Emotion regulation (ER) substantially develops during the childhood years. This growth includes an increasing awareness that certain ER strategies are more appropriate in some contexts than others, but few studies have explored how children tailor ER strategies across contexts (i.e. context sensitivity). Understanding this could help clarify why some children have difficulties effectively regulating their emotions even when they have a broad strategy repertoire. The current study explored differences in Hispanic children's ER strategy context sensitivity across three emotions and explored attentional control as a possible moderator of this sensitivity. Children (N = 78; M = 9.91; SD = 1.14; 50% girls; household income M = 31-40k) completed an attentional control task and were interviewed about their ER strategy preferences for sadness, fear, and anger. Context sensitivity was measured as the proportion of endorsed ER strategies that theoretically "fit" the given emotion. Children showed more sensitivity for anger and fear compared to sadness. Attentional control predicted context sensitivity for sadness only, but this was qualified by age. Older children showed more context sensitivity with increasing attentional control. Findings provide insight into emotional development in late childhood by highlighting children's awareness of the context-appropriate nature of ER strategies across emotions.

Children commonly experience negative emotions like sadness and fear, and much recent empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the factors supporting and predicting effective emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a cardiac index of parasympathetic function, has emerged as a key physiological correlate of children's self-regulation. But little is known about how children's use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies corresponds to concurrent parasympathetic regulation (i.e., RSA reactivity while watching an emotion-eliciting video). The current study describes an experimental paradigm in which 101 5- and 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three different emotion regulation conditions: Control, Distraction, or Reappraisal. All children watched a sad film and a scary film (order counterbalanced), and children in the Distraction and Reappraisal conditions received instructions to deploy the target strategy to manage sadness/fear while they watched. Consistent with predictions, children assigned to use either emotion regulation strategy showed greater RSA augmentation from baseline than children in the Control condition (all children showed an overall increase in RSA levels from baseline), suggesting enhanced parasympathetic calming when children used distraction or reappraisal to regulate sadness and fear. But this pattern was found only among children who viewed the sad film before the scary film. Among children who viewed the scary film first, reappraisal promoted marginally better parasympathetic regulation of fear (no condition differences emerged for parasympathetic regulation of sadness when the sad film was viewed second). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of children's emotion regulation and affective physiology.

Effective regulation of emotion is one of the most important skills that develops in childhood. Research interest in this area is expanding, but empirical work has been limited by predominantly correlational investigations of children's skills. Relatedly, a key conceptual challenge for emotion scientists is to distinguish between emotion responding and emotion regulatory processes. This paper presents a novel method to address these conceptual and methodological issues in child samples. An experimental paradigm that assesses the effectiveness with which children regulate emotion is described. Children are randomly assigned to use specific emotion regulation strategies, negative emotions are elicited with film clips, and changes in subsequent psychophysiology index the extent to which emotion regulation is effective. Children are instructed to simply watch the emotion-eliciting film (control), distract themselves from negative emotions (cognitive distraction), or reframe the situation in a way that downplays the importance of the emotional event (cognitive reappraisal). Cardiac physiology, continuously acquired before and during the emotional task, serves as an objective measure of children's unfolding emotional responding while viewing evocative films. Key comparisons in patterns of obtained physiological reactivity are between the control and emotion regulation strategy conditions. Representative results from this approach are described, and discussion focuses on the contribution of this methodological approach to developmental science.