Emotion Regulation Characteristics Development in Iranian Primary School Pupils

Objectives: Emotion regulations refer to the ability of experiencing emotions as a basic human capacity and the experience of the basic emotions happiness, anger, sadness and fear are considered as reular characteristics among nations. In school-age children, problems in socioemotional development typically shows themselves as challenging, socially disruptive paterns of behavior. The purpose of the present study was to understand Emotion Regulation characteristics in Iranian primary school pupils and whether Iranian children enable to identify common emotions. Methods: Participants included 900 children, 9 to 10 years, from elementary schools from 21 provinces in Iran. In pilot work we presented 200 children with four hypothetical vignettes of the kind typically used in display rule research. In the main study children’s knowledge regarding hiding their emotions was assessed through a structured interview. The participants were presented with the interview questions after the vignettes. The answers were coded by two people and the interrater reliability was high. The children were assessed on the basis of four common emotions:Happiness, Anger,Fear,and, Sadness. Results: The analysis of the data indicated that: 1) all children were enabled to identify and differentiate all four emotions from each other, most of students hide their happiness, anger, fear and sadness, they hide their emotions in specific situation such as school and home, hide happiness and anger against peers and hide fear and sadness in front of adults. Discussion: The study indicates that Iranian children not only differ from other culture peers in the amount of display rule use in daily life, but also in the situations they report using it and their motives for doing so they suppress their overall emotions more frequently, especially in presence of family and for pro-social and self-protective reasons. These findings provides the basic knowledge about Iranian children emotional expression development which can be used in cultural, educational and therapeutic contexts.