regulating the emotions of offspring by comforting distress, inducing positive feelings, managing emotional demands upon children, altering children's emotionally relevant constructions of events (such as through social referencing), and later by direct instruction about the need for emotional self-management, and how to do it (cf. Thompson, 1990, 1991). Moreover, emotions are influenced throughout life by others who provide sympathetic support, induce guilt, use humor in difficult circumstances, alter emotion-relevant appraisals through advice, counseling, and other means, and otherwise manage emotional arousal, especially in the context of close relationships. The importance of the extrinsic management of emotional life is particularly apparent when people seek the assistance and support of others in emotionally arousing circumstances, whether this is seen in the securebase behavior of young infants in stressful circumstances or the social support provided by friends and relatives during a divorce or death of a family member. Because emotions are both self-regulated and managed by others, however, these influences may not always be in synchrony. At times, for example, caregivers may (sometimes inadvertently) seek to alter a child's emotional experience or appraisals in ways that are inconsistent with the child's own emotional appraisals or goals. They may also impose emotional demands on offspring that require management in ways that are beyond the developmental capacities of children or that leave offspring vulnerable to other kinds of psychosocial dysfunction. Another feature of this definition is that emotional regulation is portrayed functionally — that is, in terms of the person's goals for a particular situation. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of emotional regulation except with relation to its functional ends; different strategies of emotional regulation may be used in different (or the same) circumstances to accomplish various goals. Implicit in this portrayal of emotional regulation is that emotions are managed for many reasons. These may include striving to maintain a positive disposition in oneself or another, but strategies of emotional regulation may also be enlisted for self-defense (such as when children enhan