Individual Differences in Emotion-Regulation Development

The present chapter examines individual differences in emotionality and emotion regulation from a developmental perspective, considering the dispositional and endogenous characteristics of emotion-related processes and specific emotion regulation behaviors. Individual differences represent psychological, cognitive, and emotional aspects of individuals’ characteristics through the life span, developed from biological (i.e., heritable aspects) and contextual (i.e., non-heritable aspects) factors. Addressing individual differences in thinking, behaving, and experiencing emotions is crucial for studying psychological adjustment because these differences can explain how and why people follow adaptive or maladaptive pathways during their lives. Dispositionally, individual differences in emotion regulation conceive temperamental characteristics of emotionality, particularly negative emotionality tendencies, defined as individual differences in susceptibility to negative emotions (sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, or frustration) and the frequency of negative emotional responses. Another aspect that plays a fundamental role is individuals’ beliefs, conceptualized as self-efficacy beliefs, the ability to be a proactive actor in the context. Self-efficacy in emotion regulation is a complex process of initiating, avoiding, inhibiting, maintaining, or modulating internal feelings and different emotion-related components (i.e., physiological processes, cognition, and behavior), which can influence individuals’ adjustment. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy can mediate and affect the expression and modulation of emotions.