Assignment Task: For your response posts, do the following:
- Reply to at least two classmates outside of your own initial post thread.
- Demonstrate more depth and thought than saying things like "I agree" or "You are wrong." Guidance is provided for you in the discussion prompt.
WRITTEN BY: Stephanie Durham
Emotion regulation is when one can manage one's emotional experiences to adapt to one's daily environment. "Emotion regulation is the ability to manage one's emotional experiences to engage adaptively within the daily environment (Shields & Cicchetti, 1998). This includes regulating the experience of emotion by monitoring one's expressive behavior (Saarni, 1984). Emotion regulation is important because empirical evidence shows that a child's ability to regulate his or her own emotional state is essential in the formation of positive peer relationships (Eisenberg et al., 1993; Fabes et al., 1999)". When a child likes to pretend play they are displaying emotional regulation meaning that they are in there own world and are controlling the emotions they are displaying.
Emotional regulation is when a child began to develop different emotions in there life from a young age such as happiness, fear, joy, anger, surprise, along with interest. As they get older they began to show shame, compassion, envy, and even embarrassment and even guilt, this shows that a child has accepted behavioral standards and be able to use them in there everyday life, by them having self control of there emotions they are showing that they can control themselves in certain environments that they are in or even certain situations that they are in.
For example the movie Toy Story shows the story of Andy who pretends play with his toy's never knowing that his toys are alive but in Andy's mind they are alive he displays different emotions when playing with each of his toys for Woody he pretends that he is a sheriff that makes sure that people are safe, when it came to Buzz he pretended that he was a spaceman saving a galaxy, rex he pretended was a dinosaur trying to eat everything, Hamm was an evil henchmen, slinky dog was Woody's partner and Bo peep was someone who needed saving from Hamm. By Andy using pretend play he displayed different emotions by portraying the different character's of his toy, what they sound like, and how they act when he is playing with them, he was in control of his emotions that he was displaying in the environment that he was in his home.
The strength of emotion regulation is that children who engaged in pretend play with their parents more often were found to have higher ratings of emotion regulation. Lindsey and Colwell's (2003) study found that children who engaged in high levels of play were rated by their mothers to have better emotional understanding. Girls who engaged in high levels of pretend play were also rated as having better emotion regulation and emotional competence with peers, while this pattern was not found for boys.
The limitations of emotion regulation is that both male and female children might yield a different pattern of results, especially with regard to the correlations between pretend play and emotion regulation given the findings of Lindsey and Colwell (2003) in which play related to emotional competence differently for male and female preschoolers.
References
Shields, A., &Ciccetti, D. (1998). Reactive aggression among maltreated children: The contributions of attention and emotion dysregulation. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology
Saarni, C. (1984). An observational study of children's attempts to monitor their expressive behavior. Child Development
Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Bernzwieg, J., Karbon, M., Poulin, R., &Hanish, L. (1993). The relations of emotionality and regulation to preschooler's social skills and sociometric status.
Lindsey, E. W., & Colwell, M. J. (2003). Preschoolers' emotional competence: Links to pretend and physical play.
WRITTEN BY: ARRIELLE ROBERTSON
The research article "Pretend Play, Creativity, and Emotion Regulation in Children" by Hoffmann and Russ (2011) explores the correlating factors between children's pretend play, emotional regulation and creativity. The researcher's discovered through their studies of storytelling and divergent thinking that there is a prominent correlation between a child's creativity, pretend play and their ability to self-regulate their emotions. According to Hoffmann & Russ (2012), "Children who exhibit more imagination and affect in pretend play tend to be better divergent thinkers and to be better able to self-regulate" (p. 177). The researcher's utilized an Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC), which is a scaling questionnaire composed of 24 questions, and is given to the parents to complete on behalf of their child. The researchers also utilized an Affect in Play Scale (APS), which was conducted through a five-minute observation of the child after being given the task to play with puppets and blocks.
The multitude of testing utilized in this study was a strength of the study as it allowed the researchers further insight into a child's pretend play, creativity and its correlation with emotional regulation. However, the study had some significant limitations that should be taken into consideration, as well. The first limitation I noticed was the utilization of the ERC, due to the fact the child's parent may have answered the questionnaire bias to receive a favorable scoring. The next limitation I noticed in the study was the group of children being studied was extremely exclusive. The study group consisted of strictly female children, who had all previously passed an assessment to attend a private school. So, as you can imagine, the results of this study may not apply to male children or even children being raised in a low-income household.
Reference
Hoffmann, J., & Russ, S. (2012). Pretend play, creativity, and emotion regulation in children. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(2), 175-184.