Emotions Project

Emotional Development and Wellbeing in Children and Adolescents

• About the Emotions Project
• The Researchers
• Contact Us
• How to Get Involved
• Useful Resources for Families
• Newsletters
• Key Findings to Date
• Presentations and Publications

About the Emotions Project

The Emotions Project is a research study being conducted by the School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine at Monash University and funded by the Australian Research Council.

The purpose of the project is to find out how children’s emotions are related to their wellbeing. For example, we are interested in how well children understand and control their emotions, and how children’s understanding and control of their emotions relate to both negative feelings like sadness and to positive feeling like happiness. We are also interested in how emotions change as children grow, and how they might be related to family experiences such as parenting.

The Researchers Chief Investigator A/Prof Eleonora Gullone   Co-Investigators Prof Bruce Tonge A/Prof Neville King Dr Sabura Allen Research Fellow Dr Libby Hughes Research Assistant Nerida Robertson

Clockwise from back left: Sean MacDermott, Libby Hughes, Shaun Watson, Nick Richardson, Eleonora Gullone, Nerida Robertson, Neville King

Research Students

• Emily Bariola (Psychology Honours candidate)
  For her thesis Emily is examining how parents’ emotion regulation and emotional expression are related to their children’s emotion regulation.
  
  
• Madeleine Jaffe (Psychology Honours)
  For her thesis Madeleine examined how children’s emotion regulation is related to temperament and their relationship with their parents.
  
  
• Sean MacDermott (PhD candidate)
  For his thesis Sean is examining the effectiveness of two measures of emotion regulation for use with children and adolescents.
  
  
• Mei Quek Van Wyk (Psychology Honours)
  For her thesis Mei examined how children’s proneness to feelings of shame and guilt are related to their self-esteem.
  
  
• Nick Richardson (DPsych candidate)
  For his thesis Nick is examining the way in which children’s emotion regulation may account for relationships between temperament, parenting and internalising behaviours.
  
  
• Shaun Watson (PhD candidate)
  For his thesis Shaun is examining children’s self-conscious emotions (e.g., shame and guilt), including cultural differences in participants with an East-Asian background.

Contact Us

Email: emotions.project.psychology@med.monash.edu.au
Phone: (03) 9905 3149
Fax: (03) 9905 3948

How to Get Involved

We are no longer seeking new participants for the current project. If you would like to register you're interest for future projects please email emotions.project.psychology@med.monash.edu.au.

If you think you or your child have taken part in the Emotions Project in previous years but you haven’t heard from us in a while, it may be that we don’t have your current contact details. Please contact us by phone (03) 9905 3149 or email emotions.project.psychology@med.monash.edu.au and we will update your information. Similarly, if you are moving house, be sure to let us know your new details so we can keep you up to date about the project.

Useful Resources for Families

• Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800

• Lifeline: 13 11 14

• Australian Psychological Referral Service: (03) 8662 3300

• BeyondBlue, the National Depression Initiative.

Newsletters

• Dec 2008 (pdf 238kb)
• Apr 2008 (pdf 122kb)
• 2007 (pdf 145kb)
• 2006 (pdf 60kb)

Key Findings to Date

• Emotion Regulation: The strategies children use to manage their emotions were found to be important to their psychological well-being. For example, children who try to suppress or hide their emotions are more likely to have lower levels of psychological well-being. In contrast, children who try to manage emotions by changing the way they think about an event tend to have positive psychological well-being. (MacDermott, Betts, Gullone, & Allen, under review)

  We have also found that children prone to intense feelings of depression or anxiety are more likely to use unhelpful emotion regulation strategies such as suppression and are less likely to use helpful strategies such as changing their thinking about an emotional event. (Hughes, Gullone, Dudley, & Tonge, in press;Hughes, Gullone, & Watson, under review)

  These findings highlight the need to for children to develop healthy ways of managing their emotions. Furthermore, they suggest that depression and anxiety in children may be partly due to the way they regulate their emotions.

• Shame & Guilt: Shame is an emotion characterised by negative evaluations of the self (e.g., “I am a bad person”). Guilt is an emotion characterised by negative evaluations of specific behaviour (e.g., “I did a bad thing”).  Children proneness to feelings of shame versus guilt was found to be important for their general psychological well-being. For example, when children do the wrong thing, those who respond with feelings of shame are likely to have lower levels of well-being including feelings of depression and low self-esteem. In contrast, children who respond with feelings of guilt are likely to have higher levels of wellbeing. (Hughes, Gullone, & Watson, under review; Quek Van Wyk, unpublished thesis; Watson & Gullone, in preparation)

  This suggests that when children make mistakes or misbehave, it is more helpful for them to focus on what was wrong with their behaviour than to focus on negative judgements of themselves.

• Parenting: In general, children who perceived their parents to be warm and caring reported higher psychological well-being compared to those who perceived their parents to be too controlling or less caring.

  Perceived parenting experiences were also found to be related to children’s emotion regulation skills and their tendency toward shame/guilt responses. However, these relationships were also dependent on children’s temperament. (Jaffe, Gullone, & Hughes, in press; Quek Van Wyk, unpublished thesis)

  In addition, mothers’ but not fathers’ emotion regulation skills were found to be similar to their children’s emotion regulation skills. (Bariola, unpublished thesis)

  Overall, these findings highlight the important role parents play in shaping their children’s emotional development but suggest that children’s individual characteristics are also important.

Presentations and Publications

In press or under review

2009

Gullone, E., MacDermott, S., Allen, S.J. & Hughes, E.K. (2009, August). Self-report assessment of emotion regulation in children and adolescents. Conference of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Budapest, Hungary.

Hughes, E.K., & Gullone, E. (2009, August). Emotion regulation and psychopathology in children and adolescents. Conference of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Budapest, Hungary.

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003