Emotion, regulation and quality of social functioning

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The major purpose of the proposed research is to examine the contributions of individual differences in various types of effortful control (EC: efficiency of executive attention, including the ability to inhibit a dominant response and/or to activate a subdominant response, to plan, and to detect errors) and reactive (less voluntary) control to children's socioemotional functioning, including their social competence, empathy, personality resiliency; and adjustment and its possible precursors. Other goals include examining normative development and relating aspects of parenting (e.g., expression of emotion, control tactics, warmth, reactions to children's negative emotions) to children's emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Predictions include: (a) low attentional and activational regulation, low resiliency, involuntary overcontrol (or low impulsivity), and proneness to fear and sadness will predict internalizing behaviors and early shyness/behavioral inhibition; (b) low reactive control, low EC and high dispositional anger/frustration will predict adolescent externalizing problems and problems with compliance/defiance in young children; (c) EC is linearly related to resiliency whereas impulsivity bears a positive linear relation to resiliency in young children and a quadratic relation in older children; and (d) negative emotionality sometimes will moderate the relation of regulation to outcomes. In regard to normative development, it is predicted that relations between developmental outcomes and EC become stronger with age in life, whereas relations between outcomes and impulsivity or behavioral inhibition (reactive control) are strongest at young ages (when EC is weakest). A multi-method (behavioral, facial, and physiological measures, questionnaires) and multi-reporter approach will be used in three longitudinal studies, two ongoing studies of adolescents, and one new study of young children (with multiple assessments). In all studies, 7 constructs will be measured: social competence/adjustment, EC, reactive control, resiliency, emotionality, parenting, and family-level variables (e.g., socioeconomic status, marital functioning). In the study of young children, developmental level, language, and understanding of emotions also will be measured. Across the 3 samples, both normative change in these aspects of functioning and the ways that individual differences in emotion, EC, reactive control, and parenting, jointly and uniquely predict mental health and social competence (when controlling for initial levels of the latter constructs) will be examined.