The roles of emotion regulation and emotion knowledge for children's academic readiness: Are the links causal?

This chapter discusses emotional competence in two domains (emotion regulation and emotion knowledge) and then considers research findings on whether skills such as children's ability to handle and interpret emotions are causally related to children's academic achievement. Do more emotionally well-regulated preschool and elementary age children have greater opportunities for learning? Conversely, do children who have a more difficult time regulating their anxiety or frustration and who misidentify others' emotions have fewer opportunities to learn? If so, is it due to regulatory and cognitive processes that take place within the child, or to social processes that take place around the child in his or her classroom, or to some combination of both psychobiological and interpersonal processes that make learning more difficult? This chapter explores these questions, examining a number of innovative areas of research in developmental and social psychology and developmental neuroscience that may offer some promising answers. This chapter will also outline ways that prevention and intervention programs targeting children at risk for poor academic, behavioral, and emotional outcomes may provide more conclusive answers to causal questions regarding the links between children's emotional competence and their opportunities to learn. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)