About This Project

A major developmental challenge for children and adolescents is to master their regulation of emotional expression: suppressing, amplifying, and/or substituting emotional displays as required by social demands. Extensive research has documented emotion regulation aimed at minimizing personal pain and maximizing pleasure, but has less often acknowledged that expressions of emotion must also be regulated in the service of interpersonal goals.

 

This project addresses key shortfalls in research about youth’s emotion expression regulation and its links with social relationships, particularly in terms of face-to-face interactions with peers. A combination of longitudinal and experimental methods, utilizing self-report and objective measures, investigates developmental, relational, and cognitive processes that hinder or promote children’s use of different strategies to regulate emotion expressions.

 

This project is funded through the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.