Children’s perceptions of the effectiveness of strategies for regulating anger and sadness

Children may be capable of understanding the value of emotion regulation strategies before they can enlist these strategies in emotionevoking situations. This study was designed to extend understanding of children’s judgment of the efficacy of alternative emotion regulation strategies. Children aged six and nine (N 1⁄4 97) were presented with illustrated storyboards of angerand sadness-evoking situations and rated the effectiveness of eight emotion regulation strategies. Children endorsed some strategies on an emotion-specific basis: they rated problem-solving as more effective for anger, and seeking adult support and venting emotion as more effective for sadness. Younger children rated cognitively sophisticated emotion regulatory strategies comparably to older children, but they endorsed relatively ineffective strategies as more effective. Early evidence of gender differences was also apparent as girls reported emotion-focused strategies as more effective than boys did. These findings contribute to understanding children’s nuanced estimates of the value of alternative strategies of emotion regulation based on emotion context, age, and gender.