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Deliberate emotion regulation, the ability to willfully modulate emotional experiences, is shaped through interpersonal scaffolding and forecasts later functioning in multiple domains. However, nascent deliberate emotion regulation in early childhood is poorly understood due to a paucity of studies that simulate interpersonal scaffolding of this skill and measure its occurrence in multiple modalities. Our goal was to identify neural and behavioral components of early deliberate emotion regulation to identify patterns of competent and deficient responses. A novel probe was developed to assess deliberate emotion regulation in young children. Sixty children (age 4–6 years) were randomly assigned to deliberate emotion regulation or control conditions. Children completed a frustration task while lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activation was recorded via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Facial expressions were video recorded and children self-rated their emotions. Parents rated their child’s temperamental emotion regulation. Deliberate emotion regulation interpersonal scaffolding predicted a significant increase in frustration-related LPFC activation not seen in controls. Better temperamental emotion regulation predicted larger LPFC activation increases post- scaffolding among children who engaged in deliberate emotion regulation interpersonal scaffolding. A capacity to increase LPFC activation in response to interpersonal scaffolding may be a crucial neural correlate of early deliberate emotion regulation. Keywords: Early childhood, Deliberate emotion regulation, Imaging, Prefrontal cortex, Interpersonal scaffolding

Emotion regulation has primarily been studied either experimentally or by using retrospective trait questionnaires. Very few studies have investigated emotion regulation in the context in which it is usually deployed, namely, the complexity of everyday life. We address this in the current paper by reporting findings of two experience-sampling studies (Ns = 46 and 95) investigating the use of six emotion-regulation strategies (reflection, reappraisal, rumination, distraction, expressive suppression, and social sharing) and their associations with changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in daily life. Regarding the relative use of emotion-regulation strategies, a highly similar ordering was found across both studies with distraction being used more than sharing and reappraisal. While the use of all six strategies was positively correlated both within- and between-persons, different strategies were associated with distinct affective consequences: Suppression and rumination were associated with increases in NA and decreases in PA, whereas reflection was associated with increases in PA across both studies. Additionally, reappraisal, distraction, and social sharing were related to increases in PA in Study 2. Discussion focuses on how the current findings fit with theoretical models of emotion regulation and with previous evidence from experimental and retrospective studies.