The double-edged sword: Emotional regulation for children at risk By: ROSS A. THOMPSON AND SUSAN

The capacity to manage emotion is based on the growth of self-regulatory capacities in the early years, but is also affected by situational demands, influences from other people, and the child's goals for regulating emotion in a particular setting. For most children growing up in supportive contexts, the growth of emotional regulation is associated with enhanced psychosocial wellbeing and socioemotional competence. But for children who are at risk for the development of psychopathology owing to environmental stresses or intrinsic vulnerability (or their interaction), emotional regulation often entails inherent trade-offs that make nonoptimal strategies of managing emotion expectable, perhaps inevitable, in a context of difficult environmental demands and conflicting emotional goals. This analysis discusses how emotional regulation in children at risk may simultaneously foster both resiliency and vulnerability by considering how emotion is managed when children (a) are living with a parent who is depressed, (b) witness or experience domestic violence, or (c) are temperamentally inhibited when encountering novel challenges. In each case, the child,s efforts to manage emotion may simultaneously buffer against certain stresses while also enhancing the child's vulnerability to other risks and demands. This double-edged sword of emotional regulation in conditions of risk for children cautions against using "optimal" emotional regulation as an evaluative standard for such children or assuming that emotional regulation necessarily improves psychosocial well-being. It also suggests how the study of emotional regulation must consider the goals for regulating emotion and the contexts in which those goals are sought. Article: Emotions are complex phenomena. They entail constellations of physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal, and expressive activity that interact with situational demands and cultural rules to create subtly nuanced, richly variable subjective and behavioral events. Individual differences in emotion are also multifaceted, fashioned from the interaction of organismic (e.g., temperamental) characteristics, experiential history, construals of oneself and the situation, and the personal goals that shape emotional arousal and its expression. Consequently, although emotion has its roots in the legacy of biological adaptation, it also reflects some of the most sophisticated features of human social cognition, self-understanding, and strategic functioning. It should be no surprise, therefore, that emotional regulation is a complex phenomenon. Although strategies of emotional self-regulation originate in the young infant's simple efforts to cope with distress through self-soothing, they quickly become integrated into a network of behavioral strategies by which children (and adults) seek to maintain personal well-being, manage their relations with others, behave consistently with their self-image, manage their selfpresentation to the social world, and achieve a variety of other goals. And because developing strategies of emotional regulation build on the complex physiological, cognitive, and expressive features of emotion itself, these strategies can alter emotional experience in a remarkable variety of ways (Thompson, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994). When emotion and emotional regulation are viewed in the context of risk for the development of psychopathology, their complexity is further underscored because of the challenges posed by atypical developmental pathways (Thompson, Flood, & Lundquist, 1995). For Down syndrome children whose physiological characteristics undermine their capacities to modulate arousal, for example, emotional signals may be more subdued and emotional regulation may be limited because of neurophysiological challenges as well as cognitive retardation (Cicchetti & Sroufe, 1978; Emde, Katz, & Thorpe, 1978; Thompson, Cicchetti, Lamb, & Malkin, 1985). For maltreated infants and children who experience markedly inconsistent, insensitive, and sometimes abusive care, the expression of emotion and the need to regulate emotion may become part of their complex strategies for managing interactions with caregivers, and of eliciting nurturance while avoiding harm (cf. Cicchetti, 1990; Cicchetti, Ganiban, & Barnett, 1991; Gaensbauer & Sands, 1979). For aggressive boys who tend to construe hostile intent in superficially benign social encounters with peers, problems of emotional regulation may both arise from and contribute to their impaired social skills (Dodge, 1991; Dodge & Somberg, 1987; Graham, Hudley, & Williams, 1992; Thompson, 1994). In each of these cases, and others, a developmental psychopathology perspective highlights how avenues to emotional regulation are forged from the multifaceted interaction of individual strengths and vulnerabilities, socialization processes, situational demands, personal goals and beliefs, and the variety of other factors that contribute to emotional arousal and its management by developing persons. An appreciation of the complex determinants of individual differences in emotional regulation is important not only for a sensitive understanding of the origins of these differences in typically developing and atypical populations. It is important also for appreciating