Emotional self-regulation, referring to the understanding, acceptance, and modulation of emotional responses, is a process that children and adolescents carry out in order to adapt to their psychosocial environment, orienting themselves toward the achievement of their evolutionary goals and favoring their mental health (Van Lissa et al., 2019). The achievement of emotional self-regulation allows progress in the acquisition of greater autonomy, at the same time that it is related to the development of adequate self-esteem and feelings of self-efficacy that facilitate social and school adjustment. The emotional educational process is continuous and permanent throughout the life cycle (Gallardo Fernández and Saiz Fernández, 2016), favoring the individual in order to achieve emotional competence which allows to regulate their emotions.

Much of the research on emotional development has focused on the relationships between parents and children under the age of two and/or preschoolers. However, in the last decade there have been studies referring to understanding how families socialize the expression of emotions in their children’s middle childhood and adolescence (Adrian et al., 2011; Bai et al., 2016), observing that the emotional regulation level that children reach at age 7 predicts the quality of positive friendship at age 10, showing greater ability to express their emotions effectively, interpret emotions and respond to them appropriately (Blair et al., 2014).

Gallardo Fernández and Saiz Fernández (2016) have highlighted that the 21st century school has to assume responsibility for educating children’s emotions as much or more than the family, highlighting that educators must be the main emotional leaders of the students. Furthermore, Bailey et al. (2016) highlight that children marked by effective interactions with their teachers have better socio-emotional and cognitive skills, highlighting that effective teachers can help children in the transition toward self-regulation of their emotions; and that the emotional and organizational support of the educational context can be particularly sensitive to the social-emotional functioning of children in the classroom.

Meanwhile, in the field of research, Sabatier et al. (2017) point out that, in the last 15 years of research in the field of emotional development, the findings regarding neurobiological and environmental elements that influence the acquisition of skills to manage emotions have been highlighted, with consensus that, with age, people improve in the control of their emotions. However, fewer studies were observed that analyze these regulatory processes during the adolescent period and many of these studies would correspond to western and developed countries. Also, there is a need to document the development of emotional regulation processes in different social and economic contexts.

Compas et al. (2017), based on a meta-analytic review, propose an agenda for future research that includes improving the conceptualization seeking integration between the various constructs that study the subject; prioritize the study of the development of emotional regulation capacities instead of the study of symptoms, and improve the methodology and research designs by approaching more ecological models that allow understanding these processes in real contexts and times.

Likewise, Adrian et al. (2011) affirm that the empirical evidence indicates that emotional regulation skills are developed in a dynamic and multifaceted system, observing that, although observational and longitudinal methodologies have been mostly used with children under 6 years of age, it is necessary to continue carrying out multimodal evaluations and research with multiple methods and multilevel assessments in school-age children and adolescents.

Along the same lines, Buckley et al. (2003), emphasize the need to research about the emotional development of children and adolescents, in a collaborative way with school personnel, thus being able to observe how they use different coping strategies in natural development contexts, an aspect that is also mentioned by Bai et al. (2016), who have also emphasized the need to know how children’s spontaneous emotional expressions develop and maintain in uncontrolled environments of daily life, particularly within the family and during the school-age years.

Therefore, understanding natural contexts as all those contexts in which the behavior is habitual, and is not constrained by requirements that alter spontaneity (Craik, 2000; Bolger et al., 2003; Wilhelm et al., 2012), the objective of this systematic review has been to characterize publications referring to the development of emotional self-regulation in people under the age of 18 years, through relationship/communication guidelines, in natural contexts.

Bibliographic searches were carried out in the Web of Science, Scopus and PsycINFO databases and in academic Google from its inception until May 2020 with the following keywords in title, keywords and/or abstract: (“emotional autoregulation”) OR (“autorregulación emocional”) OR (“emotional self-regulation”) OR (“emotional selfregulation”) OR (“emotional self regulation”) OR (“competencias emocionales”) OR (“emotional skills”) OR (“emotional competences”) OR (“regulación emocional”) OR (“emotional regulation”) OR (“educación emocional”) OR (“emotional education”) AND (“comunicación”) OR (“communication”) AND (“relaciones interpersonales”) OR (“relationships”) AND (“vida cotidiana”) OR (“daily life”).

