The relations of effortful control and impulsivity to children's sympathy: A longitudinal study
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were initially recruited through newspaper ads, letters sent to parents through schools, and flyers posted at local schools (as part of an eight-year longitudinal study of socioemotional development; e.g., Eisenberg, Cumberland, et al., 2001; Eisenberg et al., 2004, Valiente et al., 2004). The primary caregiving parent in families that initially expressed interest in participating was administered the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach, 1991) over the phone, and this
Reported EC
Parents and teachers completed several subscales (attention shifting, attention focusing, and inhibitory control) from the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Hershey, 1994; Rothbart et al., 2001) as measures of children's EC (T1–T5; 7-point scale; 1 = extremely untrue; 7 = extremely true; items reversed and averaged to create subscale scores). For the teacher-report subscales, some items deemed inappropriate for teachers were dropped or reworded to capture school rather than home
Relations with child sex
A series of MANOVAs (and ANOVAs where appropriate) were conducted within each time to test the relations between sex and the study variables. At each assessment, separate MANOVAs were computed for parent-, teacher-, and child-reported variables (EC, impulsivity, and sympathy). In addition, similar analyses were computed for the observed measures at each assessment.
Significant differences were found for parents’ and teachers’ reports; all multivariate Fs (Pillais) were significant at p < .01. In
Discussion
The results of this study generally support the view that individual differences in effortful control (EC) are related to, and sometimes predict across time, individual differences in children's sympathy. Although these relations generally were modest, children viewed as sympathetic by adults, especially boys, were likely to be viewed by teachers, parents, and the children themselves in early to mid-adolescence as high in EC. For girls, similar positive relations were found primarily for
References (48)
- et al.
Measurement of fine-grained aspects of toddler temperament: The early childhood behavior questionnaire
Infant Behavior & Development
(2006) Integrative guide for the 1991 CBCL/4-18. YSR and TRF profiles
(1991)- et al.
Role of affective self-regulatory efficacy in diverse sphere of psychosocial functioning
Child Development
(2003) The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer
(1991)- et al.
The measurement of executive function in early childhood
Developmental Neuropsychology
(2005) - et al.
The affect system has parallel and integrative processing components: Form follows function
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(1999) - et al.
Development and validation of an early adolescent temperament measure
Journal of Early Adolescence
(1992) - et al.
A child's social desirability questionnaire
Journal of Consulting Psychology
(1965) - et al.
Relationship between empathy and the big five personality traits in a sample of Spanish adolescents
Social Behavior and Personality
(2004) - et al.
Reactive and effortful processes in the organization of temperament
Development and Psychopathology
(1997)
The relations of regulation and emotionality to children's externalizing and internalizing problem behavior
Child Development
The relations of children's dispositional prosocial behavior to emotionality, regulation, and social functioning
Child Development
The relations of emotionality and regulation to dispositional and situational empathy-related responding
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The relations of children's dispositional empathy-related responding to their emotionality, regulation, and social functioning
Developmental Psychology
Contemporaneous and longitudinal prediction of children's sympathy from dispositional regulation and emotionality
Developmental Psychology
Mothers’ emotional expressivity and children's behavioral problems and social competence: Mediation through children's regulation
Developmental Psychology
Prediction of elementary school children's externalizing problem behaviors from attentional and behavioral regulation and negative emotionality
Child Development
Effortful control and its socioemotional consequences
Children's emotion-related regulation
The relations of problem behavior status to children's negative emotionality, effortful control, and impulsivity: Concurrent relations and prediction of change
Developmental Psychology
The relations of effortful control and impulsivity to children's resiliency and adjustment
Child Development
Gender differences in temperament: A meta-analysis
Psychological Bulletin
The psychology of fear and stress
Cited by (88)
A transdiagnostic data-driven study of children's behaviour and the functional connectome
2021, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :Within the wider literature these difficulties seem to co-occur and are more related to tasks tapping hot executive function, particularly emotion regulation and impulse control (Zelazo and Carlson, 2012). High rates of peer relation difficulties are not surprising in this group given the robust association between emotion regulation and prosocial behaviour in children (Eisenberg et al., 2007; Hastings et al., 2005; Liew et al., 2011; Moriguchi et al., 2020), and links between behavioural difficulties and pragmatic language (Hawkins et al., 2016; Ketelaars et al., 2010), which together may influence how these children form social networks. Although hot and cool executive function are often closely associated (Zelazo and Carlson, 2012), this group had the lowest ratings of inattention and cool executive function difficulties, and their IQ was age-appropriate.
Do peer and child temperament jointly predict student–teacher conflict and closeness?
2021, Journal of Applied Developmental PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Furthermore, one item was modified to reflect behaviors in school (i.e., “When practicing an activity, has a hard time keeping her/his mind on it” was modified to “When working on an activity, has a hard time keeping her/his mind on it”). The CBQ has demonstrated good psychometric properties across populations (e.g., de la Osa et al., 2014; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006), and previous studies have used teachers' reports of the CBQ (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2007), supporting the use of the measure in the school context. The attention focusing and inhibitory control scale scores were significantly correlated within individual peers, rs = .64–.72, p < .001, and the scale scores were averaged for each peer to create self-regulation scores.
Dyadic synchrony and repair processes are related to preschool children's risk exposure and self-control
2021, Development and PsychopathologyAntecedents of Empathic Capacity: Emotion Regulation Styles as Mediators between Controlling Versus Autonomy - Supportive Maternal Practices and Empathy
2023, International Journal of Emotional EducationIntegration versus Minimization of Emotional Experiences: Addressing Adaptive Emotion Regulation
2023, The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory
- 1
Now in Education at Texas A & M University.