Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Childhood: Implications for Wellbeing and Academic Success

Interpersonal emotion regulation involves managing emotions within social interactions. As part of this process, children may seek support from their peers to regulate their own emotions (intrinsic emotion regulation) or actively help others regulate their emotions when they notice distress (extrinsic emotion regulation). In this talk, I will first present preliminary findings on children's intrinsic emotion regulation and its relation with wellbeing. Using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified three distinct groups of children based on their social network size (i.e., the number of peers providing them support), the extent of emotional regulation they receive, and their levels of negative emotionality. The results showed that children who experienced moderate negative affect but received high emotional support (strong intrinsic emotion regulation) in the classroom reported lower wellbeing. In a second study, we examined whether children's ability to recognise others' emotions and provide appropriate emotional support (extrinsic emotion regulation) in the classroom could predict academic performance. Initial findings revealed that school connectedness and high extrinsic emotion regulation were positive predictors of academic achievement. Further LPA analyses identified a group of children with low emotional awareness and poor extrinsic emotion regulation, who were significantly less connected to school and had lower academic performance compared to those with higher scores in both areas. Overall, this talk will highlight the importance of fostering interpersonal emotion regulation in the classroom as a means to enhance student wellbeing and academic success.