Longitudinal Associations between Socioeconomic Status, Executive Function, and Emotion Regulation Development in Adolescence

• In Event: Leveraging Latent Growth Modeling To Understand Antecedents and Consequences of Self-Regulation from Early-Childhood to Adolescence

Abstract

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important predictor of child and adolescent development, affecting general health, physical illness, cognitive abilities, and socioemotional adjustment. Executive function (EF) is the ability to regulate cognitions that are related to goals, rather than to immediate stimuli. Emotion regulation (ER) is a process whereby individuals attempt to initiate and modulate the occurrence, intensity, and expressions of emotion. Lower SES has been consistently linked to lower EF abilities in children (Noble, 2007). Existing literature points to lifelong impacts of lower SES on EF and ER, even if later economic conditions improve (Cohen et al., 2010). The current prospective longitudinal study aimed to examine whether level and changes in SES would predict developmental trajectories (i.e., intercept and slope) of both EF and ER.
The sample included 167 adolescents (53% males; 88% White) and their primary caregiver who participated in six waves of data collection. Adolescents were 13 or 14 years of age (M = 14.13 years at Time 1 and M = 19.64 at Time 6). At Times 1-4, parents provided information about their socioeconomic status and SES was calculated based on income-to-need ratio and parent education. At Times 1-6, adolescents completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004) as well as measures of EF that capture three dimensions of EF (i.e., shifting, working memory, and inhibition; Miyake et al., 2000) which were averaged to a composite.
Bivariate growth curve modeling was used to examine the growth of SES as it related to the developmental trajectories of ER and EF separately. Both models showed good model fit. Results indicated that the changes in EF growth (i.e., slope) were predicted by income at Time 1 (b = -.09, SE = .04 p = .030). When examining the different EF dimensions separately, working memory seemed to drive the overall income effect on EF growth, such that changes in working memory were significantly predicted by income in Time 1 (b = .31, SE = .15, p = .040). Changes in inhibitory control (b = -.001, SE = .002, p = .512) or shifting (b = .001, SE = .02, p = .953) were not significantly predicted by income in Time 1. Findings from the model examining the growth of SES as related to the growth of ER did not yield significant findings.
The findings from the current study clarify that family income matters for the development of executive function, but not necessarily the development of emotion regulation. Such findings are consistent with previous literature indicating that a lack of material resources impairs cognitive development, whereas exposure to threat disrupts emotion development (Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2014). The results also highlight the need to parse apart EF dimensions in order to examine if some may be more greatly impacted by lower socioeconomic status. Further, future work could examine if there are possible moderators or mediators (e.g., parent behaviors, household chaos, enrichment activities) affecting the relationship between SES and EF abilities.

Authors

• Claudia Clinchard, Virginia Tech
  Presenting Author

• Brooks King-Casas, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, and Virginia Tech

• Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, Virginia Tech