Effortful control, executive attention, and emotional regulation in 7–10-year-old children

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.08.009

Cognitive Development

Volume 22, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 474-488

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.08.009 Get rights and content

Abstract

In this study, self-regulation was investigated in 7- to 10-year-old children using three different measures: (1) parent and child report questionnaires measuring temperamental effortful control, (2) a conflict task assessing efficiency of executive attention, and (3) the mistaken gift paradigm assessing social smiling in response to an undesirable gift. Both efficiency in executive attention and smiling to the undesired gift increased over age. Executive attention was related to both parent-reported temperamental effortful control and smiling, suggesting links between attentional capacities, broad temperament measures, and social situations requiring attentional control.

Section snippets

Temperamental effortful control

We define temperament as constitutionally based individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation (Derryberry & Rothbart, 2001; Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Reactivity describes motor, emotional, and attentional responses to internal and external stimuli. Regulation describes processes that function to modulate those responses (Putnam, Ellis & Rothbart, 2001; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Constitutional refers to the biological basis of temperament,

Executive attention

In neuro-cognitive models, attention is related to three separate brain networks (Posner & Petersen, 1990). Alerting refers to the establishment and maintenance of a vigilant state, and orienting to the ability to attend to a given location. The executive attention network is activated in situations requiring attentional control, as when there is conflict between responses suggested by different stimuli or dimensions of the same stimulus. Conflict tasks have been shown to activate a common

Temperament and executive attention

Positive relations have been found between parent-reported temperamental effortful control and performance on executive attention tasks in children from ages 2 to 7 (Chang & Burns, 2005; Gerardi-Caulton, 2000; Gonzalez, Fuentes, Carranza, & Estevez, 2001; Rothbart et al., 2003) and adolescents aged 16–17 years (Ellis, 2002). Gerardi-Caulton (2000) found positive associations between performance on a spatial conflict task and temperamental effortful control in children aged 2–3 years, as

Self-regulation and the activation of smiling

Effortful control includes modulation of emotional reactivity, allowing the expression of socially appropriate emotions and the inhibition of emotions that are inappropriate in social situations (Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000). Eisenberg, Smith, et al. (2004) explain that the process of regulating the “occurrence, form, intensity, or duration” of emotional reactions relies in part on the ability to shift one's attention away from a stimulus that induces an undesired emotional state

Participants

Forty-nine children participated in the study. Participants consisted of a group of 13 children aged 7 years (7 boys, 6 girls) and three groups of 12 children each (6 boys, 6 girls) aged 8, 9, and 10 years. Mean age for 7-year-olds was 87.69 months (SD = 1.97); for 8-year-olds, 100.92 months (SD = 1.62); for 9-year-olds, 111.83 months (SD = 2.04); and for 10-year-olds, 124.33 months (SD = 4.81). Overall mean age of the sample was 8.82 years (SD = 1.17).

Participants came from predominantly, but not

Temperamental effortful control

Psychometric properties of the TMCQ are shown in Table 2. A composite score for effortful control was derived based on previous factor analytic work (Rothbart et al., 2001), and calculated by averaging the subscale means of attentional focusing, inhibitory control, low intensity pleasure, and perceptual sensitivity. No significant age effects were found for individual subscale or factor composite scores for effortful control. Parent-reported effortful control was significantly higher for girls

Effortful control and executive attention

Parent-reported but not child-reported effortful control composite scores correlated with first administration ANT conflict scores (see Table 5). Higher parent scores on effortful control predicted less interference between congruent and incongruent trials F(1, 46) = 4.16 p < 0.05, η² = 0.08, b = −49.10. To control for age and sex differences, effortful control, age in months, and sex were entered as independent variables into a linear regression to predict first administration conflict scores. Both

Discussion

The current study examined relations among multiple levels of self-regulation: measures of effortful control: a temperament questionnaire, a laboratory task for assessing executive attention, and a social situation assessing smiling in the face of disappointment. Significant correlations were found between parent-reported effortful control and executive attention, replicating at 7–10 years the previously reported findings that more efficient executive attention performance is related to higher

References (28)

J. Fan et al.
Cognitive and brain consequences of conflict
NeuroImage
(2003)
C. Gonzalez et al.
Temperament and attention in the self-regulation of 7-year-old children
Personality and Individual Differences
(2001)
M.R. Rueda et al.
Development of attentional networks in childhood
Neuropsychologia
(2004)
R.F. Baumeister et al.
Handbook of self-regulation
(2004)
F. Chang et al.
Attention in preschoolers: Associations with effortful control and motivation
Child Development
(2005)
D. Derryberry et al.
Early temperament and emotional development
N. Eisenberg et al.
Emotion-related regulation: An emerging construct
Merrill-Palmer Quarterly
(2004)
N. Eisenberg et al.
Dispositional emotionality and regulation: Their role in predicting quality of social functioning
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology
(2000)
N. Eisenberg et al.
Effortful control: Relations with emotion regulation, adjustment, and socialization in childhood
L.K. Ellis
Individual differences and adolescent psychosocial development
University of Oregon: Dissertation Abstracts International Section B: The Sciences & Engineering
(2002)

J. Fossella et al.

Assessing the molecular genetics of attention networks

BMC Neuroscience

(2002)

G. Gerardi-Caulton

Sensitivity to spatial conflict and the development of self-regulation in children 24–36 months of age

Developmental Science

(2000)

J.E. Kieras et al.

