Emotion Regulation and Academic Achievement in Childhood

Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which children monitor, evaluate and modulate their emotional responses to achieve adaptive goals. In the context of schooling, proficient regulation of emotions supports attentional focus, resilience when facing academic challenge and constructive social engagement with peers and teachers. A child’s temperament—inherent patterns of reactivity and self-regulation—is a critical precursor to enduring habits of coping and learning. Dimensions such as effortful control, the capacity to voluntarily inhibit impulsive responses, and negative emotionality, the propensity for anger or sadness, shape trajectories of academic success from early years onwards. Interventions that enhance self-regulatory skills have been shown to boost performance across reading, mathematics and general classroom behaviour. Moreover, social and cultural processes, including parenting style and classroom climate, interact with individual regulatory capacities to influence outcomes. Understanding the complex interplay among emotional processes, cognitive skills and environmental supports has become central to designing educational strategies that promote both academic excellence and psychological well-being. This body of work carries global significance as educational attainment remains a key indicator of long-term health, social mobility and economic opportunity.

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Emotion Regulation and Academic Achievement in Childhood publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in emotion regulation and academic achievement in childhood across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Emotion regulation: The set of intrinsic and extrinsic processes involved in monitoring, evaluating and modifying emotional reactions to accomplish goals and adapt to environmental demands.

Temperament: Biologically based individual differences in emotional reactivity and self-regulation observable from early childhood.

Effortful control: The capacity to voluntarily inhibit a dominant response in order to perform a sub-dominant action, supporting sustained attention and goal-directed behaviour.

Negative emotionality: A temperament dimension reflecting the tendency to experience emotions such as anger, fear and sadness more frequently and intensely.

Spatial ability: The cognitive aptitude for perceiving, manipulating and reasoning about the spatial relations between objects in two and three dimensions.

References

1. Do Temperament Trajectories From Late Childhood Through Adolescence Predict Success in School? Findings From a Longitudinal Study of Mexican-Origin Youth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2024).
2. Temperament and Academic Achievement in Children: A Meta-Analysis. European Journal of Investigation in Health Psychology and Education (2021).
3. Feeling the distance: The relationship between emotion regulation and spatial ability in childhood.. Development and Psychopathology (2024).