Emotional and Cognitive Self-Regulation and Prosociality in Preschool Children

• In Event: 1-148 - International Perspectives on Sociocognitive and Socioemotive Mechanisms in Prosocial Development

Integrative Statement

Self-regulation enables children to control their attention and arousal as key components of goal-directed behavior (Blair & Ursache, 2011). Self-regulation is important to investigate because it plays a central role on children’s social positive adjustment during the preschool years (Lengua, 2003). Self-regulatory abilities allow children to control their levels of activity (both mental and behavioral) and to engage in more helping behaviors, as they are able to identify and act upon other’s needs (Eisenberg, 2006). Also, self-regulation has been identified as one important predictor of sociocognitive skills, including moral reasoning (Carlo, 2014).
Although self-regulation has been linked to moral reasoning and prosocial behaviors (i.e., acts intended to benefit others; Carlo, 2014), researchers have not examined whether both cognitive and emotional self-regulation are related to such outcomes. In the present study, emotional and cognitive aspects of self-regulation are investigated, as well as their links to other relevant sociocognitive aspects such as prosocial moral reasoning (i.e., thinking about situations that create a conflict between a person’s needs and desires and those of another; Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006) and different forms of prosocial behavior.
One hundred ninety-three children (91 boys) from public preschool centers in San José, Costa Rica were recruited (M age = 6.29 years, sd = 1.35). Parents reported on children’s temperament (CBQ; Rothbart et al, 2001), teachers reported on children’s prosocial behaviors (Rodriguez Villagra et al., 2010), and experimenters administered children’s emotion regulation (Smith-Donald et al., 2007), executive function (self-ordered pointing tasks and stroop tasks), prosocial moral reasoning (Eisenberg, 1986) and school readiness (Woodcock-Muñoz tests; Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval, 1995) tasks. Two dimensions of self-regulation were used: cognitive self-regulation (working memory and inhibition) and emotional self-regulation (effortful control and emotion regulation).
Preliminary correlations (see Table 1) showed that cognitive self-regulation correlated with emotional self-regulation and with needs-oriented moral reasoning. Emotional self-regulation showed negative relations with hedonistic moral reasoning and positive relations with all three types of prosocial behaviors. A path analysis was conducted to further explore these relations. The integrative model had an adequate fit to the data, 2(27) = 353, p = .001, AGFI = 1.00, CFI = .96, TLI = 1.00, and RMSEA =.00 (.00-.12), and it showed that emotional self-regulation, explained significant variation in prosocial behaviors, and that hedonistic moral reasoning might be a mechanism for these effects, at least for public helping. Cognitive self-regulation had a significant effect on needs-oriented moral reasoning, however, this type of reasoning did not have a significant effect on any types of prosocial behaviors (see Figure 1).
Discussion will focus on the importance of differentiating both emotional and cognitive aspects of self-regulation, and the specific relations that these components of children’s self-regulation have with prosocial behaviors. Also, the importance of considering specific types of moral reasoning when predicting prosocial behaviors will be discussed.

Authors

• L. Diego Conejo, University of Costa Rica
  Presenting Author

• Gustavo Carlo, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author