What is Emotional Regulation (ER)?
Emotion regulation is an important skill that allows individuals to control their expression of emotions. It could consist of actions like evaluating a stressful situation to decrease rage or anxiety or concentrating on things that make you feel good or relaxed. Regulation is the capacity to access and attend to a range of emotions, recognize those emotions, adjust them, and then utilize them to determine meaning. (Johnson, S., 2019).
Language and Emotional Regulation
Recently, research has found that expressive language plays a key role in the development of ER. Results suggest that children acquire different language skills through observational learning, which allows them to label and properly express emotions. Additionally, children model their parents’ emotional-related behaviors and they assimilate their coping skills. Therefore, encouraging the proper use of expressive language at home could foster children’s emotion regulation skills and reduce externalizing behaviors.
Prior research has found that verbal language, specifically vocabulary skills, plays a fundamental role in children’s ER (Aguilera et al., 2021). Furthermore, it has been discovered that children’s regulation abilities are influenced by their parents through observational learning (Morelen et al., 2016).
A rich vocabulary enables children to label and communicates their emotions. Verbal language supports children’s ER by allowing them to establish conversations instead of recurring externalizing behaviors (Reilly and Downer, 2019).
Besides verbal abilities, observational learning also influences children’s emotional competencies, through emotional understanding. Children’s emotional understanding determines the type of emotion regulation strategy they use. Thus, if parents understand emotions as problematic and try to inhibit them, their children will learn to use this strategy (Castro et al., 2015; Morelen et al., 2016).
If parents show maladaptive forms of expressing and regulating emotions, their children will model them. The findings state that parents who frequently engage in angry interchanges will have children who repeatedly throw tantrums (Morelen et al., 2016).
It is important that not only parents but also teachers promote ER abilities. This way, children will learn to properly deal with their feelings and they will have better interpersonal relationships. The advantages of having proper ER skills are numerous, ranging from more self-confidence to better overall health (Buruck, 2016).
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