Neural correlates of reactive and effortful control in young children

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Emotion regulation can be defined as the control of attention, thought, and action impulses as well as regulation of emotional states themselves, and is thought to engage regions of the frontal cortex. Individual differences in personality style and in social functioning, as well as many forms of psychopathology, are associated with differences in emotion regulation. Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children reach many milestones in the capacity for emotion regulation, but neural changes that accompany behavioural change are still not known. The goal of this study is to use a brain imaging method to capture individual differences in brain patterns subserving emotion regulation as they emerge in development. More specifically we wish to look at brain patterns associated with reactive and effortful control. Reactive control includes automatic attentional biases and control processes that are associated with automatic tendencies to approach or withdraw. Effortful control involves a wide range of more voluntary strategies of emotion regulation. We hypothesize that differences in behavioural measures of temperament and self-control may predict or be predicted by patterns of brain activity. To study this process, we will present emotional faces to children while they are involved in a simple attentional task. Data will be collected at three time points: Just prior to beginning junior kindergarten (3 1/2-4 years), during senior kindergarten (5 years), and at the end of Grade 1 (6 1/2-7 years). Personality questionnaires filled out by parents and laboratory measures of behaviours associated with reactive and effortful control will be compared with patterns of cortical activation, both concurrently and over time. We thus hope to gain some understanding of the link between individual styles of emotion regulation and brain development over a key developmental time window. This understanding will be important for basic psychological knowledge, but it may also help psychologists learn how to identify neural patterns associated with behaviour problems before they become too entrenched.