No abstract

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: spontaneously pointed with a finger), a wait condition (where they had to wait before giving their answers), or an arrow condition (where they had to point with a paper arrow). In Study 2, 40 Spanish 4-year-old children responded in the happy victimizer task either in a normal or a wait condition. In both studies, participants' attribution of moral emotions and moral motivation was significantly higher in the conditions with alternative response formats (wait,

The present research relied on the Process Model of Emotion Regulation (PMER, Gross, 2007) to investigate children's abilities to regulate their emotions and to assess how distinct emotion regulation strategies are used by children of different ages. In Study 1, one-hundred and eighty parents of children aged between 3-and 8-years old reported about a situation where their child had been able to change what s/he was feeling. In Study 2 one-hundred and twenty-six 3-to 8-year-old children answered two questions about how they regulate their own emotions. Results from both studies showed age differences in children's reported emotion regulation abilities and the strategies they used. As expected, strategies such as 'situation selection', 'situation modification', and 'cognitive change' were used more frequently by 5-6 and 7-8-year-olds, whereas 'attention deployment' was mainly used by 3-4-year-olds. No age differences were found for 'response modulation'. The present research contributes to the existing body of literature on emotion regulation by adding more information about the developmental patterns for each specific emotion regulation strategy.