The Effect of Self-Immersing and Self-Distancing on Late School-Aged Children’s Emotional Reactivity: Focusing on the Mediating Effect of Self-Reflection

This study examined whether self-immersing and self-distancing affect children’s emotional reactivity and whether self-reflection mediates the relationship between self-immersing and self-distancing. Participants were 201 5th and 6th grade students who were attending elementary schools in D city. They were assigned to self-immersing and self-distancing groups, and were asked to write down recent experiences of anger so that the experimenter could measure the emotional reactivity level of them. And then they had to write again about the experience of anger through self-immersed or self-distanced perspectives in order to alleviate their emotional reactivity triggered by the first writing. Data were analyzed by independent sample t-test, point biserial correlation, partial correlation, and hierarchical linear regression analysis using SPSS 23.0 and SPSS PROCESS macro. The results were as follows. First, there were significant differences in children’s emotional reactivity by age, grade, memory information and self-distancing assessment. Second, there were significantly negative correlations between self-distancing and children’s emotional reactivity, and self-reflection and children’s emotional reactivity, while there was positive correlation between self-distancing and self-reflection. Third, self-reflection mediated the effect that self-immersing and self-distancing affected children’s emotional reactivity. These findings demonstrate that children who adopt a self-distanced perspective enhance self-reflection, and that in turn leads to alleviation of emotional reactivity, whereas children with a self-immersed perspective do not.