engleski

Emotion regulation strategies and subjective well- being: gender differences in flexibility

Successful emotion regulation is important for various aspects of children’s well-being. In middle childhood, children are starting to rely on different cognitive strategies to regulate their own emotions. n the most studied regulatory strategies are cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression which show different patterns of association with the subjective wellbeing of both children and adults. Although cognitive reappraisal is considered to be an adaptive strategy, and expressive suppression non- adaptive, recent research indicates the importance of studying the flexibility of using these strategies, i.e., their interaction. It has been shown that expressive suppression is not always a detrimental strategy for boys if it is used in combination with high cognitive reappraisal. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression and their interactions in predicting the subjective well-being of girls and boys in middle childhood. The study involved 165 children (44.8% girls, Mage = 10.19, SD = 0.87) from Osijek and Varaždin in Croatia. Participants completed an emotion regulation questionnaire and two measures of subjective well-being (global life satisfaction measure and satisfaction with life domains). Boys were more likely than girls to use expressive suppression (F (1, 163) = 4.156, p = .043, η2=0.025) in order to regulate their own emotions. Moderation hypotheses were tested by using hierarchical linear regression with age as a covariate. For boys only, it was shown that cognitive reappraisal moderates the effects of expressive suppression on both global life satisfaction (F(1, 86)interaction = 3.91, p=.0512, ΔR2=.04), and satisfaction with life domains (F(1, 86)interaction=6.38, p = .0134, ΔR2 = .06). Frequent usage of cognitive reappraisal decreases the negative link between expressive suppression and the two indicators of subjective wellbeing. For girls, the interaction of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression has not been demonstrated, but expressive suppression has been shown to be the only significant predictor of global life satisfaction measure (F(1, 71)change_suppression= 11.683, p = .001, ΔR2 = .13) and satisfaction with life domains (F(1, 71)change_suppression= 5.756, p = .019, ΔR2 = .07). Results are consistent with other research on adolescents and adults in different cultures and are interpreted in terms of gender socialization differences.

emotion regulation ; cognitive reappraisal ; expressive suppression ; subjective well-being ; middle childhood

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