The role of language in emotion regulation in bilingual children

• Main Author: Kang, Pearllyn
• Other Authors: Qu Li
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67056
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The relation between language and emotion regulation has been explored by many researchers in the past. However, less focus has been put on bilingual children’s emotion regulation and language abilities. Therefore, this study examined bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary and its relation to three aspects of emotion regulation; namely, emotion knowledge, display rule knowledge, and regulation of emotional expression. 77 English-Mandarin bilingual children from Singapore were recruited. Bivariate correlations were run and the results showed that indeed, language abilities were correlated to children’s understanding of emotions. Both English and Mandarin receptive vocabulary were found to be correlated to emotion understanding in Mandarin after controlling for age. Display rule knowledge and regulation of emotional expression were not found to be significantly correlated to language. It is likely that children’s understanding of display rules and ability to regulate emotional expressions develop gradually. Other factors such as culture might have played a role in the results found in this study. Implications and future directions are discussed.