ABSTRACT
Broadly speaking, self-regulation has been de ned as “the many processes by which the human psyche exercises control over its functions, states, and inner processes” (Vohs & Baumeister, 2004, p. 1). Thus, one of the core developmental tasks facing children (and their socialization agents) is to learn how to manage behavior, thoughts, and emotions in adaptive ways that lead to positive outcomes. Given the broad, encompassing nature of this term, there is a wide diversity of skills and capacities involved in the development of self-regulatory behavior. The goal of this chapter is to summarize research that examines the development of children’s and adolescents’ emerging skills in emotional self-regulation from the lens of functionalist theory. A developmental psychopathology (DP) framework is used to interpret research examining parental and peer socialization in uences on children’s emotional self-regulation skills with an emphasis on how socialization processes direct development towards normative or atypical trajectories of emotion self-regulatory processes. Finally, given the general dearth of empirical attention paid to studying emotion processes in middle childhood and adolescence (Klimes-Dougan & Zeman, 2007), this chapter focuses solely on these developmental periods because this is an age period in which there is dramatic growth in children’s ability to self-regulate their emotions in an intentional, planful way. In addition, the evolving nature and impact of social relationships during these developmental periods raises intriguing questions concerning the impact of parents and peers on youths’ emotion processes and the outcomes associated with these in uences.
