Abstract

This experiment studied 4-year-old children's regulation of the internal negative emotion as a functional perspective, which considers emotional regulation as adapting to a given situation, through a behavioral measure and self-ratings. The subjects were 73 preschool children between the ages of 4-year-old and 5-year-old. Before the experiment, the subjects had been trained to rate their emotional state using the Self-Rating-Scale(SRS) 2 or 3 time a day for 1 weeks by their teachers. When they participated in experiment, at first they practiced a dependence measure, attention task. Randomly, half of the subjects were induced negative emotion, and the others neutral emotion using 6-minute films. Instructions were used in the experiment, which was intended either to keep induced emotional state(fixation) or to open to manage their emotional state to fit themselves to the situation(non-fixation). All of the subjects were individually administered attention task scanned on a computer monitor to measure reaction time. The subjects rated their emotional state after emotional inducing(pre-rating) and after performing the attention task(post-rating). The results were analyzed by planned contrasts made two groups at a time among the conditions of 2(emotional states)×2(instructions). Dependence variables were the reaction time of attention task and post-rated emotional scale values. The results supported the main idea of this study. Therefore, 4-year-old preschoolers could spontaneously regulate their emotional state in order to adapt themselves to the given situation.