You can’t always get what you want: Effortful control and children's responses to undesirable gifts

Psychological Science

(2005)

G. Kochanska et al.

Inhibitory control as a contributor to conscience in childhood: From toddler to early school age

Child Development

(1997)

Cited by (179)

Experience-dependent neurodevelopment of self-regulation in adolescence
2024, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Adolescence is a period of rapid biobehavioral change, characterized in part by increased neural maturation and sensitivity to one’s environment. In this review, we aim to demonstrate that self-regulation skills are tuned by adolescents’ social, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts. We discuss adjacent literatures that demonstrate the importance of experience-dependent learning for adolescent development: environmental contextual influences and training paradigms that aim to improve regulation skills. We first highlight changes in prominent limbic and cortical regions—like the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex—as well as structural and functional connectivity between these areas that are associated with adolescents’ regulation skills. Next, we consider how puberty, the hallmark developmental milestone in adolescence, helps instantiate these biobehavioral adaptations. We then survey the existing literature demonstrating the ways in which cultural, socioeconomic, and interpersonal contexts drive behavioral and neural adaptation for self-regulation. Finally, we highlight promising results from regulation training paradigms that suggest training may be especially efficacious for adolescent samples. In our conclusion, we highlight some exciting frontiers in human self-regulation research as well as recommendations for improving the methodological implementation of developmental neuroimaging studies and training paradigms.
The relation between effortful control and executive function training in preschoolers
2024, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
In recent years, the question of whether executive function (EF) is malleable has been widely documented. Despite using the same training tasks, transfer effects remain uncertain. Researchers suggested that the inconsistency might be attributed to individual differences in temperamental traits. In the current study, we investigated how effortful control, a temperamental trait, would affect EF training outcomes in children. Based on parent rating, 79 6-year-old preschoolers were identified as having higher or lower effort control and were assigned to three conditions: working memory (WM) training, inhibitory control (IC) training, and a business-as-usual control group. Children completed assessments at baseline, 1 week after intervention (posttest), and 3 months after intervention (follow-up). As compared with the control group, the WM and IC training groups showed improvement in both trained tasks and nontrained measures. At baseline, children with higher effortful control scores showed greater WM capacity and better IC. Furthermore, effortful control was positively correlated with training gain in both training groups, with children with higher effortful control benefitting more through training. In the WM training group, effortful control was positively correlated with near transfer on WM outcomes both immediately and longitudinally. At posttest, the WM and IC training groups showed a positive correlation between effortful control and fluid intelligence performance. Our results underscore the importance of individual differences in training benefits, in particular the role of effortful control, and further illustrate the potential avenues for designing more effective individualized cognitive training programs to foster learning and optimize children’s development.
Attention bias vs. attention control modification for social anxiety disorder: A randomized controlled trial
2024, Journal of Anxiety Disorders
Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Therapy (GC-MRT) is an eye-tracking-based attention bias modification protocol for social anxiety disorder (SAD) with established clinical efficacy. However, it remains unclear if improvement following GC-MRT hinges on modification of threat-related attention or on more general enhancement of attention control. Here, 50 patients with SAD were randomly allocated to GC-MRT using either threat faces or shapes. Results indicate comparable reductions in social anxiety and co-morbid depression symptoms in the two conditions. Patients in the shapes condition showed a significant increase in attention control and a reduction in attention to both the trained shapes and threat faces, whereas patients in the faces condition showed a reduction in attention to threat faces only. These findings suggest that enhancement of attention control, independent of valence-specific attention modification, may facilitate reduction in SAD symptoms. Alternative interpretations and clinical implications of the current findings are discussed.
Executive functioning skills and (low) math achievement in primary and secondary school
2023, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Schoolchildren with better executive functioning skills achieve better mathematics results. It is less clear how inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory combine to predict mathematics achievement and difficulty throughout primary and secondary school. This study aimed to find the best combination of executive function measures for predicting mathematical achievement in Grades 2, 6, and 10 and to test whether this combination predicts the probability of having mathematical difficulties across school grades even when fluid intelligence and processing speed were included in the models. A total of 426 students—141 2nd graders (72 girls), 143 6th graders (72 girls), and 142 10th graders (79 girls)—were cross-sectionally assessed with 12 executive tasks, one standardized mathematical task, and a standardized test of intelligence. Bayesian regression analyses found various combinations of executive predictors of mathematical achievement for each school grade spanning