What Cognitive Skills Are Associated With Emotion Regulation?
The developing ability of the child to regulate emotion seems to indicate that processes are at work that mature over the first years of life facilitating these developments. A number of workers have speculated about these processes. Among those mentioned are attention and what may be loosely known as executive functions (such as the ability to switch set, to plan, to generate multiple option responses). Rothbart and colleagues have written about the role of attention in regulation of behavior.6,16 They see attention as providing the child with options for response. Infants who are upset, for example, may be able to divert their attention away from stimuli that initiated the distress to other, less aversive events. For many young children, emotion dysregulation is not the result of excessive negative affect, but the result of frustration in not obtaining a desired goalwhether that goal is getting their favorite cereal or playing with their favorite toy. Many instances of emotion dysreg