why, in situations that contrib ute to the risk of psychopathology, strategies of emotional regulation can enhance resiliency as they do in typical children, but they may also enhance vulnerability to further harm, sometimes at the same time. In other words, emotional regulatory processes not only provide buffers to psychosocial stressors (as they are usually conceived), but they may also leave children vulnerable to other risks, especially in circumstances that pose challenges to normal sociopersonality growth. Our goal is to elucidate this dual quality of emotional regulation by considering the nature of emotional regulation and the factors contributing to individual differences in self-regulatory strategies in various populations of at-risk children. What Is Emotional Regulation? The view that emotional regulation may provide both strengths and vulnerabilities in the context of risk for the development of psychopathology is surprising, especially in a culture that values emotional self-control and its links to social competence, cognitive performance, and the management of stress. Moreover, the conceptual associations between individual differences in emotional self-management and a variety of desirable personality characteristics (e.g., ego control, emotional stability, agreeableness, etc.) suggest that the development of a broad repertoire of strategies of emotional self-regulation contributes significantly to healthy personality growth. Although this is likely to be true for most children, when the concept of "emotional regulation" is conceptually unpacked, it becomes more apparent how conditions of risk can make the psychosocial outcomes of emotional regulatory strategies less certain. One of us (Thompson, 1994; Thompson et al., 1995) has proposed the following definition of emotional regulation: Emotion regulation consists of the extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially their intensive and temporal features, to accomplish one's goals. (Thompson, 1994, pp. 27-28) There are several features of this definition that require elaboration. According to this portrayal, emotional regulation includes both intrinsic and extrinsic influences — that is, emotions are not only self-regulated, but they are also managed by others. The latter is most apparent early in life, when caregivers devote considerable energy to regulating the emotions of offspring by comforting distress, inducing positive feelings, managing emotional demands upon children, altering children's emotionally relevant constructions of events (such as through social referencing), and later by direct instruction about the need for emotional self-management, and how to do it (cf. Thompson, 1990, 1991). Moreover, emotions are influenced throughout life by others who provide sympathetic support, induce guilt, use humor in difficult circumstances, alter emotion-relevant appraisals through advice, counseling, and other means, and otherwise manage emotional arousal, especially in the context of close relationships. The importance of the extrinsic management of emotional life is particularly apparent when people seek the assistance and support of others in emotionally arousing circumstances, whether this is seen in the securebase behavior of young infants in stressful circumstances or the social support provided by friends and relatives during a divorce or death of a family member. Because emotions are both self-regulated and managed by others, however, these influences may not always be in synchrony. At times, for example, caregivers may (sometimes inadvertently) seek to alter a child's emotional experience or appraisals in ways that are inconsistent with the child's own emotional appraisals or goals. They may also impose emotional demands on offspring that require management in ways that are beyond the developmental capacities of children or that leave offspring vulnerable to other kinds of psychosocial dysfunction. Another feature of this definition is that emotional regulation is portrayed functionally — that is, in terms of the person's goals for a particular situation. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of emotional regulation except with relation to its functional ends; different strategies of emotional regulation may be used in different (or the same) circumstances to accomplish various goals. Implicit in this portrayal of emotional regulation is that emotions are managed for many reasons. These may include striving to maintain a positive disposition in oneself or another, but strategies of emotional regulation may also be enlisted for self-defense (such as when children enhance their anger and manage fear to stand up to a bully), maintaining good relations (such as when children control feelings of anger in aggressive or humiliating encounters to foster cordiality with an older child or an adult), obtaining assistance and support (such as when distress is enhanced in the company of nurturant companions), strengthening self-esteem (such as when negative emotions are controlled in the presence of respected individuals), or for other reasons. As these examples suggest, emotional regulation may entail managing the expression of emotion (commonly studied in terms of children's knowledge of the display rules of emotion; see Saarni, 1989) as well as underlying feelings. Often these alternative targets are not easily distinguished. Children and adults