Measuring reactive and regulatory processes in middle childhood

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The concept of emotion regulation (ER), defined as fundamental processes by which humans influence emotion experience, has recently gained immense traction in basic research on emotion.  Further, childhood has long been thought to be a crucial period in which neural regulatory processes that shape emotion emerge and begin to mature.  However, research on the construct validity and measurement of ER has not kept pace with the tremendous enthusiasm with which ER is invoked as an explanatory mechanism for emotion-related processes. Further, while research on adults has used neuroimaging techniques to better understand the neural substrates of ER, the application of this methodology in work on children’s ER has been slow to emerge.  In order for the field to advance, fundamental questions regarding the measurement of ER, its predictive validity for related constructs, and its neurodevelopmental substrates must be answered.  Thus, this research consists of three programmatic phases.  First, my laboratory will develop and refine a battery of emotionally evocative stimuli suitable for examining normative child emotion regulation, providing a tool for measuring these basic processes. Using stimuli derived from the first program phase, the next step is to examine the influence of children’s ER on their emotional responses to stimuli by assigning them to conditions in which they are instructed to enhance, suppress, or not modify emotional responses to the stimuli presented, with children’s responses in the different conditions videorecorded and coded to examine the extent to which regulatory processes in this age group are successful in up- or downregulating emotional reactivity to stimuli. These studies will lay the groundwork for the next evolution in this research, in which neural substrates relevant to children's ER will be examined using functional neuroimaging techniques.  Using stimuli validated in the first two studies, children will be scanned while being exposed to emotionally evocative stimuli, again under conditions in which they enhance, experience, or suppress emotional responses.  Two brain systems are thought to play an important role in emotion and ER: the first of these is sometimes referred to as a “ventral” system, and includes the amygdala, ventral striatum, ventromedial PFC, and the insula, among others.  The second system, held to support top-down control processes, includes the dorsolateral and posterior PFC as well as inferior parietal regions.  However, the bulk of past imaging studies of ER comes from work on adults, although important developmental differences are expected in associations between brain function and ER. Thus, this research program will generate new, developmentally sensitive methods for assessing children’s ER, a fundamental human process, as well as critical new insights regarding the neural substrates of this construct during early development.