Self-regulation research often highlights negative emotions and the need to control them. Functional emotion theory, however, asserts that negative emotions (e.g., anger and sadness) serve functional purposes. Anger prepares a person to increase effort to overcome blocked goals, and sadness prepares a person to relinquish irrecoverable goals (Frijda, 1986). This thesis tests whether preschool age children’s anger and sadness function to influence their cognitive engagement in two blocked goal tasks. We hypothesize that (H1) greater anger will relate to greater cognitive engagement because anger involves readiness to increase effort to attain a goal, (H2) greater sadness will relate to less cognitive engagement because sadness involves readiness to relinquish a goal, and (H3) older preschool age children may show more functional associations than younger preschool age children because age influences the extent to which children have and can use their cognitive resources. Participants were 152 mother-child dyads and 98 father-child dyads who engaged in the Wait Task and Difficult Puzzles Task, respectively. Contrary to H1, results indicate an inverse relation between cognitive engagement and both anger and sadness. Thus, H2 was supported. Further, no age effects emerged for these associations. Findings support the idea that children’s sadness may be functional, but not anger. The presence of parents may have influenced the findings. Future research should continue to investigate children’s self-regulation in both the presence and absence of parents.
