The role of co-regulation for the development of reflective emotion regulation - An intervention study in the preschool context
Final Report Abstract
The central aim of this project was to investigate the role of preschool teachers in the development of emotion regulation in preschool children. It was assumed that preschool teachers’ behavior, especially their emotion coaching – mirroring, labeling and validating children's emotions – and their appropriate co-regulation – in the sense of developmentally appropriate support of children’s self-regulation – should have a developmentally beneficial effect. More specifically, these behaviors should support children’s emotion awareness and emotion regulation in the specific interactional episode, which, in the long, should foster the acquisition of emotional awareness and a repertoire of functional emotion regulation strategies. In order to answer these questions, extensive everyday observations were conducted in day care centers, and standardized behavioral observations of children's socialemotional competence concerning their emotion regulation, emotion regulation knowledge, and prosocial behavior were assessed. The study was designed as an intervention study with a pre-post-follow-up intervention control group design with four measurement time points, in which about half of the teachers (35 out of 63) received an intense training aimed at improving both their emotion coaching and developmentally appropriate co-regulation. Due to unpredictable current affairs (particularly the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic), analyses during the project period to date have focused on (i) cross-sectional analyses of everyday observations of 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 73) at the first time point (t1) and (ii) standardized behavioral observations at the first time point (t1) and approximately 7 months later (t3; 1st follow-up). In line with transactional theories on child development, correlational analyses of the everyday observations show, on the one hand, that professionals adapted their behavior to children’s developmental stage and to the situation at hand and, on the other hand, that specific teacher behaviors, especially emotion coaching and more demanding types of co-regulation, namely in the form of meta-cognitive prompts, strengthened children's self-regulation in the situations at hand. Longitudinal analyses of the standardized assessments of various facets of social-emotional competence showed, first, that social-emotional competence at t1 is consistently correlated with age and, second, that especially emotion-regulation knowledge and a higher ability to delay gratification may help to explain the further development in costly prosocial behavior, namely sharing. Based on currently ongoing codings, the outstanding questions about the effectiveness of the training can be addressed soon.
Publications
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The role of co-regulation for the development of social-emotional competence. Journal of Self-Regulation and Regulation, 17-32.
Silkenbeumer, J., Schiller, E.-M., Holodynski, M. & Kärtner, J.
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Co- and self-regulation of emotions in the preschool setting. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 44, 72-81.
Silkenbeumer, Judith Rebecca; Schiller, Eva-Maria & Kärtner, Joscha
