Indirect Effects of Cognitive Self-Regulation on the Relation between Emotion Knowledge and Emotionality.

Between three and five years of age, both emotional competence (EC) and cognitive self-regulation (CSR) have been documented as undergoing remarkable growth and as being strong predictors of concurrent and future positive outcomes. EC encompasses three interrelated and progressively developing skills: emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and emotional expression and experience (i.e. emotionality). Whereas associations between CSR and emotion regulation are often documented, the current study explored whether CSR exerted a significant indirect effect in the emotion knowledge-emotionality relation. Path analysis results supported our hypotheses that emotion knowledge was associated with more positive emotionality and that CSR had a significant indirect effect between these facets of EC. This study is one of the first to examine CSR as a conduit for EC development in young children, further bridging the divide in understanding the emotion-cognition relation and how it is translated into what one experiences and expresses.