ABSTRACT
Emotion regulation, or the ability to enable adaptive psychosocial functioning through regulation of emotional responses (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004), is a dynamic developmental process that unfolds throughout childhood and adolescence (and indeed across adulthood). This multifaceted process takes place across various systems, including neurophysiological, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral, while also being modulated by the social context—indicating that emotion regulation is not only influenced by but also influences alterations within each of these domains. In this way, emotion regulation is both an internal regulatory process occurring at the level of (for example) cognition and neurophysiology, and also a process that is significantly influenced by psychosocial contexts, such as parent–child, romantic, and peer relationships (Morris et al., 2007). Relevant to this latter point, the dramatic changes that occur in social cognition across development have a key role to play in changing patterns of emotion regulation—an issue that is especially relevant to the core thesis in this chapter. In particular, the transition from childhood to adolescence is a key inflection point in the life span with respect to the development of emotion regulation, since it is an especially critical period for developmental change in social cognition, emotional reactivity, and the emergence of emotion regulation skills—especially related to the child’s emerging ability to self-regulate (Riediger & Klipker, 2014). Moreover, it is a period of uniquely high risk for the emergence of emotional disorders (Paus, Keshavan, & Giedd, 2008). In this chapter, we will consider how emotion changes across the developmental transition from childhood to adolescence, specifically by examining the developmental dynamics of how emotion and emotion regulation unfold over the course of situations (and change with age), and, by taking a functionalist 141approach to emotion (i.e., by considering the evolutionary and developmental functions of emotions across this phase of the life span), thereby considering the multiple ways in which emotional states are both regulated and regulatory (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004).