may, for example, seek to manage the expression of anger, fear, or distress to regulate their underlying feelings. The multiplicity of possible goals to be accomplished in any situation requiring the management of emotion makes the process of emotional regulation potentially quite complex. It is important to recognize, furthermore, that many circumstances entail more than one goal in the management of emotion, and these goals may impose inconsistent demands on regulatory skills. A child who has been threatened by a playmate, for example, may experience conflict between managing emotion to enlist the assistance of others (by freely expressing fear and distress and even enhancing their expression), defend oneself (by controlling fear and enhancing feelings of anger and indignation), avoid aggression (by controlling feelings of anger and distress), or to achieve other aims. Likewise, a child who has been wronged by another may experience conflict between regulating emotion to restore amicability (by controlling feelings of anger), ensure justice (by enhancing anger expressions), obtain support (by expressing distress and managing feelings of anger), or to accomplish other goals. The implicit choices among these goals depends on the child, the situation, the child's relationship with the target of their arousal, and the goals and values of others (especially socialization agents). Furthermore, each of these immediate goals has long-term consequences; thus there may be further dissonance between the emotional management strategies entailed in accomplishing various short-term and long-term goals (such as avoiding further threats or harm). A third feature of this definition is that emotional regulation includes monitoring and evaluating emotional experience as well as modifying it. In this sense, the appraisal of one's emotional state, and reactions to this appraisal, constitute part of the process of emotional regulation. Although we know little about how children perceive the cues of visceral arousal (e.g., escalating heart rate, increased blood pressure, perspiration, shortness of breath) and the cognitive states (e.g., confusion, biased information processing) that accompany emotional arousal, it is probably safe to conclude that experiences of emotional arousal are highly salient to children. But is also clear that children vary in the relative salience of their emotional arousal. Temperamentally inhibited infants and young children, for example, may engage in fairly persistent and systematic emotional self-appraisals because of their low thresholds for arousal, which may not be true of children who are temperamentally uninhibited. Children in conditions of risk may also become acutely self-monitoring, especially when the cues associated with their own emotional arousal have become conditioned to other events that are meaningful to them because these events are aversive, threatening, or overwhelming, such when children are victims of abuse, regularly witness extreme marital conflict, or must assist a depressed or chronically anxious parent. In these circumstances, processes of emotional regulation are likely to be focused on the appraisal of one's emotional condition and the internal and external cues anticipating emotional arousal because of their importance to the management of negative arousal. Additional elements of emotional self-control are likely to be devoted to appraising and monitoring the emotional conditions of others, especially as they have significant implications for one's own wellbeing. Indeed, appraising another's emotional state may be essential to emotional self-regulation if children learn that one of the best ways of altering their own unpleasant emotional experiences is to alter another's emotions, whether this requires comforting a distressed parent, averting anger in an adult, or modulating the stimulation provided by a demanding or overintrusive caregiver. A fourth aspect of this definition of emotional regulation is that managing emotion may entail maintaining or heightening emotional arousal as well as inhibiting it (see also Masters, 1991). Although we most commonly consider emotional regulation in the context of dampening experiences of negative arousal, it is also true that individuals sometimes act to heighten their negative feelings, such as when children "feel sorry for themselves" by ruminating on their sadness, or intensify their feelings of anger to confront a bullying peer or an indignant parent (cf. Miller & Sperry, 1987). Of course, strategies of emotional management are also enlisted to maintain and heighten experiences of positive arousal, such as during parties and other group activities or (for adults) in sexual relations. An important consideration in studying at-risk developing populations, however, is how (intrinsic or extrinsic) strategies of emotional management may contribute to heightening negative arousal in children when the consequences of doing so are aversive rather than desirable for the child. That is, in conditions of environmental risk, or owing to temperamental vulnerability, emotions may become regulated in ways that leave children with persistent feelings of sadness, anger, or anxiety. Finally, this definition of emotional regulation emphasizes not only strategies for managing the discrete emotion that is aroused by circumstances, but also its temporal and intensive