Changes in children’s anger, sadness, and persistence across blocked goals: Implications for self‐regulation

Abstract

The current study took a person‐centered approach to examine the heterogeneity of changes in children’s emotions and persistence during a goal‐blocking task and examined how different profiles of emotions and persistence related to children’s self‐regulation. Children’s anger, sadness, and persistence were rated in a goal‐blocking task in toddlerhood (T1; N = 140, 72 boys, Mage = 2.67 years, 90.7% White) and preschool (T2). Children’s self‐regulation, specifically sustained attention and engagement, was assessed at T1, T2, and early school‐age (T3) from 2005 to 2012. Growth mixture modeling revealed two classes of children at T1 and three classes at T2 with different patterns of anger, sadness, and persistence. Children’s classification at T2, but not T1, significantly predicted their sustained attention and engagement both concurrently and longitudinally.

Longitudinal bidirectional relations between children’s negative affectivity and maternal emotion expressivity

“…Because mothers’ negative expressivity in toddlerhood appears to have a long-term influence on child negative affectivity, it is important for practitioners to intervene early by teaching mothers strategies to manage their negative emotions to prevent the long-term adverse impact of maternal negative expressivity on children. At the same time, because children’s negative reactivity during preschool years may also have an impact on mothers, it is equally important to provide resources and support for children to learn emotion regulation skills to help them regulate and utilize their negative emotions adaptively ( Tan and Smith, 2018 ; Tan et al, 2022 ). Researchers, practitioners, and schools may consider a family-based program that targets both the parents and the children to help them create a more optimal family emotional climate.…”

The role of language in the development of emotion regulation.

“…In one study using this evocative task, the more 4-to 6-year-olds uttered task-relevant speech, the less they expressed nonverbal anger; in contrast, negative utterances, for example, criticizing the self ("I can't do this") or the task ("This box is stupid") were associated with more sadness (Day & Smith, 2013). However, other studies showed that anger expressed at low intensity predicted better persistence during this task, although only at age 4 years and not at younger ages (Ramsook et al, 2020;Tan et al, 2023). This suggests an adaptive function of low-level anger for persistence that develops with age.…”