Author(s)

Yi Huang

Corresponding Author

Yi Huang

ABSTRACT

Children always face conflicts, especially emotional conflicts during their development because of their low self-control ability. Learning appropriate methods to deal with different situations and conflicts, which is referred to as emotion regulation, is essential to improve the academic performances and social competence of children. Therefore, this systematic review is interested in how children get emotional support from their teachers, who seem to always play important roles in each students’ life. The review is intended to find some common-used strategies from teachers to help children with emotional regulation, and whether a specific method is more efficient than others. Although there are differences in the age and gender in terms of children's emotional regulation, based on the overall tendency of childhood development, the four categories of emotional regulation strategies are widely used by teachers: distraction, comfort, cognitive reappraisals, and instrumental behaviour. Distraction is to shift the attention from the original stimulus by providing a distracting stimulus; comfort is defined as the physical behavior such as hugging, holding or verbally saying “it’s okay”; cognitive reappraisals refer to the reappraisals of the stressors through the change of thinking perspective; instrumental behavior is the attempt to change the situation or even exclude the possible source of frustration. Moreover, current research has indicated that the socialization of emotional strategies, such as cognitive reframing, is more effective than physical comfort. However, teachers should still pay attention to the cultural difference in emotional regulation and develop a sense of emotional labour to prepare for uncertain situations.

KEYWORDS

emotional conflict, emotional regulation, emotional regulation strategies, teacher support