The relationship between emotion regulation and spatial ability in childhood: implications for early years education

Emotion regulation is a crucial aspect of a child’s development, influencing their social interactions, academic performance, and overall health and well-being. Previous experimental studies have demonstrated that when children use language to create a sense of distance—be it social, physical, or temporal—from a challenging or potentially traumatic experience, they can effectively reduce the impact of negative emotions associated with it. This cognitive distancing allows them to process experiences with less emotional overwhelm.

In a new study published in Development and Psychopathology, we have shown that there is a significant reciprocal association between spatial skills and emotion regulation. In the first direction, children with stronger spatial abilities at age 5 years exhibited fewer signs of emotional dysregulation at age 7. Conversely, children who displayed greater emotion regulation at age 5 tended to have better spatial abilities by age 7. These relationships held true even after accounting for various family, environmental, and individual factors, including a child’s verbal ability (a crucial indicator of emotion regulation and broader cognitive ability).

These findings have important implications for educators in early years settings and parents or carers of young children:

1. Integrating Spatial Reasoning Activities: Incorporate games and activities that enhance spatial reasoning, such as puzzles, building blocks, and outdoor play that highlights distances to goals, obstacles, or other people.
2. Storytelling with Spatial Elements: Use stories that involve journeys or maps, encouraging children to think about space and movement.
3. Promoting Cognitive Distancing Techniques during storytime: Highlight instances where the protagonist had to stop and take a ‘step back’ to reassess a situation or perspective. This could also involve imagining a scene from afar or discussing the protagonist’s feelings (in the third person).
4. Mindfulness and Visualisation: Incorporate mindfulness exercises that include visualizing spaces or distances, helping children practice spatial visualisation and cognitive distancing.
5. Construction Area: Integrate more deeply into the curriculum construction activities, and have a dedicated area where these can be accessed (resourced with blocks of various sizes, for instance). Engage children in group activities that require planning and constructing, fostering spatial reasoning and social-emotional skills at the same time.

The study has several limitations, as detailed in the paper's conclusions, including the fact that effect sizes were modest. Future research should explore the specificity of these findings, that is, the potential bidirectional association between spatial ability and emotional dysregulation in children across developmental stages, and with a particular focus on mapping the link between specific spatial skills and specific dimensions of emotional dysregulation.

The study was co-authored with Prof. Eirini Flouri (UCL Institute of Education) and partially supported by Alphablocks Research Lab ( Alphablocks Nursery School ):

Flouri E, Tsomokos DI. "Feeling the distance: The relationship between emotion regulation and spatial ability in childhood." Development and Psychopathology. Published online 2024:1-8. doi:10.1017/S0954579424001093