Measures of Effortful Regulation for Young Children.

Many investigators who want to assess emotion-related regulation share the assumption that emotion usually is adaptive and functional in nature (Campos, Mumme, Kermoian, & Campos, 1994). However, it is also recognized that emotional experience can sometimes be unregulated or internally dysregulating, and that the expression of emotion in ways that are inappropriate in a given context can have a negative effect on a child’s social behavior and development (e.g., Cole, Mischel, & Teti, 1994). Moreover, it is generally agreed that the modulation of emotional reactions often is important for optimal performance on tasks and in social contexts. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that children’s abilities to regulate the experience and expression of emotion are associated with a range of important developmental outcomes for children, such as their social competence, adjustment, and academic outcomes (e.g., Blair, 2002; Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Sadovsky, in press; Kochanska & Knaack, 2003; Rothbart & Bates, 1998, in press). Emotion regulation has been defined in diverse ways (see Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004, and related commentaries). For example, Cole et al. (2004) argued that, “Emotion regulation refers to changes associated with activated emotions. These include changes in the emotion itself…or in other psychology processes (e.g., memory, social interaction). The term emotion regulation can denote two types of regulatory phenomena: emotion as regulating and emotion as regulated” (p. 320). Kopp and Neufeld (2003) asserted that “emotion regulation during the early years is a developmental process that represents the deployment of intrinsic and extrinsic processes--at whatever maturity level the young child is at--to manage arousal states for: (a) affective biological and social adaptations, and b) to achieve individual goals.” Thompson (1994) defined emotion regulation as the “extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially their intensive and temporal features, to achieve one’s goals” (pp. 27–28). Based on these and others’ ideas regarding emotion regulation (e.g., Campos et al., 1994; Cole, et al., 1994), we define emotion-related self-regulation as the process of initiating, avoiding, inhibiting, maintaining, or modulating the occurrence, form, intensity, or duration of internal feeling states, emotion-related physiological, attentional processes, motivational states, and/or the behavioral concomitants of emotion in the service of accomplishing affect-related biological or social adaptation or achieving individual goals” (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004, p. 338). Thus, our definition of emotion, unlike that of Cole et al. (2004), differentiates between regulation of emotion and by emotion; moreover, unlike some investigators, we include the modulation of emotion-related behavior (and not just internal states) in this broad definition. The regulation of the behavior associated with emotional reactivity is what many (albeit not all) developmental scientists attempt to assess in their research. In this paper, we discuss issues relevant to the measurement of emotion-related regulation in young children. Then we review some measures of regulatory processes used with young children and their merits.