Purpose: Research has shown that children who stutter (CWS) demonstrate poor adaptive functioning, or poor functional, social, and psychological skills, when compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). Previous work has also shown that preschool CWS demonstrate significantly lower effortful control than CWNS. High effortful control, or the ability to inhibit a dominant response, is predictive of high adaptive functioning in children who are exposed to a range of adversities. The purposes of this study were fourfold: (a) to investigate if the differences between preschool CWS and CWNS in effortful control extended to school-aged children; (b) to determine if effortful control could uniquely explain adaptive functioning after controlling for a diagnosis of stuttering; (c) to investigate whether effortful control was more influential to CWS than to CWNS; and (d) to investigate whether effortful control uniquely explained adaptive functioning in CWS after controlling for stuttering frequency. Methods: Effortful control and seven core areas of adaptive functioning were investigated in 46 school-age CWS and 46 CWNS. Eight independent two tailed t-tests were used to assess whether CWS demonstrated lower effortful control than CWNS and lower adaptive functioning than CWNS in seven adaptive functioning areas: communication competence, peer competence, internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, general anxiety, social anxiety, and depression. Correlation and hierarchical regression analyses were used to examine the extent to which each component of adaptive functioning was related to effortful control when controlling for age, intelligence, parent-child relationship, and stuttering group membership. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to assess the extent to which each separate component of adaptive functioning was related to effortful control in CWS only. Results: CWS demonstrated significantly lower effortful control when measured by the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire (a parent report measure of hot effortful control) than CWNS. CWS also performed more poorly in all aspects of adaptive functioning; however statistical significance was only reached for internalizing behaviors and general anxiety. The hierarchical linear regressions indicated that effortful control predicted the majority of the variance in five areas of adaptive functioning: peer competence, externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, general anxiety, and depression. In the group of CWS, stuttering frequency predicted internalizing behaviors, general anxiety, and social anxiety. However, stuttering was the most important contributor to only one of the seven components of adaptive functioning, social anxiety. Conclusions: This study with school-aged CWS extends previous work indicating that preschool CWS exhibit lower effortful control than their normally fluent peers. The fact that emotional aspects of effortful control were a stronger predictor of social functioning, internalizing behaviors, and externalizing behaviors than either a stuttering diagnosis or the quantity of stuttering, may explain the adaptive functioning deficits often observed in CWS. Because effortful control is both a powerful contributor to adaptive functioning, and is reduced in CWS, clinical therapy approaches, which boost effortful control skills, have the potential to greatly lessen the impact of stuttering for CWS.

Through the life history theory perspective, this paper seeks to demonstrate how early adversity shapes the development of effortful control in ways that aim to best match the individual to the proximal environment toward ultimate goals despite trade-offs related to social, academic, and later health outcomes. Investigation linking early life harshness (i.e., cues of extrinsic morbidity-mortality; Ellis et al., 2009) and unpredictability (i.e., stochastic changes in environmental conditions; Ellis et al., 2009) to the development of self-regulation could facilitate a more nuanced understanding of early environmental effects on development. The current study investigates early environmental harshness and unpredictability as unique predictors for a self-regulation construct, effortful control. It was hypothesized that early life harshness and unpredictability would uniquely and negatively predict effortful control among preschoolers. While there was no evidence that cues of unpredictability predicted effortful control, cues of harshness, specifically neighborhood harshness, did statistically significantly predict effortful control in the direction expected. This appears to be the first study to explicitly investigate effortful control development in early childhood within the harshness and unpredictability framework.

