Emotion regulatory processes in evoked play narratives

: Evoked play narratives have been demonstrated to provide a novel window towards internal emotion regulation and mental representations. The present study evaluates covariations between emotion themes and mother-child interaction, as well as child behavior problems. An exploratory study in non-referred children in the 3-6 age span utilizing the MacArthur-method was conducted by taking emotional, conflictive and moral themes as indices of emotion-regulatory processes. Emotion themes were linked to external measures of dyadic Emotional Availability, interparental relationship quality, and behavior problems employing the 4/18 version of the Child Behavior Checklist. Mental representations were aggregated using the Person Representation Coding System. Of a principal components analysis with subsequent varimax-rotation for narrative content codes resulted four emotion theme composites: social conflicting, a prosocial aggregate, an antisocial aggregate, and a composite conflict solving/-understanding. The 4-factor solution displayed meaningful correlation patterns with the mental representations of self and parents, as well as with most of the external measures. Although subsequent studies ought to be methodologically improved both in design and sample size, the results of the present investigation give rise to the assumption that future efforts of validating emotion-regulatory processes with more established outside measures are likely to be successful.