The family context plays an important role in shaping the ways in which people express and regulate emotions in social interactions, which has important implications for health and well-being. Yet, despite that emotion regulation most often occurs within social interactions, there is a surprising dearth of research investigating emotion regulation as it develops and naturally occurs in interpersonal contexts. My research aims to identify (1) how children learn to regulate their emotions within the family context, (2) how emotion regulation shapes social behavior during social interactions (e.g., goal-related performance, support provision, conflict resolution), and (3) how these emotional and behavioral processes impact personal and relationship functioning immediately, in subsequent social interactions, and over time (e.g., psychological health, social competence, and family functioning).

To address these questions, I adopt diverse methods to examine how both children and adults regulate their emotions across a range of important social contexts, such as when experiencing relationship conflict, needing support, or competing vs. cooperating with others. I also employ repeated measures and longitudinal designs to model how the outcomes of emotion regulation in the immediate social context spill over to affect important outcomes in subsequent interactions and across time. For example, I examine how adults’ emotion regulation during marital conflict spills over to affect parental responsiveness in parent-child interactions, how children’s emotion regulation during peer competition predicts subsequent cooperation, and how adults' emotion regulation when needing support influences goal-related efficacy and success over time.