1.  Emotion regulation (ER) is a critical component of children’s
successful development as it signals a wide range of psychosocial
outcomes (see Morris et al., 2007 for a review).
 Child ER abilities develop largely upon cultural and social contexts
(Cole, Martin & Dennis, 2004), thus findings from one specific
culture might not be generalizable to other cultures.
 Compared to numerous studies focusing on western samples, child
ER in the eastern societies has remained understudied.
 Many previous studies only utilized single-assessment method (see
Adrian, Zeman & Veits, 2011 for a review) to reflect child ER,
which might result in losing important information regarding the
liability of each approach (Suveg & Zeman, 2011).
Emotion Regulation and Psychosocial Functioning of Chinese School-age Chileren:
A Person-centered and Multi-informant Approach
Peipei Li1, Mengyu Gao2, & Rachel (Zhuo) Han3,
1Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal Universoty, China
2 Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, USA
 To utilize model-based cluster analysis to identify profiles of child
ER based on information from different informants (mother, teacher
and child) .
 To examine associations between child ER profiles and children’s
psychosocial problems. It was expected that children with more
problematic profiles of ER might present more psychopathological
problems in family and at school.
 As an additional analysis, to explore the agreement/disagreement of
family versus teacher reports on children’s psychosocial adjustment
Participants:
 196 Chinese children (96 boys and 100 girls; Age M=9.14, SD=1.02)
 Their biological parents and head teachers .
Introduction
Purpose
Method
Conclusion & Discussion
Measures:
Emotion Regulation
 Children’s self-reports on Children’s Emotion Management Scales
(CEMS; Zeman et al. 2001).
 Maternal reports on Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields &
Cicchetti, 1997).
 Teacher’s reports on Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields &
Cicchetti, 1997).
Children’s Psychosocial adjustment
 Paternal reports on Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach,
1991).
 Teachers’ reports on Teacher’s Report Form (TRF; Achenbach,
1991).
Analytic Plan:
• Model based cluster analysis
• One-way ANOVA
 Inconsistency among raters exists. Such inconsistency between raters was
meaningful because it helped us confirmed the necessity of employing a
multi-informant and person-centered approach from one aspect. This
disagreement among raters also indicated the context-based nature of ER,
which in turn highlighted the importance of incorporating different raters.
 Most Chinese school-age children from the community sample consistently
displayed good ER strategies across contexts.
 Special attention should be paid to children from these two inconsistent
clusters, as their emotional problems might be only observable in a specific
micro-context (family or school) or it could be that their emotional distress is
overlooked due to the rater’s disagreement.
 All three clustering variables (mother report of ER, teacher report of ER and
child self report of ER) demonstrated statistically significant differences
across the four clusters. These findings helped us confirm the validity of
these four profiles: that individuals of each cluster showed distinct ER
patterns when incorporating the perspectives of their mother, their teacher
and the child per se.
 We found a positive trend in two consistent subgroups (good ER group and
excellent ER group). Specifically, individuals in these two groups were
reported to have relatively fewer psychosocial problems than those in the
inconsistent groups (poor family ER group and poor school ER group). In
contrast, children in the inconsistent subgroups were reported as having more
somatic complaints, thought problems and withdrawn depression as well as
attention problems
*Acknowledgement. ******.
Figure 1 Standard deviations from the overall sample mean of each cluster for all
measures on child emotion regulation from the best fitting model with four-cluster
solution.
Table 1 One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) examining cluster differences on
ER variables, demographic variables and teacher reported children’s emotional and
behavioral problems
DeviationFromSampleMean
SDUnits
Poor Family
ER Group
Good
ER Group
Poor School
ER Group
Excellent
ER Group
Results
Note: M-ERC-ER = Maternal report on Emotion Regulation Checklist, emotion regulation subscale; T-ERC-
ER = Teacher report on Emotion Regulation Checklist, emotion regulation subscale; C-CEMS-Cope = Child
report on Children’s Emotion Management scale, coping subscale.
Cluster results:
The best-fitting model yielded a four-class cluster solution with variable volume
and equal shape (△BIC= 10.26).
 Good ER group (cluster 2; n=115): moderately positive evaluations on
ER competence from all three informants.
 Poor school ER group (cluster 3; n=40): the most negative
evaluations from teachers and moderately positive assessments from
mothers.
 Poor family ER group (cluster 1;n=36): most negatively evaluations by
their mothers, yet slightly above average evaluation based on
teacher’s reports.
 Excellent ER group (cluster 4; n=5): included children who received
the highest scores across all informants
Cluster validation:
 Basic information: the groups did not differ on parental age, child age, or
SES. Gender differences were found among clusters, with more boys
included in cluster 1 and 3.
 Family report: No significant group differences emerged on each subscale in
family reported CBCL.
 School report: significant differences were found among ER clusters on
teacher-reported TRF when compared on the levels of withdrawn depression,
somatic complains, thought problems and attention problems.