The Puzzle of Emotion Regulation: Development and Evaluation of the Tangram Emotion Coding Manual for Children

Abstract

The ability to regulate one’s emotions is crucial to engaging successfully in social contexts. Difficulties in emotion regulation are seen in multiple psychiatric disorders, prompting an increased interest in the concept. Suitable methods for assessing emotion regulation, however, are lacking. In this study, we investigated the interrater and intrarater reliability, construct validity, and content validity of a new observational method for evaluating children’s emotion regulation abilities (a complex puzzle task) in a sample of 62 children without psychiatric disorders and 23 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) aged 7–12, using intra-class correlation coefficients for the reliability analyses and Spearman’s rank-order correlations for analyses of convergent and discriminant validity. A panel of experts examined the content validity of the test, and Mann–Whitney U-tests were used to investigate the ability of the test to differentiate the non-clinical group from the ADHD group. Results showed a high level of interrater and intrarater reliability of the test. There was mixed evidence for convergent and discriminant validity as expected due to the novelty and experimental nature of the test, making it difficult to compare with questionnaire-based measures. Content validity analysis was satisfactory, and the group comparison showed that the test differentiated the groups on the primary outcome measure. Overall, the measure demonstrated high feasibility and satisfactory psychometric properties. The generic nature of the test makes it suitable for use across psychiatric disorders and age groups with potential relevance in both research and clinical settings

Revisión sistemática de programas educativos de procesos de autorregulación en alumnos con TDAH

“…Las desigualdades que se pueden observar, es que en algunos estudios aparece aplicada la intervención a todos los participantes, mientras que en otras investigaciones existe un GC y GE. Aunque también se han realizado estudios donde se han aplicado diferentes técnicas al grupo experimental, por lo que se han registrado dos GE y un GC (Bonete et al, 2021;Hagstrom et al, 2019;Moreno et al, 2020).…”

“…Junto con los años de publicación, también destaca la pregunta de investigación, ya que no aparece en la mayoría de ellos. Por el contrario, el objetivo de la investigación y la hipótesis se detallan de modo explícito en cada uno de los estudios empíricos analizados (Bonete et al, 2021;Hagstrom et al, 2019;Viglas et al, 2017).…”

An observational study of emotion regulation in children with Tourette syndrome

“…The Tangram Emotion Coding Manual (TEC-M) facilitates a standardized assessment of children's behaviors reflective of ER, as well as parent-child interactions during a frustration task (Hagstrøm et al, 2019). Eighty-five of the 150 children in the present study were also part of the validation of the instrument (the ADHD and control group) with the objective of examining psychometric properties (Hagstrøm et al, 2019).…”

“…The EmReg score represents the child's general ER ability when considering all factors, such as parental behavior and perceived level of difficulty. The remaining items cover aspects of regulation, emotional expressions, and emotional behavior related to executive control (Hagstrøm et al, 2019). All items are clinician-rated on anchored scales in accordance with the manual.…”

“…Rage attacks as manifestations of ED are often targeted against a parent (Budman et al, 2000) and a review of ER strategies across psychopathologies emphasized the need for assessment of ‘spontaneous emotion regulation in ecologically valid contexts’ (Aldao, Nolen‐Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010). To this end, we asked children, in the presence of a parent, to solve a complex, frustration‐eliciting task employing an instrument for coding child ER (Hagstrøm et al, 2019). We hypothesized that we would see a difference in ER between children with ADHD/TS + ADHD and the remaining groups.…”