Trial reportJournal of experimental child psychology2016
The effects of distraction and reappraisal on children's parasympathetic regulation of sadness and fear.
Trial report in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between parenting and child autonomic nervous system activity.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Pooled it
- The Development of Cognitive Reappraisal From Early Childhood Through Adolescence: A Systematic Review and Methodological Recommendations.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Negative and Positive Emotion Reactivity and Regulation in Adolescents: A Multimethod Investigation of Associations With Depressive Symptoms.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Heart Rate Variability and Perceived Recovery as Predictors of Performance in Athletes Competing in Sprint Events.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Effects of Distraction and Reappraisal on the Late Positive Potential Across Discrete Emotions: A Study With Latinx Children.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- A Multi-Component Model of Emotion Response Convergence: Implications for the Development of Psychopathology.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Children's executive functions predict their preferences for emotion regulation strategies.Cognition & emotion · 2025Article
- Does Parental Media Soothing Lead to the Risk of Callous-Unemotional Behaviors in Early Childhood? Testing a Moderated Mediation Model.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Multicomponent approach reveals differences in affective responses among children and adolescents.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Momentary autonomic engagement during parent-adolescent conflict: Coping as a moderator of associations with emotions.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
- Cognitive control processes and emotion regulation in adolescence: Examining the impact of affective inhibition and heart-rate-variability on emotion regulation dynamics in daily life.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cure for tantrums? Longitudinal associations between parental digital emotion regulation and children's self-regulatory skills.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2024Article
- A Developmental Hierarchical-Integrative Perspective on the Emergence of Self-Regulation: A Replication and Extension.Child development · 2021Article
- Article
- Creating "a Safe Haven": Emotion-Regulation Strategies Employed by Mothers and Young Children Exposed to Recurrent Political Violence.Journal of child & adolescent trauma · 2020Article
- Neural patterns during anticipation predict emotion regulation success for reappraisal.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Adolescents' Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire: Initial Validation and Prospective Associations With Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Other Mental Health Problems in Adolescence and Young Adulthood in a Swedish Youth Cohort.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Children's physiological reactivity in emotion contexts and prosocial behavior.Brain and behavior · 2019Article
- An intervention that increases parental sensitivity in families referred to Child Protective Services also changes toddlers' parasympathetic regulation.Developmental science · 2019Article
- Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Children commonly experience negative emotions like sadness and fear, and much recent empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the factors supporting and predicting effective emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a cardiac index of parasympathetic function, has emerged as a key physiological correlate of children's self-regulation. But little is known about how children's use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies corresponds to concurrent parasympathetic regulation (i.e., RSA reactivity while watching an emotion-eliciting video). The current study describes an experimental paradigm in which 101 5- and 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three different emotion regulation conditions: Control, Distraction, or Reappraisal. All children watched a sad film and a scary film (order counterbalanced), and children in the Distraction and Reappraisal conditions received instructions to deploy the target strategy to manage sadness/fear while they watched. Consistent with predictions, children assigned to use either emotion regulation strategy showed greater RSA augmentation from baseline than children in the Control condition (all children showed an overall increase in RSA levels from baseline), suggesting enhanced parasympathetic calming when children used distraction or reappraisal to regulate sadness and fear. But this pattern was found only among children who viewed the sad film before the scary film. Among children who viewed the scary film first, reappraisal promoted marginally better parasympathetic regulation of fear (no condition differences emerged for parasympathetic regulation of sadness when the sad film was viewed second). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of children's emotion regulation and affective physiology.
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Registered trials
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