The Development of Cognitive Reappraisal From Early Childhood Through Adolescence: A Systematic Review and Methodological Recommendations

Cognitive reappraisal is an important emotion regulation strategy that shows considerable developmental change in its use and effectiveness. This paper presents a systematic review of the evidence base regarding the development of cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence and provides methodological recommendations for future research. We searched Scopus, PsycINFO, and ERIC for empirical papers measuring cognitive reappraisal in normative samples of children and youth between the ages of 3 and 18 years published in peer-reviewed journals through August 9th, 2018. We identified 118 studies that met our inclusion criteria. We first present a quantitative review of the methodologies used to investigate cognitive reappraisal in children and adolescents, with attention to variations in methodologies by the sample age range. We then present a qualitative review of findings with attention to: (1) the age at which children begin to effectively use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions, and (2) developmental changes in cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence. We consider how methodological differences may contribute to inconsistencies in findings, highlight gaps in the literature that remain to be addressed, and make recommendations for future directions.

As they wait: Anticipatory neural response to evaluative peer feedback varies by pubertal status and social anxiety

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by substantial biological, neural, behavioral, and social changes. Learning to navigate the complex social world requires adaptive skills. Although anticipation of social situations can serve an adaptive function, providing opportunity to adjust behavior, socially anxious individuals may engage in maladaptive anticipatory processing. Importantly, elevated social anxiety often coincides with adolescence. This study investigated cortical electroencephalogram (EEG) responses during anticipation of evaluative feedback in 106 healthy adolescents aged 12–17 years. We examined differences in anticipatory event-related potentials (i.e., stimulus preceding negativity [SPN]) in relation to social anxiety levels and pubertal maturation. As expected, the right frontal SPN was more negative during feedback anticipation, particularly for adolescents with higher social anxiety and adolescents who were at a more advanced pubertal stage. Effects for the left posterior SPN were the opposite of those for the right frontal SPN consistent with a dipole. Anticipatory reactivity in adolescence was related to social anxiety symptom severity, especially in females, and pubertal maturation in a social evaluative situation. This study provides evidence for the development of social anticipatory processes in adolescence and potential mechanisms underlying maladaptive anticipation in social anxiety.

Teaching emotion regulation in schools: Translating research into practice with the RULER approach to social and emotional learning

Emotion regulation skills are critical to young children's school readiness and later academic achievement, as well as educators' efficacy, stress, and job satisfaction. In this article, we demonstrate how the science of emotion regulation can be translated into practical steps for educating teachers and students in schools. We begin with the crucial role of supporting educators in developing their own emotion regulation skills. We also discuss concrete and accessible tools that can be used to support both educators' own skill development and that of their students. We demonstrate how educators can integrate the teaching of emotion regulation through direct instruction, its integration into existing curricula, and daily practices and routines. The examples we provide are part of RULER, an evidence-based, whole school approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) that was developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. RULER is grounded in the theory of emotional intelligence, which emphasizes the critical role of emotion regulation in healthy development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Neurophysiological evidence for distinct biases in emotional face processing associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children

Attentional bias to threat has been implicated in both internalizing and externalizing disorders. This study utilizes event-related potentials to examine early stages of perceptual attention to threatening (angry or fearful) versus neutral faces among a sample of 200 children ages 6-8 years from a low-income, urban community. Although both internalizing and externalizing symptoms were associated with processing biases, the nature of the bias differed between these two symptom domains. Internalizing symptoms were associated with heightened early attentional selection (P1) and later perceptual processing (P2) of fearful faces. In contrast, externalizing symptoms were associated with reduced early attentional selection (P1) of fearful faces and enhanced perceptual processing (P2) of neutral faces, possibly indicative of a hostile interpretation bias for ambiguous social cues. These results provide insight into the distinct cognitive-affective processes that may contribute to the etiology and maintenance of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

The glass is half empty: Negative self-appraisal bias and attenuated neural response to positive self-judgment in adolescence

Substantial changes in cognitive-affective self-referential processing occur during adolescence. We studied the behavioral and ERP correlates of self-evaluation in healthy male and female adolescents aged 12-17 (N = 109). Participants completed assessments of depression symptoms and puberty as well as a self-referential encoding task while 128-channel high-density EEG data were collected. Depression symptom severity was associated with increased endorsement of negative words and longer reaction times. In an extreme group analysis, a negative appraisal-bias subsample (n = 28) displayed decreased frontal P2 amplitudes to both positive and negative word stimuli, reflecting reduced early attentional processing and emotional salience. Compared to the positive appraisal-bias subsample (n = 27), the negative appraisal-bias subsample showed reduced LPP to positive words but not negative words, suggesting attenuated sustained processing of positive self-relevant stimuli. Findings are discussed in terms of neural processes associated with ERPs during negative versus positive self-appraisal bias, and developmental implications.

One-Month Stability of Cyberball Post-Exclusion Ostracism Distress in Adolescents

We examined one-month reliability, internal consistency, and validity of ostracism distress (Need Threat Scale) to simulated social exclusion during Cyberball. Thirty adolescents (13-18 yrs.) completed the Cyberball task, ostracism distress ratings, and measures of related clinical symptoms, repeated over one month. Need Threat Scale ratings of ostracism distress showed adequate test-retest reliability and internal consistency at both occasions. Construct validity was demonstrated via relationships with closely related constructs of anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and emotion dysregulation, and weaker associations with more distal constructs of state paranoia and subclinical psychosis-like experiences. While ratings of ostracism distress and anxiety were significantly attenuated at retest, most participants continued to experience post-Cyberball ostracism distress at one-month follow-up, which indicates that the social exclusion induction of Cyberball persisted despite participants' familiarity with the paradigm. Overall, results suggest that the primary construct of ostracism distress is preserved over repeated administration of Cyberball, with reliability sufficient for usage in longitudinal research. These findings have important implications for translating this laboratory simulation of social distress into developmental and clinical intervention studies.