abstract: Obesity is associated with many well-established health risks as well as high annual public health costs. Intervening in the trajectory of obesity becomes significantly more difficult after a child has reached obesity. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the processes that influence weight early in life. Parents serve as one of the main influences on child health, have a significant impact on the weight of their offspring, and are often incorporated into childhood obesity prevention programs. However, the mutual influence that parents and children have on each other is not accounted for. Using an Actor-Partner Interdependence model, the current study 1) examined the effect of children’s and mother’s temperament (e.g., negative affectivity, effortful control, and impulsivity) on their own weight as well as the weight of the other dyad member, 2) explored the effect of the interaction between mother and child temperament on both members’ weight, 3) assessed the effect of mother’s approach to food on mother and child weight, and 4) investigated how temperament might moderate the relationships between mother’s approach to food and mother and child weight. The sample consisted of 220 mother-child dyads. Children ranged from 4 to 6 years of age. Mothers completed self-report questionnaires on their own temperament and approach to food as well as their child’s temperament. Weight measures were assessed in the laboratory for both mother and child. Results indicated children’s impulsivity was related to their mother’s higher weight. The interaction between mother and child temperament was not significantly associated with weight. However, the interaction between child impulsivity and mother’s approach to food was significant; the effect of the mother’s approach to food on her own weight depended on their child’s impulsivity behaviors. Specifically, mothers’ approach to food on her own weight was nonsignificant when her child showed higher levels of impulsivity. The association of mother’s approach to food with her own weight was stronger when her child exhibited average to low impulsivity levels. This investigation of the influence of mother and child on each other’s weight is well-placed for translation into later obesity preventative and intervention efforts for family systems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Psychology 2021

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Children's self-regulation has been found to be related to optimal developmental outcomes; however, researchers are still investigating how cognitive and emotional regulation work together to explain development of self-regulation. This study investigated how children's private speech interacted with emotion regulation, conceptualized as effortful control, to predict children's emotionality. I also examined how private speech and effortful control may be different strategies of self-regulation that more fully explain the relation of parental emotion coaching philosophy to children's emotionality. Preschool-aged children (n = 156) and their primary caregivers participated in this study. Parental emotion coaching was observationally measured as encouraging of negative emotion when discussing a time when children were upset. Children's non-beneficial private speech was transcribed and coded during a cognitively-taxing task. Children's effortful control (attention shifting, attention focusing, and inhibitory control) and negative emotion (anger and sadness) were measured using parent-report on the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ). It was found that children's parent-reported effortful control significantly mediated the relation between parent's observed emotion coaching philosophy and children's reported negative emotionality. Parents who did more emotion coaching had children reported to have greater effortful control and in turn were reported as less emotionally negative. While parental emotion coaching did not predict children's non-beneficial private speech, children who used less of the non-beneficial private speech were reported as less emotionally negative. Lastly, children's private speech and effortful control interacted to predict children's negative emotion. When children were low in effortful control they were high in negative emotion, regardless of how much non-beneficial private speech they used. However, children with higher levels of effortful control were reported as less negative when non-beneficial private speech was low. This research supports the importance of considering both cognitive and emotional development together, because private speech and emotion regulation interacted to predict children's negative emotionality. In addition, parents who support and encourage negative emotions may aid children's effortful control. This research further supports the importance of children's use of private speech in the classroom because non-beneficial private speech may be an additional cue for teachers and caregivers to know that a child needs assistance. / Ph. D.

Extensive research on the development of self-regulation has demonstrated that better executive functioning and effortful control during the preschool years are associated with greater kindergarten and early school achievement. Recent findings suggest that self-regulation tasks differ in their assessment of “hot” and “cool” regulation, how these processes map onto effortful control and executive functioning, and may predict school readiness. However, only a few studies have examined the validity of hot and cool regulation tasks (Allan & Lonigan, 2014; Di Norcia, Pecora, Bombi, Baumgartner, & Laghi, 2015; Willoughby, Kupersmidt, Voegler-Lee, & Bryant, 2011), and how they predict socio-emotional competence (Di Norcia et al., 2015) and academic performance (Kim, Nordling, Yoon, Boldt, & Kochanska, 2013). The current study examined the validity of hot and cool tasks as measures of self-regulation and predictive measures of school readiness within a low-income sample. The sample consisted of 64 preschoolers between the ages of three (n= 38) and four (n= 26) who were enrolled in a blended Head Start program. The Preschooler Self-Regulation Assessment, Woodcock Johnson subtests (Letter Word, Applied Problem, and Picture Vocabulary), and teacher ratings of social competence (Social Competence and Behavioral Evaluation) and emotional competence (Emotion Regulation Checklist) were collected in the fall and spring of the school year. Results indicated that performance on the Cool and Hot tasks was moderate to highly correlated with academic performance and teacher ratings of socio-emotional competence respectively. Developmental differences in selfregulation performance suggested that cool regulation begins to develop later in the preschool period and may depend on earlier development of hot regulatory processes. There were also gains in academic achievement and socio-emotional competence from fall to spring. Regression analyses indicated that Hot and Cool tasks did not predict socio-emotional competence and academic achievement as distinctively as expected. Hot and cool regulation seemed to predict socio-emotional competence and academic achievement in parallel, with the exception of math performance, which was strongly predicted by Cool task performance above and beyond Hot tasks. Results suggest that hot and cool regulation overlap in predicting school readiness.

