ABSTRACT
How do young children calm themselves when they are upset? What factors contribute to childrens abilities to modulate distress and to ‘ rev up” when it is playtime? What are the consequences for adaptive behavior of being facile at managing distress? These questions fall under the broad rubric of emotion regulation, and, more particularly, the development of emotional self-regulation. This topic cuts across traditionally separate areas in psychology such as temperament, neurophysiology, motiva tion, and personality One of the reasons the area has become popular in the field of child development is that it is a broad rubric that can account for how and why emotions organize and facilitate various psychological processes such as attention and problem solving, or, alternatively disrupt such processes (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). In addition, emotion regulation applies to the life span (Cicchetti, Ganiban, & Barnett, 1991): While clearly the capacity to regulate emotion changes with age, even newborns have rudimentary strategies for dealing with emotions.