Emotional eating and instructed food-cue processing in adolescents: An ERP study

We examined the P3 (250-500ms) and Late Positive Potential (LPP; 500-2000ms) event-related potentials (ERPs) to food vs. nonfood cues among adolescents reporting on emotional eating (EE) behavior. Eighty-six adolescents 10-17 years old were tested using an instructed food versus nonfood cue viewing task (imagine food taste) during high-density EEG recording. Self-report data showed that EE increased with age in girls, but not in boys. Both P3 and LPP amplitudes were greater for food vs. nonfood cues (food-cue bias). Exploratory analyses revealed that, during the LPP time period, greater EE was associated with a more positive food-cue bias in the fronto-central region. This heightened fronto-central food-cue bias LPP is in line with a more activated prefrontal attention system. The results suggest that adolescents with higher EE may engage more top-down cognitive resources to regulate their automatic emotional response to food cues, and/or they may exhibit greater reward network activation to food cues than do adolescents with lower EE, even in the absence of an emotional mood induction.

The dynamics of internalizing and externalizing comorbidity across the early school years

High rates of comorbidity are observed between internalizing and externalizing problems, yet the developmental dynamics of comorbid symptom presentations are not yet well understood. This study explored the developmental course of latent profiles of internalizing and externalizing symptoms across kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. The sample consisted of 336 children from an urban, low-income community, selected based on relatively high (61%) or low (39%) aggressive/oppositional behavior problems at school entry (64% male; 70% African American, 20% Hispanic). Teachers reported on children's symptoms in each year. An exploratory latent profile analysis of children's scores on aggression/oppositionality, hyperactivity/inattention, anxiety, and social withdrawal symptom factors revealed four latent symptom profiles: comorbid (48% of the sample in each year), internalizing (19%-23%), externalizing (21%-22%), and well-adjusted (7%-11%). The developmental course of these symptom profiles was examined using a latent transition analysis, which revealed remarkably high continuity in the comorbid symptom profile (89% from one year to the next) and moderately high continuity in both the internalizing and externalizing profiles (80% and 71%, respectively). Internalizing children had a 20% probability of remitting to the well-adjusted profile by the following year, whereas externalizing children had a 25% probability of transitioning to the comorbid profile. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a common vulnerability factor contributes to developmentally stable internalizing-externalizing comorbidity, while also suggesting that some children with externalizing symptoms are at risk for subsequently accumulating internalizing symptoms.

How does reactivity to frustrative non-reward increase risk for externalizing symptoms?

Frustration is a normative affective response with an adaptive value in motivating behavior. However, excessive anger in response to frustration characterizes multiple forms of externalizing psychopathology. How a given trait subserves both normative and pathological behavioral profiles is not entirely clear. One hypothesis is that the magnitude of response to frustration differentiates normative versus maladaptive reactivity. Disproportionate increases in arousal in response to frustration may exceed normal regulatory capacity, thus precipitating aggressive or antisocial responses. Alternatively, pathology may arise when reactivity to frustration interferes with other cognitive systems, impairing the individual's ability to respond to frustration adaptively. In this paper we examine these two hypotheses in a sample of kindergarten children. First we examine whether children with conduct problems (CP; n=105) are differentiated from comparison children (n=135) with regard to magnitude of autonomic reactivity (cardiac and electrodermal) across a task that includes a frustrative non-reward block flanked by two reward blocks. Second we examine whether cognitive processing, as reflected by magnitude of the P3b brain response, is disrupted in the context of frustrative non-reward. Results indicate no differences in skin conductance, but a greater increase in heart rate during the frustration block among children in the CP group. Additionally, the CP group was characterized by a pronounced decrement in P3b amplitude during the frustration condition compared with both reward conditions. No interaction between cardiac and P3b measures was observed, suggesting that each system independently reflects a greater sensitivity to frustration in association with externalizing symptom severity.

Implications of ongoing neural development for the measurement of the error-related negativity in childhood

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been proposed as biomarkers capable of reflecting individual differences in neural processing not necessarily detectable at the behavioral level. However, the role of ERPs in developmental research could be hampered by current methodological approaches to quantification. ERPs are extracted as an average waveform over many trials; however, actual amplitudes would be misrepresented by an average if there was high trial-to-trial variability in signal latency. Low signal temporal consistency is thought to be a characteristic of immature neural systems, although consistency is not routinely measured in ERP research. The present study examined the differential contributions of signal strength and temporal consistency across trials in the error-related negativity (ERN) in 6-year-old children, as well as the developmental changes that occur in these measures. The 234 children were assessed annually in kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade. At all assessments signal strength and temporal consistency were highly correlated with the average ERN amplitude, and were not correlated with each other. Consistent with previous findings, ERN deflections in the averaged waveform increased with age. This was found to be a function of developmental increases in signal temporal consistency, whereas signal strength showed a significant decline across this time period. In addition, average ERN amplitudes showed low-to-moderate stability across the three assessments whereas signal strength was highly stable. In contrast, signal temporal consistency did not evidence rank-order stability across these ages. Signal strength appears to reflect a stable individual trait whereas developmental changes in temporal consistency may be experientially influenced.