This study focused on how school-age children develop and refine their strategies for dealing with aversive emotions, defined as fear, shame, anger, sadness, and hurt feelings. Two groups of children were used, one from a public school, serving a working class neighborhood, and the other from a sexual abuse treatment agency. The aversive emotions were presented to the children in the form of hypothetical vignettes, involving two same-sexed friends who either got into a conflict with one another or had some event befall them that elicited a negative feeling. The results suggested that by the early elementary school grades, many children appear to have acquired a cultural script for how to deal adaptively with aversive feelings in social contexts. Beneficial coping strategies such as problem-solving and support-seeking were most often cited as the best coping strategies, and aggressive, externalizing strategies as the worst. In general, the children were able to anchor these coping choices in appropriate contexts in which gains were cited as rationales for their choice of the best coping options, and negative social or non-social consequences were cited for worst coping choices. (Contains 21 references.) (AA)