Promoting Emotional Regulation

Leah Kuypers, MA Ed, OTR/L & Elizabett Sautter, MA SLP, CCC


Recently, Perry, a third grade student at our center said,"I used to make a scene when something upset me. I've been told many times to 'calm down' and it never worked."

Children like Perry, like so many others who struggle with emotional regulation, are told to use sensory supports or breathing techniques when "making a scene". Without teaching how to read the social demands of the situation and how this behavior affects others, we may end up providing band aid supports in place of a long-term approach. It is important to ask ourselves, "Is the child struggling due to a challenge with regulating emotions, impulses, and sensory needs given the demands of their social context?"

Social skills and self-regulation go hand in hand, since we are often sharing space with others. If we are unable to control our internal state and/or overt behaviors to adapt to various social demands, we will have minimal success in social situations. People may label this is as "non-compliant", "disruptive", "hyper", anxious", "inflexible", or "lazy". These labels point to difficulties with what we refer to as social regulation - the ability to adjust one's level of alertness and modify the expression of emotions and behaviors to meet social goals.

Skills Needs For Social Regulation

Social regulation may, at first glance, seem simple and automatic, but its internal operation is vast and complex. Many neurologically rooted skills need to be integrated, including the following:

  • sensory processing and modulation

  • emotional regulation

  • executive functioning

  • language processing

  • pragmatic language

  • perspective taking

  • central coherence

Given the complexity of social regulation, using an interdisciplinary approach to address the underlying issues is most effective in developing and generalizing goals.

The Zones of Regulation

The Zones of Regulation is a curriculum designed to address many of these underlying issues that drive social regulation. The Zones teaches students to recognize when moving towards a less regulated state and increases awareness of triggers, physiological states, and emotions. Additionally, students reflect on how their actions impact outcomes, thus increasing their social cognition about how those around them think and feel. Lastly, students learn when and how to use a variety of tools.

The Zones uses 4 concrete states to represent our states of alertness and their associated feelings:

  • The Red Zone is used to describe extremely heightened states of alertness and intense emotions. A person may be bursting with elation or experiencing anger, rage, explosive behavior, devastation, or terror in the Red Zone.

  • The Yellow Zone is used to describe somewhat heightened states of alertness and elevated emotions; however one has some control in this Zone. A person may be experiencing stress, frustration, anxiety, or excitement, silliness, restlessness, or nervousness in this Zone.

  • The Green Zone is used to describe a calm state of alertness. A person feels happy, focused, content, and ready to learn in this Zone. This is the Zone students predominantly need to be in the classroom.

  • The Blue Zone is used to describe low states of alertness. The person feels sad, tired, bored, sleepy, tuned out.

Practice and Implementation

The Zones curriculum includes 18 lessons that embed role playing and video modeling, self-monitoring and visual supports into various learning activities to teach fundamental self-regulation skills. Activities are broken down by age groups and skill levels.

Students learn how various emotions look and feel by labeling physiological cues in photographs and videos. Children learn to recognize emotions through various mediums - playing charades, watching videos, making magazine collages, exploring characters' social cues in children's books and playing Zones Bingo. They are also encouraged to reflect on how they may have influences those around them through their actions and expressions.

To understand events that cause them to become less self-regulated, students brainstorm all of the "triggers" and are taught to use caution when approaching them. Students explore various strategies such as deep breathing, sensory supports, and thinking tools and games to determine if a particular strategy is helpful to them in regulating their emotional state. For example, Stop, Opt, and Go is a thinking tool and visual support which helps students stop before they act, consider all the options, and then go with the best one. This tool also teaches students to solve problems and predict outcomes.

Supporting students in their self-regulation allows them to enjoy friendships, builds their confidence and helps them navigate peer relationships at school and beyond.


About the Authors

Elizabeth Sautter is a licensed and certified speech language pathologist and the co-director of Communication Works. She has been working with families in private practice, schools, and hospitals since 1996. She is experienced in the areas of autism, developmental disabilities, and social challenges.

Leah Kuypers is a licensed and certified occupational therapist who has worked since 1999 in school and clinical settings, specializing in sensory processing disorder, motor coordination, and self-regulation needs. She is the author of "The Zones of Regulation", a curriculum designed to help students learn self-regulation strategies and improve their social adaptive skills.

Communication Works is located in Oakland, CA. For more info, please visit www.cwtherapy.com