Ricerc@Sapienza

Emotion regulation (ER) is a crucial skill in adulthood and its acquisition represents one of the key developmental tasks in early childhood. Literature evidenced also that the ER is an important component in predicting children's social competence as reported by parents and teachers. Peer relations and social interaction abilities are crucial in school-age years to promote the adaptive development of children. In school-age, the management and understanding of their emotions continue to improve further, and it is in this evolutionary phase that children find themselves having to learn to respond and adequately control stimuli that cause stress. Thus, it is important to investigate the role of ER in different social difficulties, and to analyze the participating roles of different components of ER specifically in externalizing and internalizing problems. The aims of the present study are: to analyze the associations between different components of emotion regulation and many difficulties of school-aged children, as reported by parents and teachers; to compare the two descriptions, from parents and teachers, about externalizing and internalizing children's problems; finally to analyze the different components of emotion regulation linked to externalizing and internalizing reported problems. A series of MANCOVA and hierarchical regressions (controlling for gender and age) will be conducted in order to test the hypotheses. Main findings would be reported and discussed in a scientific paper.