Article summary with Temperamental vulnerability to emotion dysregulation and risk for mental and physical health challenges by Calkins & Dollar - 2019

What is emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation is defined as a set of processes that function at biological, behavioral, and social levels. These processes serve to modulate, maintain, inhibit, or enhance the intensity and valence of emotional experiences to accomplish an individual´s goals. Emotion regulation cannot be separated from the social context in which they occur and emotions can be regulated even as they are regulating an individual´s interactions with the environment. Previous research has found that:

• Emotion regulation becomes highly integrated into other biological, psychological, and social developmental processes over the course of childhood and adolescence. It is part of a larger system of self-regulation that emerges in development.
• There are multiple aspects of a child´s context that will affect the child in different way at different points in development. Key contextual moderators are parenting and parent functioning, and peers and school experiences.
• Development itself comes with different tasks at different ages, providing windows of opportunity as well as challenges.
• Emotion regulation may directly and indirectly influence physical health. The biological mechanisms that underlie emotion regulation also affect health-related processes in the short and long term.

How does emotion regulation develop in infancy and toddlerhood?

1. During the first few months of life, emotion regulation is controlled by innate and automatic physiological mechanisms, and almost entirely embedded in the infant-caregiver dyad.
2. There is a gradual transition from primary reliance on co-regulatory processes to increasing levels of independent self-regulation. Emotion regulation skills, strategies, and abilities that were given by the caregiver become integrated into the child´s own self-regulatory skill set.
3. As attentional neural networks mature and increased inhibitory control emerges, children begin to redirect attention to less emotionally relevant aspects of a situation. As inhibitory and attentional processes become increasingly integrated, children become more able to delay gratification and comply with adult demands.
4. Emotion regulation develops less rapidly and becomes more stable from early childhood onwards. Biological and behavioral aspects of emotion regulation continue to be refined into middle childhood and adolescence.
5. As children mature, they become better able to identify long-term consequences of their behavior, and they are better able to distinguish the effectiveness of long- and short-term regulatory strategies.

What causes individual differences in emotion regulation?

Certain constraints on the emergence of emotion regulation and its deployment cause individual variation in emotional regulation. These constraints are usually temperamental. Temperament is defined as relatively stable early differences in emotional, attentional, and behavioral reactivity that have a genetic and biological basis. Also causing individual differences in emotion regulation is the context in which children are trying to learn to regulate (e.g. variability in parental response).

How do biological systems support the development of emotion regulation?

The development of emotion regulation extends from the emergence of basic and automatic regulation of biological processes in infancy to the more self-conscious and intentional regulation of behavior and cognition. The maturation of different neural systems and processes that provide a functional mechanism for behavioral integration are fundamental to this developmental process. The development of emotion regulation skills is marked by continuous change across biological systems that support, among other processes, the behavioral control of emotion.

Which biological systems are involved in emotion regulation development?

Neural development (neural connectivity and functioning) is important to emotion regulation. Developing brain regions serve to coordinate, regulate, and process information from other neural networks and are involved in the control of cognition and emotion. Also the maturation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays an important role.

What is the autonomic nervous system (ANS)?

The ANS is composed of a complex system of afferent and efferent feedback loops that are integrated with other neurophysiological and neuroanatomical processes, reciprocally linking cardiac activity with the functioning of the central nervous system. In this heart-brain connection, the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the ANS play a role.

How can the withdrawal of parasympathetic nervous system influence during emotional challenge be used as an indicator of emotion regulation?

The parasympathetic nervous system is concerned with the vagal control of the heart. In situations that do not elicit emotional arousal, the vagus nerve inhibits the sympathetic nervous system´s influence on cardiac activity through increased parasympathetic influence, producing a relaxed state. In situations that are emotionally taxing, the vagal influence is withdrawn or suppressed, resulting in increased sympathetic activity. This leads to an increase in heart rate, facilitating the focused attention that is necessary for generating emotional responses that are effective in modulating arousal.

Why is emotion regulation often researched as a predictor of externalizing problem behavior?

Excessive emotional lability and reactivity, and a lack of behavioral and emotional regulation, are considered important symptoms for children with externalizing problem behaviors. Children who are less able to control their emotions are at higher risk for difficulties across different domains (e.g. negative peer interactions, poor social problem-solving behaviors, academic difficulties). Scientific research has focused a lot on the genetic and biological origins of temperamental anger, but the genes that may produce anger and dysregulation of anger have not yet been identified. A translational perspective may be able to identify the conditions under which emotional dysregulation develops.

What has research using a translational perspective uncovered about the relationship between emotion regulation and externalizing problem behavior?

Results showed that maternal behavior, specifically sensitivity and mother-child attachment, predicted emotionality and emotion regulation. Maternal behavior and frustration reactivity predicted increases in externalizing behavior across the preschool period. Also, lower vagal regulation was a characteristic of children with early externalizing problems. Poorer vagal regulation and a low-quality mother-child relationship accounted for worsening of behavior problems from age two to five.

What have longitudinal studies using a translational perspective uncovered about the patterns of growth and change in emotion regulation and externalizing problem behaviors?

Children with high and stable trajectories of externalizing behavior problems in toddlerhood and preschool were characterized by poor physiological regulation and low maternal control during toddlerhood. Also, early child and environmental factors affect the growth of emotion regulation skills over the preschool period. Maternal depression is predictive of less steep increases in emotion regulation trajectories, while greater physiological regulation is predictive of steeper increases.