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Effects of age, gender, and peer social status on children's understanding of the regulation of positive and negative emotions were investigated. Participants (second-, forth-, and sixth-graders) completed a Social Emotions Questionnaire (SEQ) and responded to sociometric items. The SEQ has six vignettes describing emotionprovoking classroom situations: happiness, pride, sadness, disappointment, embarrassment, and anger. Results showed that, as predicted, children reported that they would less openly express negative emotions. Children's views of peer reactions to emotional expressions depended on the type of emotion and the particular form of expression. Across emotions and forms of expression, girls anticipated more negative reactions from peers than boys, and rejected children expected more negative peer consequences than average or popular children.
Children who have successful relationships with peers likely make skillful choices about how and when to express emotion. Saarni (1989) has characterized this ability to manage expressive behavior as "shrewd finesse" (p. 204). Gottman and Mettetal (1986) theorized that emotion regulation sustains social interaction among children. Based on a number of observational studies of children's conversations, they noted that young children tend to respond to emotional arousal by leaving the interaction, children in the middle childhood age range tend to contain emotional arousal by constructing rules for social interactions, and, finally, in adolescence, children become able to use their powers of reason and expression to be more open about their emotional experiences.
The primary purpose of this investigation was to explore the relation between peer sociometric status and children's cognitions about the regulation of positive and negative emotions. For children in the age range of middle childhood, this research examined age, gender, and peer status differences in anticipated reactions of peers to particular types of emotional expression.
Developmental and clinical psychologists are only beginning to conduct empirical research to address the complexity of affective regulation and its relation to peer social status (Hubbard & Cole, 1994). As one example, much research on anger has been focused on aggressive behavior (Lemerise & Dodge, 1993), defined rather narrowly as hitting or starting fights (e.g., Dodge, 1986). We now know that aggression and social rejection are moderately related (Coie, Belding, & Underwood, 1988). However, we know little about the relationship between positive peer relations and other more subtle types of...