Emotion regulation and social information processing skills in preschool children: The effect of emotion regulation intervention

This study aims to determine the effect of the Emotion Regulation Education Program on the social information processing skills of 60-72-month-old preschool children. In the research, a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest and retention test control group was used. The study group of the research consists of children attending two different kindergartens affiliated with the Ministry of National Education in the district of Başakşehir in the province of Istanbul in the 2021-2022 academic year. The study group was determined by a convenient sampling method. One of the randomly selected classes from the 5 age group classes attending two randomly determined independent kindergartens was determined as the experimental group and the other as the control group. Of the 33 children who make up the entire study group, 16 children are in the control group and 17 children are in the experimental group. As a data collection tool in the research, the "General Information Form" prepared by the researcher to obtain various information about children and their families, and the "Social Information Processing Test - Preschool Version (SIPI-P)" to evaluate children's social information processing process skills. Child Emotion Regulation Checklist (CLB)" was used to measure children's emotion regulation skills. The reliability of the measurement tools was tested with Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient, and the reliability between raters was tested with Cohen's Kappa Coefficient. The researcher analyzed the data from the measurement tools, taking into account the descriptive statistics and normality test results. SPSS 22.0 package program was used for data analysis. In this study, the normal distribution of the scores obtained from the measurement tools was examined using skewness and kurtosis coefficients. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the total scores and sub-dimension scores of the measurement tools were between -1.96 and +1.96, indicating a normal distribution of data. In order to assess the equality of variances in the data analysis, the Levene (homogeneity) test, which is another assumption of parametric test application, was used, and it was observed that the variances were homogeneously distributed. In the study, covariance analysis (ANCOVA) was conducted to examine the significant difference between the posttest scores while controlling for the differences in the pretest mean scores of the experimental and control groups. Since the score distributions in the study met the assumptions of parametric tests and showed a normal distribution, it was deemed appropriate to use parametric tests in the data analysis of this study. Dependent groups t-test, independent groups t-test, and Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient analysis were employed as parametric test statistics. According to the findings obtained from the research, it was determined that the emotion regulation education program had a statistically significant effect on children's social information processing process skills. According to the pre-test results, there was no statistically significant difference between the SIPI-P pre-test scores of the children in the experimental and control groups, while the SIPI-P post-test scores of the children in the experimental group differed from the post-test scores of the children in the control group after the emotion regulation training applied to the experimental group was found to be statistically significantly higher. In addition, the SIPI-P retention test scores of the children in the experimental group were found to be significantly higher than the posttest scores. Accordingly, it can be said that the Emotion Regulation Education Program applied to children is effective and the effects continue and are permanent after the application. Keywords: Pre-school, social information processing, emotion regulation, early childhood