The purpose of the present study was to examine relations between children's emotional reactivity, emotion regulation and stuttering. Participants were 65 preschool children who stutter (CWS) and 56 preschool children who do not stutter (CWNS). Parents completed the Behavior Style Questionnaire (BSQ) [McDevitt S. C., & Carey, W. B. (1978). A measure of temperament in 3-7 year old children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines,19,[245][246][247][248][249][250][251][252][253]. Three groups of BSQ items measuring emotional reactivity, emotion regulation, and attention regulation were identified by experts in children's emotions. Findings indicated that when compared to their normally fluent peers, CWS were significantly more reactive, significantly less able to regulate their emotions, and had significantly poorer attention regulation, even after controlling for gender, age, and language abilities. Findings suggest that the relatively greater emotional reactivity experienced by preschool children who stutter, together with their relative inability to flexibly control their attention and regulate the emotions they experience, may contribute to the difficulties these children have establishing reasonably fluent speech and language.Learning outcomes-The reader should be able to (1) define emotional reactivity and emotion regulation, (2) explain how emotional reactivity and emotion regulation relate to preschool stuttering, and (3) understand recent empirical evidence linking reactivity and regulation to preschool stuttering.Despite an extensive literature in psychology regarding emotional reactivity and regulation (see Eisenberg & Fabes, 1992, for a review) and an equally extensive literature in speechlanguage pathology regarding stuttering (e.g., Bloodstein, 1995; Conture, 2001; Guitar, 1998), in recent years there has been relatively little intersection between speech-language pathology approaches to stuttering and psychological approaches to emotion, stress and coping (for early, notable exceptions, see Fitzsimons, 1960, and Brutten & Shoemaker, 1967). This is unfortunate given that emotional reactivity and regulation have been shown to influence a wide range of developmentally important outcomes such as communication (Dixon & Shore, 1997;Dixon & Smith, 2000;Karrass & Braungart-Rieker, 2003;Paul & Kellogg, 1997), school performance (Ialongo, Edelsohn, & Kellam, 2001), and psychopathology (Eisenberg et al., 1993; Eisenberg, Fabes et al., 1997) in children who do not stutter.Given the relations among emotional reactivity and regulation and communicative development, there is reason to expect that reactivity and regulation may influence childhood stuttering, or at least possibly exacerbate or maintain the problem. This expectation is consistent with recent reviews and findings from empirical studies regarding the emotional development and behavior of children who stutter (e.g., Anderson, Pellowski, Conture & Kelly, 2003; Embrechts, Ebben, Franke & van de Poel, 1998; Wakaba, 19...

The development of social referencing in 40 infants aged 6-9, 10-13, and 14-22 months was investigated in this study. Social referencing was defined broadly to include children's looks toward parents, their instrumental toy behaviors, affective expressions, and other behaviors toward parents. Children's looks at parents were more selective with increasing age, with older infants preferring to look directly at their parents' faces and younger infants showing no preference for looks to faces over looks elsewhere at the parent. Younger infants looked most often when their parents expressed positive affect, whereas older infants looked most often when parents displayed fearful reactions toward a stimulus. Evidence of a behavioral regulatory effect on instrumental toy behaviors was found only among infants 10-13 months of age. However, only infants older than 14 months of age inhibited touching the toy until after referencing the parent. On some measures these older infants showed a preference for toys associated with fearful messages. Affective expressions were in line with positive and negative behavior toward toys. No support for mood modification or simple imitation as explanations for the effects was found. Results indicated that the looking behavior of younger children may function differently than that of older children, and that social referencing involves a number of component skills that develop during the end of the first year and throughout the second year of life.

This study assessed emotional and speech-language contributions to childhood stuttering. A dual diathesis-stressor framework guided this study, in which both linguistic requirements and skills, and emotion and its regulation, are hypothesized to contribute to stuttering. The language diathesis consists of expressive and receptive language skills. The emotion diathesis consists of proclivities to emotional reactivity and regulation of emotion, and the emotion stressor consists of experimentally manipulated emotional inductions prior to narrative speaking tasks. Preschool-age children who do and do not stutter were exposed to three emotion-producing overheard conversations—neutral, positive, and angry. Emotion and emotion-regulatory behaviors were coded while participants listened to each conversation and while telling a story after each overheard conversation. Instances of stuttering during each story were counted. Although there was no main effect of conversation type, results indicated that stuttering in preschool-age children is influenced by emotion and language diatheses, as well as coping strategies and situational emotional stressors. Findings support the dual diathesis-stressor model of stuttering.

The purpose of this preliminary study was to assess whether behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation are associated with developmental stuttering, as well as determine the feasibility of these methods in preschool-age children. Nine preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) and nine preschool-age children who do not stutter (CWNS) listened to brief background conversations conveying happy, neutral, and angry emotions (a resolution conversation followed the angry conversation), then produced narratives based on a text-free storybook. Electroencephalograms (EEG) recorded during listening examined cortical correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation. Speech disfluencies and observed emotion regulation were measured during a narrative immediately after each background conversation. Results indicated that decreased use of regulatory strategies is related to more stuttering in children who stutter. However, no significant differences were found in EEG measurements of emotional reactivity and regulation between CWS and CWNS or between emotion elicitation conditions. Findings were taken to suggest that use of regulatory strategies may relate to the fluency of preschool-age children’s speech-language output. Learner Outcomes: The reader will be able to (1) describe emotional reactivity and regulation processes, (2) discuss evidence for or against the relations of emotional reactivity, regulation and stuttering, (3) understand how multiple measures can be used to measure emotional reactivity and regulation.

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