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Article Excerpt
Self-regulation, or the ability to control one's actions and responses, is essential for healthy development across varied contexts. Self-regulation comes in several forms, including emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. The present study sought to examine whether individual differences in one form of self-regulation was related to children's regulation in another domain. In addition, we explored whether different forms of self-regulation were similar in their contribution to preschoolers' understanding of false belief. Findings revealed concurrent relations among emotional, behavioral, and cognitive self-regulation. When measures of children's self-regulation were related to their performance on false belief tasks one year later, executive function predicted false belief understanding, while emotional and behavioral self-regulation did not contribute significantly to the model. These findings support the theory that self-regulation may consist of different interrelated types, including emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. In addition, the study provides important discriminant validity for the types of properties by which inhibitory control processes may be distinguished.
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Self-regulation, or the ability to control one's actions and responses, is essential for healthy development across varied contexts. This ability comes in several forms, including emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. It has been proposed that individual differences in one form of self-regulation may be related to children's regulation in another domain (Calkins & Howse, 2004). To date, there exists limited empirical work exploring a wide range of self-regulatory skills to address this issue. The first aim of the present study, therefore, was to examine individual differences in preschool children's emotional, behavior, and cognitive self-regulation. Another important question is whether various forms of self-regulation are similar in their contributions to other developmental achievements. Specifically, recent work has identified an association among executive function, a cognitive form of self-regulation, and children's understanding of false belief, a critical element in their development of theory of mind and significant to their social development (e.g., Carlson & Moses, 2001; Frye et al., 1995; Hughes, 1998). The second aim of the present study was to explore whether different forms of self-regulation are similar in their contribution to preschooler's understanding of false belief.
Self-regulation is broadly defined as the control or organization of behavior, or the active suppression process engaged for the purposes of pursuing a goal (Fuster, 1997; Kopp, 1989; Posner & Rothbart, 2007), and involves control over a variety of processes, including emotion (i.e., emotion regulation), motor (i.e., behavioral control), and cognition (i.e., executive function). Theoretically, individual differences in one type of self-regulation might be expected to be related to regulation in another domain (Calkins & Howse, 2004). Blair (2002) hypothesized that children with difficulty regulating emotion may show poor behavioral and cognitive self-regulation or may have less practice than other children with more regulatory skills. On the role of executive function and behavioral control in aiding emotion regulation, Kopp (1989) highlights the importance of planfulness, organization, and monitoring in aiding children to identify sources of distress, reflect on how distress was alleviated in the past, and enlist the appropriate strategies for self-soothing. It may be that the underlying process of inhibitory control explains relations among various forms of self-regulation. Indeed, neuropsychological research points to correlations between dysfunctions of the frontal lobe and inhibitory deficits in action, cognition, emotion, and personality, suggesting that a common structure may govern these processes (Fuster, 1997; Luria, 1973). Developmentally, these skills appear in simpler forms across infancy but show the greatest maturation in the preschool years.
Children's Development of Self-Regulation
Cognitive self-regulation, or executive function, entails flexible goal-directed behavior, the temporal organization of behavior, and flexibility of complex and purposeful behavior (e.g., Fuster, 1997). Although cognitive self-regulation is present by around 12 months of age, the greatest developmental growth in this ability is thought to occur between about 3 and 6 years of age. During this time, children show significant improvement in their ability to inhibit perseverative and prepotent responses, to use rule-based reasoning skills, and to use overt speech to monitor their behavior (e.g., Diamond & Taylor, 1996; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995; Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994).
The self-regulation of emotion is an extrinsic and intrinsic process responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions or expressions (Thompson, 1994). Rudimentary forms of this skill appear in early infancy (Stifter, 2002). With age, children become better able to express and self-regulate their emotions, as can be seen in their generation of emotional expressions in play and their modulation of emotional expressions during stressful events (e.g., Thompson, 1994). Studies have shown that children as young as 3 years of age are able to regulate their emotional expressions in accordance with social display rules, and this ability shows age-related changes in children from first through fifth grades (Saarni, 1984).
