Early Childhood Emotion Regulation Strategy Articulation, its Neurophysiological Correlates, and Association with Psychopathology.

Deliberate Emotion Regulation (ER), the effortful regulation of emotions, is strongly linked to psychopathology. In adults, deliberate ER is often experienced as a self-narrative, such as reappraising a negatively perceived scenario. However, researchers have yet to study how young children articulate deliberate ER strategies, whether these strategies relate to real-time ER neurophysiological processes, and how these strategies are associated with psychopathology. We examined preschool-aged children's verbally articulated ER strategies prior to a frustration challenge, and related these strategies to subsequent real-time neural and physiological responses to frustration and psychopathology in a sample of 59 children. We categorized children's responses into two groups: those who articulated any emotion regulation strategy (i.e., "strategy") and those who did not articulate a strategy (i.e., "no strategy"). We found that about 70% of children in our sample were able to articulate an emotion regulation strategy. Children who articulated a strategy had lower psychophysiological stress during a frustration task compared to children who did not articulate a strategy. Children who articulated a strategy also had fewer ADHD symptoms compared to peers who did not, but also significantly smaller variability of symptoms, and when these unequal variances were taken into account the difference was outside of the traditional p < .05 threshold for significance. To our knowledge, this pilot study is the first to show that emotion regulation strategy articulation may be an emerging skill in early childhood connected to successful modulation of physiological stress and fewer symptoms of psychopathology.