Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood

The overall goal of this experimental paradigm is to assess the effectiveness with which children regulate negative emotions by measuring changes in psychophysiology while they use emotion regulation strategies. This method can help answer key questions in developmental, emotion, and clinical fields of psychology, such as how effective different emotion regulation strategies are for children to use to manage negative emotion. The main advantage of this technique is that it enables researchers to distinguish between children's emotional responding and emotion regulation processes using a non-invasive, objective methodology.

Though this laboratory-based method provides insight into children's development. It could easily be applied to adolescent and adult populations, and modified to examine different emotional contexts or strategies. Begin by randomly assigning children to one of the six conditions before they arrive at the laboratory, keeping an equal number of boys and girls in each condition.

Then at the beginning of the visit, escort the child to the testing room and sit at a small table with him or her. To establish rapport with the child, introduce art supplies the child can use if desired. Ask two to three questions about the child's hobbies and interest to engage the child in friendly conversation.

Once the child is acclimated to the environment, train him or her to self-report the intensity of his or her emotional reactions, either sadness, fear, anger, or happiness, by using a simple four-point cartoon face scale to rate each discreet emotion separately. Note that each scale depicts a neutral face followed by three faces depicting increasingly exaggerated target facial expressions for each emotion. Next present one scale to the child and read the scale anchors aloud while pointing to each corresponding face.

Then explain the task. Today we are going to play a lot of different games, and sometimes we will ask you to tell us what you are thinking and feeling. This scale shows some sad faces.

You can use this to tell us how sad you are feeling at different times today. Then explain each face and how to use the scale. For each emotion scale, ask the child two practice questions to ensure comprehension.

Which face would you point to if you felt very sad? And where would you point if you felt not at all sad? If the child points to an incorrect face or expresses confusion about what to do, repeat the instructions until the child answers two practice items correctly.

Next, bring in a second adult experimenter to assist with placement of electrodes for the electrocardiogram or ECG. Let the child choose a few stickers from a sheet and secure these stickers to three disposable pre-gelled electrodes. Then place these electrodes over the child's distal right collar bone, lower left rib, and lower right rib, to acquire the ECG signal.

After attaching the electrodes, give the child five minutes to acclimate to wearing the sensors. Finally, keep the child occupied with a coloring book while acquiring a resting parasympathetic baseline for five minutes, and continue the ambulatory wireless ECG recording for the rest of the visit as the child completes the experiment. Begin by asking the child to self report how they are really feeling right now using the same four-point emotion face scale in order to capture baseline emotion.

For a child assigned to the control condition, show a short movie clip to the child and instruct him or her based on the scripted emotion regulation instructions to pay attention to all the things that happen in the movie. For a child assigned to the distraction condition, show a short movie clip, but in this condition instruct the child to think about something happy if he or she feels bad while watching it. For a child assigned to the reappraisal condition, say I want you to think about how everything that is happening in the movie is not really happening, so it's not a big deal.

Think about how it's just a movie and isn't real, okay? Can you try to do that? Ensure that the child understands the instructions by providing follow up questions before starting the film clips.

Once the child is properly instructed based on condition, begin the experiment by showing the child one standardized film clip, about three to five minutes long, to elicit negative emotions. After watching the emotion-eliciting film clip ask the child to self report their feelings again, using the face scale. Once the emotion regulation task is complete remove the ECG electrodes.

Finally, during debriefing, provide a positive affect emotion induction by showing a short funny film clip to ensure the child does not leave the laboratory feeling upset. Begin by opening the analysis software and selecting the correct participant file on the data file path. In the Events and Modes tab, enter the correct start and end time of the episode, and enter 30 seconds as the segment time.

Next, in the Calibration Settings tab, select the high frequency range for the age of children in the study. Then click on the Analyze button on the lower right. Observe a segment of the data appear on the screen with the question, Is the EKG inverted?

Visually inspect the data and respond No if it looks normal or Yes if it looks inverted. Visually inspect data for artifacts and make corrections as needed. Click the green Edit R's button at the top to inspect and edit a segment of data.

Check the respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or RSA, value for each segment on the RSA section on the lower right of the screen. Finally, write the clean and edited data to a spreadsheet file using the white Write button on the top of the page. After the segments are written, click the red Done button at the top of the screen.

Instructing children to use cognitive emotion regulation strategies leads to a different pattern of RSA reactivity than simply viewing the emotional film. Different scores reveal RSA augmentation in general, but a different pattern of reactivity is seen depending on the children's condition assignment. Using sample-specific residualized change scores, children who used reappraisal had average reactivity, children who used distraction had less augmentation, and the control condition had greater reactivity for the sad film but average for the scary film.

Once mastered, this technique can be completed in 30 minutes if it is performed properly. While attempting this procedure, it's important to remember to give clear emotion regulation instructions to the child, and check that they understand what they are supposed to do. This procedure can easily be modified or expanded to examine the effectiveness of other emotion regulation strategies, other discreet emotions, or other developmental periods to answer additional questions of interest to psychologists.