The Development of Infant Emotion Regulation

Abstract

The ability to effectively regulate emotions is a skill that begins to develop during the first year of life and continues throughout the life span. Effective management of emotions, particularly negative emotions, has important implications for a variety of developmental outcomes. The current chapter focuses on the development of emotion regulation during infancy with the goal of highlighting the dynamic, temporal interrelation of emotion and the behavioral strategies used to regulate emotion. The first section provides an overview of the development of emotion regulation during infancy and the traditional approaches to measuring emotion regulation during this part of the life span. The second section discusses the temporal, moment-to-moment sequencing of emotion and regulatory strategies and provides a detailed discussion of research using novel methodological and statistical approaches to studying these temporal associations. The final section highlights new statistical techniques that could be applied to the study of infant emotion regulation and suggestions for future research directions.