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Article Excerpt
The core processes of emotion understanding, emotion control, cognitive understanding, and cognitive control and their association with early indicators of social and academic success were examined in a sample of 141 3-year-old children. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesized four-factor model of emotion and cognition in early childhood. A subsequent structural model indicated that emotion understanding processes were significantly positively associated with early indicators of academic success, while emotion control processes were inversely related to socioemotional problems. These results point to the utility of an integrated model of emotion and cognition in early development and offer support for the differentiation of understanding and control processes within these developmental arenas as a framework for future study.
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In the study of early development, investigators have tended to focus on either emotional predictors of social processes or cognitive predictors of academic skills and have treated the developmental areas of emotion and cognition as largely separate from one another, Thus, links have been established between emotionality, emotion regulation, and emotion understanding and early childhood social competence (e.g., Calkins & Fox, 2002; Denham et al., 2003; Eisenberg et al., 1995, 1996). Similarly, research on early academic success has emphasized cognitive precursors, especially processes associated with metacognition (e.g., Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Gaskins, 1994), strategy use (e.g., Griffin, Case, & Siegler, 1994; Pressley, 1995), and other skills central to executive functioning such as memory and problem solving (e.g., Stipek & Ryan, 1997). To date, there has been little research addressing the contributions of emotional processes to academic performance or cognitive processes to social skills. Furthermore, the interconnections between emotion and cognition have not been thoroughly explored, despite recent acknowledgment that integration across these areas of development will likely yield a more complete understanding of early development and successful adaptation in home, peer, and school contexts (Bell & Wolfe, 2004; Blair, 2002; Gray, 2004). The purpose of this study was to examine the associations among emotion understanding, emotion control, cognitive understanding, and cognitive control early in the preschool period to determine if these are unique or overlapping areas of development and to examine their relation to concurrent indices of social and academic skills.
Several lines of work suggest the potential utility of examining the relations between emotion and cognition processes in a single study. First, recent work in the area of self-regulation in both children and adults suggests that both emotion and cognitive processes are implicated in the successful regulation of thought and behavior (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Gray, 2004; Lewis & Stieben, 2004). A second literature that bears on this issue of emotion-cognition relations addresses early indices of psychological adjustment, focusing specifically on early childhood psychopathology. This work emphasizes that children who experience early adjustment difficulties, characterized either by acting-out externalizing problems or anxiety-based internalizing problems, often show deficits in both emotion and cognitive processing (Nigg & Huang-Pollock, 2003). Finally, recent work in developmental neuroscience suggests that there are two separate but closely related and potentially reciprocal subdivisions within the anterior cingulate cortex, one governing cognitive and attentional processes and the other governing emotional processes (Davidson, Putnam, & Larson, 2000; Davis, Bruce, & Gunnar, 2002). The functional relation between these areas provides a biological mechanism for behavioral integration of emotional and cognitive processes in early childhood.
Thus, several productive areas of current research provide a rationale for examining the emergence of emotion-cognition relations in early development. Moreover, recent developmental work supports the hypothesis that these relations may be observable as early as the preschool period. For example, recent research suggests that the ability to control emotional arousal allows children to engage in challenging tasks that provide opportunities for using and practicing executive function skills (Calkins & Dedmon, 2000). During the second and third years, children also acquire a voluntary attentional system that enables them to use deliberate and effortful attentional strategies (Walden & Smith, 1997); these changes in the planful control of attention undoubtedly contribute to goal-directed behavior in both the emotional and cognitive spheres, skills that translate into successful social and academic outcomes.
An important first step in examining the relations between emotional and cognitive development involves specification of the component processes within each area of development (Blair, 2002; Gray, 2004). Drawing from previous literature, we propose that emotion and cognition processes can be separated into two components: control and understanding. Control processes refer to the regulation of affect in social and nonsocial contexts and the regulation of executive function in cognitive tasks. Understanding processes include the meta-cognitive and meta-emotion knowledge that young children begin to internalize during the preschool period. This approach to analyzing emotion and cognition processes builds upon previously described approaches in both areas. For example, Saarni's (1990) model of emotional competence and Halberstadt, Denham, and Dunsmore's (2001) model of affective social competence both implicate elements of emotion understanding (e.g., awareness and identification of one's own and others' emotions) and emotional control (e.g., the ability to cope by using self-regulatory strategies, management, and regulation of affect) as essential to early adaptive development. In these models, the underlying emotional processes are presented as distinct but interrelated skills. Likewise, in the cognitive domain, knowledge, metacognition, and strategy employment are all believed to influence performance on academic and cognitive tasks (Pressley, 1995), and theory of mind (an element of cognitive understanding) and executive function have been viewed as interrelated but distinct dimensions of cognitive development (Perner, Lang, & Kloo, 2002). Our approach is unique in that we identify multiple skills that appear similar in function--either understanding or control--across the emotion and cognition arenas. Although we acknowledge that other emotion and cognition processes are displayed by young children (e.g., empathy, attributions, planning, attentional control), we have focused on a set of specific processes that have been linked consistently to social and academic performance in young children in prior research (Eisenberg et al., 1995, 1996; Stipek & Ryan, 1997).
The four factors of interest are described below along with an overview of how they relate to the outcomes of interest. Emotional control processes are generally referred to as emotional reactivity and emotional regulation; these involve responses produced or inhibited during an affectively arousing situation (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998; Kopp, 1989). Emotional control helps children maintain or modulate their arousal, facilitating positive social interaction and effective problem solving (Eisenberg et al., 1995, 1996). Emotion understanding includes the ability to recognize and label one's own and others' emotions, tie them to situations, understand their causes, identify familial and cultural display rules, and recognize disparity between emotional displays and felt emotions (Campos & Barrett, 1984; Denham, 1998). Knowledge about emotions allows children to communicate their own emotional experiences effectively and respond appropriately to the emotional signals of other people, thereby enhancing social competence (Denham et al., 2003). Cognitive control processes include the set of skills often referred to as executive function, particularly inhibitory control and working memory (Carlson, Moses, & Claxton, 2004). These abilities appear to develop somewhat interdependently (Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1995) and enhance children's ability to engage in effective goal-directed behavior by reducing their attention to nonessential stimuli and allowing them to consider multiple solutions to a problem. Executive function skills have been linked to literacy and mathematical reasoning in young children (Espy, McDiarmid, Cwik, Stalets, Hamby, & Senn, 2004; Gathercole, Brown, &...
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