The goal of this project is to identify neurophysiological markers for child emotion regulation. In other words, we are testing whether measures of brain activity reflecting emotional and cognitive processes can help us predict how children actually behave and cope during emotional challenges.

Parents and teachers certainly have first-hand knowledge that children are wonderfully emotional and that emotions can both facilitate and compromise learning and attention. In turn, being able to control attention and behavior increases a child’s ability to effectively control emotions. This interplay between emotion and cognition provides the foundation for child emotion regulation, the ability to effectively adjust behavior and emotions in order to cope with emotional challenges.

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in identifying endophenotypes of emotion regulation, or mechanisms along the pathway from genes to behavior. Emotion regulation is closely linked to individual differences in cognitive control and affective style. Yet, two issues prevent the field from advancing towards a systematic model of these links and its implications for adjustment. First, it remains unclear how best to measure cognitive control and affective style and to conceptually distinguish them from emotion regulation. Second, there are few studies that directly test how specific interactions between cognitive control and affective style predict clinically-relevant measures of emotion regulation. For example, cognitive control may predict the regulation of frustration or disappointment differently for children varying in approach and avoidance affective style.

Our approach to these challenges is to identify neurological markers for cognitive control and affective style, study their interplay, and examine whether they are related to observed emotion regulation. Of particular interest are event related brain potentials (ERPs) that reflect cognitive control capacities, such as the inhibitory N2, error-related negativity (Ne), and error-related positivity (Pe). During emotional tasks, these components may reflect cognitive control in the service of emotion regulation. We will examine whether relations between these ERP components and emotion regulation vary depending on individual differences in affective style as measured by EEG asymmetries.

We are also examining whether ERPs related to emotional processing are associated with the use of specific emotion regulation strategies, such as reappraisal and suppression. Often, emotion regulatory processes must be inferred because they are difficult to observe. ERPs that measure changes in emotional processing linked to regulatory strategies may provide a powerful marker for effective emotion regulation.

This project is being conducted in collaboration with Greg Hajcak at the Psychology Department of SUNY Stonybrook.

This research is supported by NIH grant 1K01MH75764-01A1.