This study investigated the impact of parenting and children’s self-control on children’s externalizing behavior problems among 167 predominantly African-American mothers and their 2-year-old children. Two hypotheses were considered based on two distinct theoretical origins of self-control. First, consistent with a behavioral perspective, exposure to positive parenting was hypothesized to indirectly affect externalizing behaviors through children’s self-control; that is, children’s self-control was expected to mediate the association between positive parenting and externalizing behaviors. Second, consistent with a temperamental perspective, self-control was expected to moderate the impact of positive parenting on levels of children’s externalizing behaviors such that only children with a propensity towards low self-control benefited from positive parenting. Results were not consistent with the mediational hypothesis and provided limited support for the moderational hypothesis. That is, only for children with characteristically low self-control was exposure to more positive parenting associated with fewer externalizing behavior problems, as rated by teachers, one year later.

abstract: Research on self-regulatory variables like mindfulness and effortful control proposes strong links with physical and mental health outcomes across the lifespan, from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and old age. One pathway by which self-regulation may confer health benefits is through individual differences in reports of and emotional responses to daily negative and positive events. Mindfulness is broadly defined as non-reactivity to inner experiences, while effortful control is broadly defined as attentional and behavioral regulation. Mindfulness and effortful control have both been conceptualized to exert their beneficial effects on development through their influence on exposure/engagement and emotional reactivity/responsiveness to both negative and positive events, yet few empirical studies have tested this claim using daily-diary designs, a research methodology that permits for examining this process. With a sample of community-dwelling adults (n=191), this thesis examined whether dispositional mindfulness (i.e., non-reactivity of inner experience) and effortful control (i.e., attention and behavioral regulation) modulate reports of and affective reactivity/responsiveness to daily negative and positive events across 30 days. Results showed that mindfulness and effortful control were each associated with reduced exposure to daily stressors but not positive events. They also showed that mindfulness and effortful control, respectively, predicted smaller decreases in negative affect and smaller increases in positive affect on days that positive events occurred. Overall, these findings offer insight into how these self-regulatory factors operate in the context of middle-aged adults’ everyday life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2018

Substantial evidence from previous research has supported the idea that greater self-regulation in the form of “cool” self-regulation or executive functioning and “hot” self-regulation or effortful control is associated with higher academic achievement within the preschool years and school readiness in the kindergarten years (Anaya, 2016; Carlson, 2005). However, there are only a few studies that assess the prediction of school readiness through validated cool and hot self-regulation tasks (Carlson, 2005; Krain, Wilson, Arbuckle, Kastellanos, & Wilham, 2006; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & Posner, 2003; Thompson & Giedd, 2000). There also few studies examining to what extent cool and hot-self-regulation tasks predict socio-emotional (Blair, 2002) and academic achievement (Bull & Scherif, 2001), which are aspects of school readiness. The current study examined the validity of hot and cool tasks as measures of school readiness within a preschool sample (n = 86) enrolled in one of two programs: one blended Head Start and one full Head Start program. Adapted hot and cool self-regulation tasks, global observer ratings of hot and cool self-regulation tasks (Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment Assessor Report (PSRA-AR) and the Observation of Child Temperament Scale), Woodcock Johnson subtests (Letter Word, Applied Problems, and Picture Vocabulary), teacher ratings of social competence (Social Competence and Behavioral Evaluation) and emotional competence (Emotion Regulation Checklist) were collected in the fall of the school year. Results indicated that performance on cool tasks of measures cool self-regulation were highly correlated with academic performance and that the Snack Delay task and the PSRA-AR component scores (Attention/Impulse Control and Positive Emotion) of hot self-regulation were correlated with socio-emotional competence. Additionally, there were no age differences for hot self-regulation. Regression analyses suggested that hot self-regulation predicted socio-emotional competence and cool tasks predicted academic achievement. However, conclusions regarding hot self-regulation age differences and predictive validity are limited by the sole use of one hot task within this study and the results do not warrant a conclusion regarding whether hot self-regulation and cool self-regulation are separate self-regulation constructs, given the use of only one hot task.