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Poster #203 - Cross-cultural links among executive functions, emotionality, emotion regulation, and effortful control in preadolescence

Sat, March 23, 8:00 to 9:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

The transition to adolescence is associated with substantial increases in the prevalence of a wide range of psychological problems that have long-term effects on both physical and mental health in adulthood (Costello et al., 2011). Adolescent self-regulation related processes have figured prominently in scientific inquiries about factors that contribute to the onset and duration of psychological problems (Steinberg, 2005). The aim of this paper is to help clarify self-regulation related processes and their antecedents in order to advance research scientists’ and practitioners’ abilities to identify, prevent, and ameliorate the antecedents and negative consequences of poor psychological adjustment in childhood and adolescence.
In this study, three relevant and correlated aspects of adolescent self-regulation were studied: executive functions (EF), emotionality, and emotion regulation. EF is an umbrella term referring to several cognitive processes—such as working memory and higher-order processes (Zelazo et al., 2004). EF has been shown to predict low negative emotionality (e.g., children with impairments in EF tend to become angry easily; Rohlf et al., 2018), high emotion regulation (e.g., impairments in EF are associated with a tendency to ruminate when experiencing depressed mood; Connolly et al., 2014) and high effortful control (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2010). Virtually all of the relevant research has been conducted in the U.S. In the present study, we ask whether similar relations among aforementioned correlated aspects of adolescent self-regulation are observed in other cultural contexts as well.
This study investigated longitudinal relations among EF, emotionality, and effortful control in a sample of preadolescents from three countries. Participants (50% female) included 88 mother-child dyads from Colombia, 190 dyads from Italy, and 263 dyads from the USA. At time 1 (M age = 10.89; SD = .70), children completed a computerized battery to assess cognitive capacities related to EF, which included a test of resistance to interference in working memory, a digit-span memory test, and a test of verbal fluency (Steinberg et al., 2009). At time 2 (M age = 12.58; SD = .68), mothers’ reports of adolescents’ anger, sadness, positive emotionality, and effortful control were assessed using the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire (Capaldi & Rothbart, 1992). Concurrently, children completed the depressive and hostile rumination, and sadness and anger coping subscales of the vignette-based Anger and Sadness Self-Regulation Scale (Di Giunta et al., 2017). Multigroup path analyses using gender and site as separate grouping variables were conducted (Table 1). Across sites and gender, EF at time 1 predicted low sadness, low anger (except in Colombia), high positive emotionality (only in Colombia), high effortful control, high sadness coping, and low depressive and hostile rumination one year later. These results support the relevant role of EF in predicting different aspects related to preadolescents’ emotionality, emotion regulation, and effortful control in contexts other than the USA. Findings from this study could also advance professionals’ abilities in educational and clinical settings to identify adolescents’ strengths and limitations in those self-regulation-related processes that are crucial to promote adolescents’ well-being.

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