characteristics. Indeed, strategies to diminish (or accentuate) the intensity of an experienced emotion, slow (or accelerate) its speed of onset or recovery, limit (or enhance) its persistence over time, reduce (or increase) emotional range or lability, or influence other qualitative characteristics of emotion are likely to be used far more commonly, and with greater efficacy, than are strategies to alter the discrete emotion itself (such as by changing anger to sadness or happiness). Furthermore, altering the intensity or temporal course of an emotional response may better accomplish the functional goals of emotional regulation than managing the discrete emotional tone, whether this involves strategies for suppressing the intensity of fear experienced in novel or challenging situations, reducing the persistence of feelings of anxiety in academic settings, or slowing the rise time of anger in response to peer provocations that may be misinterpreted. As a consequence, studies of emotional regulation — especially concerning atypical populations — should wisely focus on the quality of emotion as well as its valence and tone. It is important to note that this portrayal of emotional regulation does not make a sharp distinction between strategies that are enlisted to manage the underlying subjective experience of emotional arousal, and strategies that are used to alter one's display of emotion to others, as earlier noted. The reason is that the difference between regulating emotion and its display is not always so clear. As self-perception theory argues, individuals sometimes manage their feelings by acting in a discordant manner, such as behaving casually during fearful events. Conversely, acting consistently with cultural rules for emotional displays requires, at times, managing underlying arousal, such as during funerals or other formal gatherings. These connections between feelings and their expression argue against a strong distinction between skills of emotional management and the ability to regulate emotional displays. Many times, especially for children, they are closely related. This definition provides a fairly complex portrayal of a phenomenon that initially seems simple and straightforward. But its complexity suggests that in many situations, the process of emotional regulation is neither easy nor necessarily straightforward. Particularly in conditions of risk for developing psychopathology, children may encounter circumstances in which different but meaningful goals for regulating emotion compel different behavioral strategies (such as intervening vs. fleeing witnessed episodes of domestic violence), or in which their goals for managing emotion are different from the emotional demands imposed by caregivers (such as what the offspring of a depressed, guilt-inducing parent may experience). They may also encounter circumstances in which the outcome of appraising and monitoring one's own ambient emotional state, or another's emotions, creates anxiety or distress (such as what the son or daughter of an alcoholic parent may experience) or situations in which one's personal threshold of arousal makes it especially difficult to regulate emotion (as may occur for children who are temperamentally inhibited). These suggest ways that processes of emotional regulation can enhance resiliency and also vulnerability, sometimes at the same time. Fostering Resiliency and Vulnerability The research literature in the field of developmental psychopathology includes many examples of how children at risk acquire strategies for managing their emotions, or their emotional display, in ways that protect them from many challenges in their constitutional or environmental circumstances, but leave them vulnerable to other risks. Like classic portrayals of defensive processes within psychoanalytic theory, they purchase relief from certain psychosocial demands, but often at a cost. In this section, we profile two conditions of environmental risk—when children are in the care of a depressed mother, and when children witness or are victims of domestic violence—and one of constitutional risk — when children show a particular temperamental vulnerability. Offspring of depressed mothers Consider what it is like to grow up with a parent who is depressed, or has a bipolar disorder (see Garber, Braafladt, & Zeman, 1991; Radke-Yarrow, Belmont, Notelmann, & Bottomly, 1990; Susman, Trickett, lannotti, Hollenbeck, & Zahn-Waxler, 1985; Zahn-Waxler, Cole, & Barrett, 1991; Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). A depressed mother presents her offspring with compelling emotional demands and forceful messages affecting children's interpretations of those demands. Children of depressed caregivers encounter a mother who manifests a great deal of sad emotion, together with irritability, helplessness, and guilt displayed in her interactions with her offspring (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1991). Depression is also often accompanied by marital conflict in the home, which exacerbates the emotional demands on offspring (Downey & Coyne, 1990). In the context of this emotional climate, moreover, depressed caregivers act in ways that enhance children's sense of guilt and responsibility for the adult's depression (see Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). Depressed adults commonly use their offspring as sounding boards for their own despair and negative