Abstract
Children exposed to violence and abuse have been found to exhibit emotional problems such as high emotional reactivity, which is indicative of maladaptive emotional regulation processes. Young children with dysregulated emotions have exhibited emotional and behavioral problems that can lead to more severe problems and psychopathology in later childhood. The present study evaluated emotional reactivity and emotional regulation among 186 maltreated children as compared to 33 non-maltreated children. Consistent with study hypotheses, child emotional reactivity as rated by caregivers was significantly negatively related to observed emotion regulation during caregiver-child interaction. Contrary to expectations, however, non-maltreated children showed a sharper decline in emotion regulation than maltreated children in response to increasingly aversive play situations with their caregivers, which may be due to lower baseline levels of regulation in the maltreated group. Study results suggest that examining emotion regulatory processes during dyadic interaction in a maltreated population is useful for developing a fuller understanding of the construct in a relationship context.