Grade 2 to measures of cognitive inhibition (negative priming) and cognitive flexibility (verbal fluency); Grade 6 to measures of inhibition: resistance to distractor interference (receptive attention), cognitive flexibility (local–global), and working memory (counting span); and Grade 10 to measures of inhibition: resistance to distractor interference (receptive attention) and prepotent response inhibition (stop signal) and working memory (reading span). Logistic regression showed that the executive models derived from the Bayesian analyses had a similar ability to classify students with mathematical difficulty and their peers with typical achievement to broader cognitive models that included fluid intelligence and processing speed. Measures of processing speed, cognitive flexibility (local–global), and prepotent response inhibition (stop signal) were the main risk factors in Grades 2, 6, and 10, respectively. Cognitive flexibility (verbal fluency) in Grade 2 and fluid intelligence, which was more stable in all three grades, acted as protective factors against mathematical difficulty. These findings inform practical considerations for establishing preventive and intervention proposals.
Effortful control and depression in school-age children: The chain mediating role of emotion regulation ability and cognitive reappraisal strategy
2023, Journal of Affective Disorders
Depression is one of the main mental health problems facing primary school students. Temperamental effortful control (EC) has received much attention as a protective factor to depression. The present study aimed to verify the association of effortful control and children's depression and explore the mediating roles of emotion regulation ability (ERA) and strategies (ERSs) in the relationship.
A total of 449 valid primary school students in grades 3 to 6 were included in the study. Self-report and parent-report questionnaires were used to collect data on key variables, including EC, depression, ERA and ERSs.
Gender and whether-native-or-not had significant effects on children's depression. EC was significantly and negatively correlated with children's depression; EC and depression were significantly correlated with Emotion Regulation dimension of ERA and cognitive reappraisal; but there was no correlation between EC and Lability/Negativity, as well as between expression suppression and depression. EmotionRegulation and cognitive reappraisal played mediating effects in the relationship between EC and depression parallelly and sequentially.
The study used cross-sectional design and the sample was restricted to Chinese primary school students. Additionally, the types and research perspectives of ERSs can be further expanded.
EC can reduce the level of children's depression by improving the abilities of Emotion Regulation and the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy, as well as the chain mediating effects of the two.
Performance monitoring moderates the relationship between stress and negative affect in response to an exam stressor
2023, International Journal of Psychophysiology
The present longitudinal study examined the role of performance monitoring in the relationships between stress (both stress change and chronic stress) and negative affect to a real-life stressor-final exam among 60 undergraduates. Participants firstly completed a Go/No-Go task in the laboratory with electroencephalogram recordings. At T1 (31 days before the final exam), participants reported their chronic perceived stress. Then, with the daily dairy method, their daily stress level and negative affect were collected for three consecutive days. At T2 (three days before the final exam), the 3-day daily dairy was repeated. Results showed that performance monitoring, as measured by behavioral adjustments and electrophysiological correlates, moderated the effects of stress change as well as chronic perceived stress on the negative emotional response to the final exam. More specifically, as the stress change from baseline to exam increases, individuals with shorter PES, lower PEAD or larger Pe amplitudes experienced less negative affect increases in response to exam. Additionally, individuals with shorter PES or larger Pe amplitudes showed no significant relationship between chronic stress and negative affect, whereas individuals with longer PES or smaller Pe amplitudes showed significant positive relationship between chronic stress and negative affect increases in response to exam. The results demonstrated that efficient performance monitoring is a protective factor for stress.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Effortful control, executive attention, and emotional regulation in 7–10-year-old children

Abstract

Section snippets

Temperamental effortful control

Executive attention

Temperament and executive attention

Self-regulation and the activation of smiling

Participants

Temperamental effortful control

Effortful control and executive attention

Discussion

NeuroImage

Personality and Individual Differences

Neuropsychologia

Handbook of self-regulation

Attention in preschoolers: Associations with effortful control and motivation

Child Development

Early temperament and emotional development

Emotion-related regulation: An emerging construct

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

Dispositional emotionality and regulation: Their role in predicting quality of social functioning

Journal of Personality & Social Psychology

Effortful control: Relations with emotion regulation, adjustment, and socialization in childhood

Individual differences and adolescent psychosocial development

University of Oregon: Dissertation Abstracts International Section B: The Sciences & Engineering

Assessing the molecular genetics of attention networks

BMC Neuroscience

Sensitivity to spatial conflict and the development of self-regulation in children 24–36 months of age

Developmental Science

You can’t always get what you want: Effortful control and children's responses to undesirable gifts

Psychological Science

Inhibitory control as a contributor to conscience in childhood: From toddler to early school age

Child Development