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Emotional Regulation and Social Thinking - Part One
Emotional regulation is an important developmental process for all children to acquire. It helps a child to successfully attend to and interact with partners and further develop relationships. Emotional regulation is defined as the ability to control and modify emotions across time. Another way to think about emotional regulation is that it is the ability of the child to adapt to an emotion by redirecting, controlling or modifying their response to the emotion.
An emotion is an internal state experienced in response to events which may be real, or part of the child's imagination or even recalled from a previous event. It is common for us to group these responses based on the nature of the emotion in a continuum ranging from positive to negative. Experiencing extreme emotional states at either end of the continuum may interfere a child's ability to attend, communicate or problem solve social opportunities with adults or peers. Emotional regulation helps the child to adjust their internal state and remain engaged with partners and social opportunities even when there is a strong emotional response.
The next Parent Matters Newsletter includes more about emotional regulation and its typical development in children. Please be sure to check back for the next installment in this four part series.
ˇ Compiled from readings in The SCERTS Model: A Comprehensive Educational Approach for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2006, Barry Prizant, Amy Wetherby, Emily Rubin, Amy Laurent and Patrick Rydell.
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