Occupational Therapy
and Emotional Regulation

What is it?

Emotional regulation refers to “The ability to manage your own energy states, emotions, behaviours and attention, in ways that are socially acceptable and help achieve positive goals, such as maintaining good relationships, learning and maintaining wellbeing” (Shanker, 2010). For children, this looks like the ability to identify different emotions, what they mean, and choosing and utilising a meaningful response to communicate them. Development of “Emotional regulation skills take time to learn. It begins from birth and continues into adulthood” (Florez, 2011).

Emotional regulation is our own experience of emotions, how we understand them, and what we do to support ourselves to respond to them in a healthy way. When we can emotionally regulate, we can identify what we are feeling, and act on this feeling in a way that can make ourselves feel safe and secure. Self regulation is about making a dramatic difference in mood, concentration, and the ability to make friends, feel empathy, and develop the higher values and virtues that are vital to a child’s long term wellbeing.

What does emotional dysregulation look like?

Emotional dysregulation is a reaction or expression of an emotion that feels unsafe or unhealthy, to us and to others. These behaviours are expressions of a child’s inability in the moment to respond to everything going on in and around them – sounds, noise, distractions, discomforts, emotions.

Unsafe or unhealthy reactions can result from feeling overwhelmed, feeling scared of, unsure of, or confused by big emotions. Triggers to overwhelming emotions can be different for everyone and may be big or small. What can be difficult for some children, is finding the right or most appropriate response to different intensities of triggers.

Emotional Regulation and Relationships

Understanding our emotions is also key to participating in healthy relationships and social interactions, especially for children.  As our emotional awareness and intelligence develops, we can better understand other’s emotions, and respond in a healthy way to support others. This supports the development of healthy friendships and relationships throughout our lifetimes. “…emotion regulation has been hypothesized to affect children’s social relationships … This ability can be thought of as a core aspect of good social skills as children must know when to appropriately engage with others (i.e., talk to or play with them) and when to disengage with them …This constant shift in communication and behavioural engagement and disengagement during social interactions may be easier for children who are able to regulate their emotions. Not surprisingly children who appropriately regulate emotions have been found to display greater social competence, better social skills…” (Graziano et al., 2007).

Emotional regulation and school learning

 Emotional regulation is also an important skill that supports children’s school learning. Blair (2002) suggests that inefficient emotion regulation physiologically inhibits a child’s use of higher order cognitive processes (e.g., working memory, attention, and planning) in the classroom. The most frequent aspects of the cognitive domain that we see children and adolescents struggle with are:

• Attentiveness
• Ignoring distractions
• Delaying gratification
• Combining ideas
• Sequencing ideas
• Tolerating frustration
• Learning from mistakes
• Switching focus
• Seeing the relationship between cause and effect
• Thinking in abstract terms

It seems ‘common sense’ when you encounter any of these problems, to think that you should be focusing on that specific issue. Say for example a child has difficulty paying attention: It is tempting to think that they need exercises to strengthen this capacity. Occupational Therapists help to reframe by asking – what are the underlying factors? What can I do to strengthen physical and sensory demands of this task?