Abstract
Objectives
Emotion goals lie at the heart of emotion regulation, as people have to first decide what emotions they want to feel before engaging in emotion regulation. Given that children with Asperger's syndrome (AS) are characterized by exhibiting difficulties in emotion regulation, studying whether they display similar or different emotion goals compared to typically developing (TD) children may provide insightful information.
Methods
Thirty AS and 30 TD children (10–12 years) reported about their general (i.e., how they want to feel in general) and contextualized (i.e., how they want to feel when confronting vs. collaborating with someone) emotion goals, and about their difficulties in emotion regulation through questionnaires.
Results
Results showed that both groups did not differ in their general emotional goals and in their contextualized emotion goals for happiness for collaboration and anger for confrontation. AS children only differed from TD children in a higher preference for sadness for collaboration and happiness for confrontation. These emotion goals predicted their difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour.
Conclusions
The obtained results support the need to further study emotion goals as an aspect of emotion dysregulation, namely the difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour when experiencing different emotions.
Emotion goals lie at the heart of emotion regulation, as people have to first decide what emotions they want to feel before engaging in emotion regulation. Given that children with Asperger's syndrome (AS) are characterized by exhibiting difficulties in emotion regulation, studying whether they display similar or different emotion goals compared to typically developing (TD) children may provide insightful information.
Methods
Thirty AS and 30 TD children (10–12 years) reported about their general (i.e., how they want to feel in general) and contextualized (i.e., how they want to feel when confronting vs. collaborating with someone) emotion goals, and about their difficulties in emotion regulation through questionnaires.
Results
Results showed that both groups did not differ in their general emotional goals and in their contextualized emotion goals for happiness for collaboration and anger for confrontation. AS children only differed from TD children in a higher preference for sadness for collaboration and happiness for confrontation. These emotion goals predicted their difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour.
Conclusions
The obtained results support the need to further study emotion goals as an aspect of emotion dysregulation, namely the difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour when experiencing different emotions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 274-290 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | British Journal of Clinical Psychology |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 5 Feb 2018 |