The role of antecedent-focused emotion regulatory strategies on emotionally dysregulated behavior above and beyond the influence of ADHD.

Emotion dysregulation in children may contribute to poor interpersonal relationships and a variety of internalizing and externalizing psychopathological outcomes in children both with and without ADHD. This study serves to provide an examination of how emotional self-awareness and situationally appropriate emotional expression may affect an individual\u27s ability to broadly regulate emotion and additionally provides an exploratory investigation of how these attributes may affect specific emotion regulation. The present study found that emotional self-awareness and emotion recognition may both contribute to emotion regulation through shared variance with each other rather than unique variance of either one. Exploratory analyses of regulation of specific emotion suggested that children displaying greater difficulties with emotional self-awareness may experience more difficulty regulating anger above and beyond the influence of ADHD, and children with difficulties with situationally appropriate expression of emotion may have greater difficulty regulating sadness and worry above and beyond the influence of ADHD. By continuing research in this domain, it may be possible to design interventions for children prone to emotion dysregulation which are more individualized to fit the child’s specific symptomatology