Emotion, Emotion-Related Regulation, and Social Functioning

It is a well-established finding that children who are popular with peers tend to be prosocial and relatively appropriate in their social interactions (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998). Thus, it is reasonable to predict that children who are liked by peers tend to be fairly well regulated. However, children who are overcontrolled - rigid and overly constrained in their behavior - may not be especially attractive to peers. In addition, the degree to which children regulate versus express their emotions may have a different significance in different cultures and, consequently, be differentially related to developmental outcomes. In this chapter, we review conceptions of regulation/control relevant to managing emotion and its expression, discuss possible reasons for similarities and differences in the relations of emotionality and regulation to quality of children’s social functioning, and summarize research from studies in three cultures outside of North America. Emotion-Related Regulation/Control: Conceptual Distinctions There is considerable debate regarding the definition of emotion regulation (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004; Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). In an attempt to include the many aspects of such regulation, Eisenberg and Spinrad (2004) defined emotion-related self-regulation as the process of influencing (i.e., initiating, avoiding, inhibiting, maintaining, or modulating) the occurrence, form, intensity, or duration of internal feeling states, emotion-related physiological and attentional processes, motivational states, and/or the behavioral concomitants of emotion in the service of accomplishing affect-related biological or social adaptation or achieving individual goals.