Functions of language in children’s development of emotion regulation: A multimethod approach

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Learning to regulate one’s own emotional experiences and related action tendencies to bring them in line with personal goals and social demands is a central developmental task in early and middle childhood. Better emotion regulation skills are associated to better socio-emotional competences and better peer relationships. They enable better adaptation to school and preschool settings and better academic achievement. Language is one of the cognitive domains that contributes to the development of emotion regulation skills: While there is a substantial body of research indicating a close association between language skills and emotion regulation skills, the underlying psychological mechanisms remain unclear. Previous studies indicate three possible functions of language in the development of emotion regulation: Language as a means of (1) representing emotional concepts including related causes and reactions, (2) regulating emotion-related action tendencies, and (3) cognitive emotion regulation.The proposed project will systematically investigate these three functions of language in children’s development of emotion regulation skills. Taking a multimethod and multi-perspective approach, the project will examine developmental processes, developmental interrelations, and causal relations between language and emotion regulation skills. Methodological approaches will include standardized settings and experimental paradigms in preschool and elementary school. We especially emphasize a differentiated analysis of the contribution of general and emotion-specific language abilities to emotion regulation knowledge and skills. Two distinct but closely aligned work packages will address the following issues: (1) How do general and emotion-specific language skills relate to the development of children’s emotion regulation skills and how does the relation change over time? (2) What are the causal mechanisms explaining the association between language skills and emotional regulation knowledge, action regulation in emotionally challenging situations as well as cognitive emotion regulation?