Behavioral self-regulation develops as children acquire greater motor capacities and an increasingly complex behavioral repertoire. The inhibition of some motor activity is necessary for the attainment of goals that do not call for physical activity (Maccoby, Dowley, Hagen, & Degerman, 1965). This ability begins to mature sometime after the first year, and by the preschool years children can more flexibly balance self-defined needs with social expectations (Kopp, 1989). Behavioral control includes the capacity to actively suppress or delay approach, to regulate the pace of one's movement, to willingly inhibit forbidden impulses, to delay gratification, to suppress or initiate an activity, and to comply with others' requests (Kochanska, Murray, and Harlan, 2000; Posner & Rothbart, 2007).
Although these skills may emerge and consolidate at different ages, there is empirical evidence to suggest some commonality. For example, several studies have demonstrated associations between traditional executive function measures and those requiring greater behavioral and attentional regulation (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Cole, Usher, and Cargo, 1993). Likewise, research has linked behavioral control to emotion regulation (Howse, Calkins, Anastopoulos, Keane, & Shelton, 2003; Stifter, Spinrad, & Braungart, 1999) and to other measures of behavioral self-regulation (Kochanska et al., 1998). Finally, Carlson and Moses (2001) demonstrated that executive function tasks that require children to provide novel responses incompatible with prepotent responses (i.e., conflict tasks) can be distinguished from those that require the ability to delay, temper, or suppress an impulsive response (i.e., delay tasks). It is possible to argue that measures of impulsivity and those assessing modulation of emotional responses can be more consistent with delay tasks than conflict tasks.
Associations between Self-Regulatory Processes and Understanding of False Belief
Important to our understanding of children's self-regulatory processes is a consideration of whether various forms of regulation are similar in their contribution to other developmental achievements. There is an ever increasing body of work that implicates the role of executive function in children's ability to understand false beliefs (e.g., Carlson & Moses, 2001; Frye et al., 1995; Hughes, 1998). Children's comprehension of false belief indicates that they can distinguish between reality and the beliefs of others and can hold these multiple (and often contradictory) representations of events in their mind at once (Wellman, 1990; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). This ability emerges in the preschool years at around age 4, with some variation around the age of acquisition (Astington, 2003; Wellman et al., 2001). An understanding of false belief has been implicated in children's development of social competence (Astington, 2003). While the specific mechanism underlying the connection between executive function and false belief understanding has yet to be confirmed, there is empirical support of both concurrent and longitudinal relations (e.g., Flynn, O'Malley, & Wood, 2004; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995; Carlson, Mandel, & Williams, 2004; Carlson & Moses, 2001; Hughes, 1998; Perner, Lang, & Kloo, 2002). With respect to the specific types of executive function, Carlson and Moses (2001) found relations between various measures of delay and theory of mind, but the conflict task battery was found to be a better predictor. In another study (Moore, Barresi, & Thompson, 1998), 4-year-olds who opted for a delayed reward showed better performance on a measure of theory of mind. Given that emotion-regulation and behavioral control are most consistent with delay executive function tasks, the findings suggest that such tasks should also be related to theory of mind, albeit to a lesser extent than true conflict executive function tasks.
The first goal of the present study was to examine individual differences in emotional, behavioral, and cognitive self-regulation. We hypothesized that the three forms of self-regulation would be related, at both the level of individual measures and composite batteries. Our second goal was to assess relations between self-regulation and theory of mind. We hypothesized that executive function would be a significant predictor of false belief understanding and speculated that both emotion-regulation and behavioral control would also be significant predictors. Theoretically, these other forms of self-regulation could also moderate the relation between executive function and theory of mind in a linear fashion such that, overall, more self-regulation (e.g., greater behavioral regulation and executive function) would be a stronger predictor of theory of mind than executive function alone. Alternatively, executive function could act as a developmental link between other...
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