Context and dynamics: The new frontier for developmental research on emotion regulation

Despite much research and progress in understanding the development of emotion regulation over the past 3 decades, there is still much to be understood about how developing individuals modulate their affect as they go about their daily life. The papers in this special issue highlight context and dynamics as 2 important intersecting foci for future developmental research on emotion regulation. Ecological momentary assessment, passive sensing, and other ambulatory methods offer exciting new tools for capturing contextual features of the environment that may influence the selection of emotion regulation strategies and the effectiveness of specific strategies in different contexts. New interdisciplinary, methodological, and quantitative approaches also offer new tools for better characterizing the temporal dynamics of emotion regulation, including a focus on the coregulation of affect between parents and children. The next generation of emotion regulation researchers will require advanced interdisciplinary, quantitative, and technological skills to be able to leverage new tools that can better characterize the fine-grained dynamics of emotion regulation processes and the precise ways in which social contextual features modulate these processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).