The role of co-regulation for the development of reflective emotion regulation - An intervention study in the preschool context

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The proposed study aims at providing empirical evidence for the constitutive role of preschool teachers' adequate co-regulation of emotionally challenging events for the development of 4- to 6-year-olds' reflective emotion regulation. Regulating emotions volitionally requires the application of regulation strategies (i.e., distraction, reappraisal, soothing, and response modulation) in order to replace the dominant action readiness by a subdominant behavioral alternative. Once developed, reflective emotion regulation enables children to master emotionally challenging events and to satisfy own desires in socially coordinated and desirable way. From an ontogenetic perspective, the study starts from the basic assumption that self-regulation of emotions gradually emerges from the interpersonal regulation (i.e., co-regulation) of emotions through important caregivers during the preschool years. To date, there is no elaborated theoretical model that specifies how this gradual shift occurs and so far there is only correlational evidence that suggests that co-regulatory processes play an important role for later self-regulation. Based on the internalization model of reflective emotion regulation that addresses this conceptual gap, the proposed study focuses on day care institutions as an important developmental context. This setting provides children with critical experiences and challenges with regards to their emotion regulatory competence. In these situations, preschool teachers play a significant role in supporting children's development. Key features of the study proposal are, first, the pre-post treatment-control intervention design and, second, a teacher training that is fostering emotion coaching (i.e., validating and exploring emotions) and the provision of developmentally appropriate co-regulation, in terms of the regulation strategy chosen and the type of co-regulation (i.e., adopting co-regulation, providing specific prompts, or providing meta-cognitive prompts) provided. The proposed study contributes to the current discourse in at least three ways. First, it is one of the first studies that looks at conflictual peer interactions within the day care setting as an important ecological niche for the development of reflective emotion regulation. Second, the study highlights the significance of preschool teachers as important socialization agents beyond the family that support children when confronted with emotionally challenging situations. Third, this is one of the first studies that goes beyond a correlational study design and looks at the effects of a targeted teacher training on preschoolers' self-regulation of emotions. Finally, by testing the effects of the teacher training on children's development of reflective emotion regulation, the study contributes to the more general discourse on the role of co-regulation for child development.