feelings, which they sometimes blame on the children themselves. Depressed parents have high expectations for the behavior of offspring, they can be demanding and critical, and they often induce guilt through the use of love withdrawal and other techniques (Susman et al., 1985). In addition to these demands, children are exposed to compelling models of a negative attributional strategy: one that mingles perceptions of personal responsibility with feelings of personal helplessness (cf. Garber et al., 1991). Children are likely to internalize these messages, and this may contribute to their becoming caught up in their parents' emotional struggles and experiencing undue responsibility for their parents' emotional problems. Even in infancy, the children of depressed mothers may become insecurely attached and show other signs of psychosocial dysfunction (Radke-Yarrow, Cummings, Kuczynski, & Chapman, 1985; ZahnWaxler, Cummings, Iannotti, & RadkeYarrow, 1984). How do young children learn to manage their own emotion in caregiving circumstances such as these? The evidence paints a dismal picture of deficits in emotional regulation. The school-aged offspring of depressed mothers tend to be less effective in managing their emotions than are the offspring of nondepressed mothers, and they also tend to lack confidence in their ability to regulate their arousal (Garber et al., 1991). When they can think of strategies for managing emotion, these strategies often consist of avoidance or negative behaviors (like aggression) that may have unexpectedly unfortunate consequences for the child, rather than more constructive, problem-focused strategies. This suggests that the helplessness that often accompanies depression in adults is mirrored in the limited confidence of offspring in their own capacities to manage their feelings (Garber et al., 1991). Offspring may thus themselves become preoccupied with negative emotion, and they are susceptible to depressive disorders (Cole & Kaslow, 1988; Cummings & Cicchetti, 1990; Miller, Birnbaum, & Durbin, 1990). The problem is not that the offspring of depressed mothers do not try to cope with the emotional demands of their caregivers, but rather that their capacities to do so are impaired, in part, by conflicting and inconsistent goals and strategies for emotional self-regulation. For these children, efforts to manage emotion may be oriented toward accomplishing any of several outcomes: maintaining a stable feeling of wellbeing, avoiding further critical reactions or rejection from the parent, defending oneself against unfair accusations or unreasonable expectations, anticipating the next difficult encounter with the parent, or perhaps also trying to manage the parent's emotional state to protect his or her own. These goals can lead the child in inconsistent directions. Avoiding a depressed parent may be helpful for preserving feelings of personal wellbeing, for example, but may accomplish little for self-defense and does nothing to improve the parent's ongoing emotional condition. In fact, it may exacerbate the parent's distress or animosity. Alternatively, angrily confronting a sad but hostile parent may help to safeguard selfesteem but foster an angrier home environment and, thus, contribute to personal feelings of guilt and responsibility for the parent's emotional condition. Consequently, these children often seem caught in a complex web of taxing emotional demands and inconsistent goals for emotional selfregulation for which there are no optimal strategies for managing their feelings. There is some evidence that in such circumstances, the offspring of depressed parents become hypervigilant to cues from the parent of impending distress or conflict (Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). A heightened sensitivity to the parent's ongoing emotional state can be protective as it enables the child to anticipate and prepare for difficult encounters with the caregiver or between parents in the home. As we shall see, hypervigilance is a regulatory strategy observed in children who experience other kinds of domestic difficulty. However, hypervigilance can exact an emotional cost, particularly as it sensitizes the child to negative affect, and it may foster an overreaction to conflict when it actually occurs. More significantly, there is also evidence that the young offspring of depressed mothers show enhanced capacities for empathy as they try to provide helpful assistance to their mothers, and they are commonly observed intervening prosocially and with problem-solving initiatives when their mothers are expressing distressed emotion (Garber et al., 1991; Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). In a sense, their goal is to provide helpful assistance to their caregivers to relieve the adult's depressed affect and, thus, reduce their own stress. Furthermore, this style of interaction also generalizes to other social partners. In one study, the young offspring of depressed mothers treated playmates with greater politeness and appeasement and showed less negative emotion, compared to a group of children of nondepressed mothers (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1984; ZahnWaxler & Kochanska, 1990). As summarized by these researchers, children who had grown up with a depressed parent had "learned to treat others carefully" (Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska,