Poster #208 - Investigating the Developmental Timing of Self-Regulation in Early Childhood

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

The first indications of effortful self-regulation, i.e., attempts to regulate one’s own behavior without adult direction, appear between ages 3 through 4 years (Kopp, 1982). However, there is little direct empirical evidence addressing when young children’s strategic attempts actually change their behavior, which requires analysis of temporal information (Cole et al., 2004). We conceptualize self-regulation as the influence of engagement of executive processes (EP) on the prepotent responses (PR) evoked by task conditions. We present evidence of inter-individual variation in the timing at which PR declines and EP increases in early childhood. That is, we examine how children’s individual trajectories of change in PR and EP relate to each other over developmental time. At four age points, we observed children when they had to wait until their mothers completed work to open a gift and indexed PR in terms of children’s interest in the gift and frustration about waiting to open it and EP in terms of the strategy most associated with successful self-regulation in a delayed reward task, i.e., distraction (Peake, Hebl, & Mischel, 2002).
The data came from a longitudinal study of emotion regulation; during lab visits, children (46% female) completed an 8 minute (480 second) waiting task with their mothers at ages 24 months (n=111), 36 months (120), 48 months (120), and 5 years (96). Prepotent responses were indexed by the proportion of seconds in which children focused on the gift, bid angrily about waiting to the mother, expressed anger, and/or engaged in disruptive behavior. Executive processes were indexed by the proportion of seconds in which children engaged executive attention, i.e., distracted themselves by getting absorbed in any activity that was appropriate. Individuals’ differences in timing of age-related changes in PR and EP were examined using a series of nonlinear (logistic) growth models (Ram & Grimm, 2015).
Descriptive statistics in Table 1 show that the average proportion of PR time decreased with age, and the proportion of EP time increased with age. The key results of the logistic growth models are displayed in Figure 1. The projected age at which the average proportion of each variable reached .50 of task time was 24.88 months for PR (red lines) and 58.55 months for EP (blue lines). Moreover, individual differences in PR and EP timing were correlated r = .41, such that the timing of the age of decrease in PR proportion was coupled with timing of the age of increase in EP proportion (scatterplot within Figure 1).
These findings provide one form of empirical documentation that a strategy can change young children’s anger and related prepotent responses, and that this influence emerges at the age point that Kopp (1982) posited. We discuss the implications of individual differences in timing, given the fact that for children whose PR duration declines earlier their EP duration increases sooner (and vice versa). We discuss some future directions for this approach, questions raised by the findings, and potential implications for these developmental changes.

Authors

• Breana Genaro, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Lindsey M Green, Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kizzann Ashana Ramsook, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pamela M. Cole, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nilam Ram, Penn State University
  Non-Presenting Author