As inclusion criteria of the studies selected to respond to the objective of the present investigation, the following were considered: (a) that their objective was to investigate self-regulation/emotional regulation; (b) primary studies, excluding theoretical works, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis; (c) that they observe daily relationship/communication patterns in natural contexts; (d) that the main participants were people under 18 years of age (regardless of whether parents or teachers were also involved) (e) who studied universal population (normal evolutionary development); (f) written in English or Spanish; (g) with access to the full text. For study selection, two investigators applied the criteria independently. Subsequently, intercoder reliability was calculated using the kappa coefficient (κ). Agreement was reached on the discrepancies found with the mediation of a third researcher.

Additionally, in order to expand the number of primary studies included, the references of the included texts were reviewed and the authors were written to in order to request new articles that could meet the criteria indicated.

The included works were reviewed in order to observe: (1) extrinsic characteristics: their institutional affiliation, type and year of publication, and country where the research was carried out; (2) substantive characteristics: referring to the characteristics of the sample, and the way to conceptualize, base and evaluate self-regulation/emotional regulation; and (3) methodological characteristics: recording the characteristics of the method explicitly declared by the authors; those observed according to Guidelines Reporting Evaluations based on Observational Methodology GREOM (Portell et al., 2015); and those observed according to Methodological Quality Checklist for studies based on Observational Methodology (MQCOM; Chacón-Moscoso et al., 2019).

The review of the articles was carried out independently by two researchers, who when applying the MQCOM guide, had to agree on their observations in the face of the discrepancies found with the arbitration of a third expert researcher. The degree of initial agreement was calculated with the coefficient κ.

In the last 30 years, there has been a growing interest in the study of emotional self-regulation in older children and in different contexts and cultures, as suggested by Adrian et al. (2011), Bai et al. (2016), and Chervonsky and Hunt (2019). Regarding the substantive characteristics of the works, it is observed that a large part of the studies consider adults linked to children or adolescents as participants, showing a greater interest in observing the interaction in emotional regulation processes.

The countries and universities that lead the research carried out, as pointed out by Sabatier et al. (2017), correspond mostly to territories with higher income and quality of life, many of which have some tradition in studies of the evolutionary development of children. The influence of North American authors such as Claire Koop, Ross Thompson, James Gross, Susan Calkins, Pamela Cole or Nancy Eisenberg is observed, which could be related to having considered only works written in English and Spanish, suggesting that future studies incorporate written works in other languages.

Regarding the methodological characteristics, as strengths it was observed that most of the studies use different techniques or instruments for data collection; that the instruments designed ad hoc have a theoretical basis, are applied by properly trained personnel and have data quality control. In all the primary documents, situations typical of daily life are studied and analyzed, observing in all of them the use of the observational methodology, although there are some variants and diverse denominations, for which it is estimated as a weakness, that more than half of the studies do not propose the choice of a low intensity methodological design, with which they do not necessarily consider the richness involved in observing behaviors of daily life and detailing observation parameters such as duration and sequence of behaviors, aspects that are deemed necessary to observe in future research. In this sense, considering that the observational methodology constitutes a contribution to studies referring to evolutionary development in daily life, there is a need to highlight, in the preparation of future research, the review of the guidelines proposed by Chacón-Moscoso et al. (2019) and Portell et al. (2015), in order to guarantee the methodological quality.

Finally, observing that the study of behaviors in daily life has been gaining space and value when questioning the impact of studies carried out in laboratories (Compas et al., 2017), it is observed that, although every day there are older and better technological instruments that allow observing daily life and with people who are willing to comment on their experiences, it is necessary to regulate the ethical scope of the use of social networks in research, since they could affect the private and public life of the participants.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

MA-E and MTA: idea. MA-E and SS-C: literature review (state of the art). MA-E, SS-C, and SC-M: methodology, data analysis, and results. MA-E, MTA, PS, SS-C, and SC-M: discussion and conclusions. MA-E, PS, and MTA: newsroom (original draft). MTA, SS-C, and SC-M: final revisions. MTA and SC-M: project design and sponsorships. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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