When a particular event or situation has high personal significance and deserves our attention, the role of emotion is to interrupt our on-going activity to prepare us for action (Frijda, 1986a). Yet we cannot afford to be constantly interrupted and therefore, emotions need to be appropriately managed according to the particular context in which they arise (Johnstone & Walter, 2014). This is particularly true of classroom contexts where emotion regulation is required to minimise emotional reactivity that may disrupt learning.
Early signs of emotion-regulation can be seen in the first weeks of life. New-borns are able to reduce levels of stimulation by turning away from the source, closing their eyes and engaging in self-soothing activities such as thumb-sucking (Kopp,
1989). Early parental relationships are strongly associated with the development of emotion regulation. The new infant requires a stimulating environment that changes in response to the infant’s moods and interests. An important aspect of the nurturing relationship is that new stimuli are presented in a way that is gradual, nurturing, predictable, repetitive, and attuned to the child’s development stage (B. Perry & Pollard, 1998). This includes sensitive handling by the caregiver, responsive eye-gaze and talking to the infant. Since young infants have not yet developed the capacity to regulate their own arousal and impulses, they require help from a sensitive caregiver to co-regulate emotional reactivity and behavioural response to distress; to help deal with frustration; to direct and focus attention; and to restore a calm emotional state, free of anxiety (Glaser, 2000). In this way, the securely attached infant-mother relationship can be described as a bio-behavioural system that acts as a protector or buffer to the body’s emotional response system (Gunnar, 1998) and from these early social experiences, emerges the adult ability to develop adaptive regulatory strategies to cope with negatively challenging events (Sroufe, 1996).
The emotions experienced when children interact with their environment can activate physiological arousal (Levenson, 2003). A key system associated with emotional arousal is the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The ANS may be regarded as the system of periphery neurons that lie outside of the central nervous system (Kuntz, 1936). This system retains a synaptic relationship to the brain stem and spinal chord axons of the central nervous system but is an outlying regulatory system that as suggested by its name, acts relatively unconsciously. The ANS is subdivided into an excitatory sympathetic nervous system and an inhibitory parasympathetic nervous system (Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 2009). Both originate in the brainstem and influence the regulation of organs such as the heart, lungs and kidneys as well as blood vessels and sweat glands. The ease with which individuals are able to transition between high and low states of arousal relies on the flexibility of the ANS to regulate these two systems according to situational demands. Emotion regulation is critically dependant on the individual’s ability to adjust these physiological systems (Gross, 1998b).
2.4.1 Impact of stress on development of emotion regulation
When the individual is threatened, the stress response of the ANS triggers the release of several so called ‘fight or flight’ hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which are important for meeting the energy demands associated with a threatening event and include vigilance to stress and preparation to deploy defensive responses (Cannon, 1929). Short-term cortisol release in response to threat serves an adaptive function, but chronically elevated cortisol levels are found to have a negative effect on health, as well as social outcomes (Tarullo & Gunnar, 2006). In threatening environments laden with distress and conflict, children learn to maintain vigilance to threat and as a result are constantly exposed to high levels of emotional arousal. Sustained exposure to on-going, potent sources of distress such as deprivation, neglect or parental conflict, may result in the development of prolonged alertness or hyper-vigilance to emotion- eliciting events, altering the biological stress response and eventually producing deficits in a child’s ability to effectively regulate their emotions (Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007). While the early years present considerable opportunities for rapid growth and development, they are also the periods of greatest vulnerability to stress.
Healthy development of the systems controlling emotional reactivity and regulatory systems is hampered by factors of socio-emotional deprivation. Numerous studies show that adversity, neglect or maltreatment in the early years leads to psychological problems later in life (for review, see Kim & Cicchetti, 2010). Potential threats or sustained exposure to negative environmental influences of distress (such as marital conflict, domestic violence, economic uncertainty, premature birth, maternal depression or parental unavailability) appear to alter the stress response system and lead to deficits in the child’s capacity to autonomously regulate their emotions (Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007). Whilst early established patterns of emotion regulation may be adaptive within the family or parental relationship (e.g. avoiding rejection, or gaining attention from an unavailable caregiver) they can become maladaptive in normative environments (i.e. when the child is at school), increasing vulnerability for negative behavioural, emotional and social consequences (Cassidy, 1994). The
resulting behavioural tendencies that arise from early experience and manifest themselves in the classroom are of central concern to the present study and as such, deficits in emotion regulation and their association with specific emotion and behavioural difficulties will be discussed in more depth, later in this chapter.