VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Smith, Cynthia L."

Browsing by Author "Smith, Cynthia L."

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Advances in Behavioral Remote Data Collection in the Home Setting: Assessing the Mother-Infant Relationship and Infant's Adaptive Behavior via Virtual Visits
Shin, Eunkyung; Smith, Cynthia L.; Howell, Brittany R. (Frontiers, 2021-10-01)
Psychological science is struggling with moving forward in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially due to the halting of behavioral data collection in the laboratory. Safety barriers to assessing psychological behavior in person increased the need for remote data collection in natural settings. In response to these challenges, researchers, including our team, have utilized this time to advance remote behavioral methodology. In this article, we provide an overview of our group’s strategies for remote data collection methodology and examples from our research in collecting behavioral data in the context of psychological functioning. Then, we describe the design and development of our strategies for remote data collection of mother-infant interactions, with the goal being to assess maternal sensitivity and intrusiveness, as well as infants’ adaptive behaviors in several developmental domains. During these virtual visits over Zoom, mother-infant dyads watched a book-reading video and were asked to participate in peek-a-boo, toy play, and toy removal tasks. After the behavioral tasks, a semi-structured interview (Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale – VABS III) was conducted to assess the infant’s adaptive behavior in communication, socialization, daily living skills, and motor domains. We delineate the specific strategies we applied to integrate laboratory tasks and a semi-structured interview into remote data collection in home settings with mothers and infants. We also elaborate on issues encountered during remote data collection and how we resolved these challenges. Lastly, to inform protocols for future remote data collection, we address considerations and recommendations, as well as benefits and future directions for behavioral researchers in developmental psychology research.
Associations between maternal personality dysfunction and emotion suppression and adolescent emotion suppression
Phillips, Jennifer J.; Smith, Cynthia L.; Bell, Martha A. (2024-11-27)
Background: Adaptive strategies of emotion regulation are important for adolescents, as maladaptive strategies of such can manifest as psychopathology that is sometimes severe. Individual biological characteristics and influences from peers have been shown to have an effect on the development of emotion regulation strategies in adolescents. Maternal factors, however, have received less attention in this age group regarding how they might predict emotion regulation in adolescents. Given that prior work has demonstrated that certain maternal factors, like emotion regulation and personality, play a crucial role in the development of emotion regulation strategies in early childhood, we sought to examine these associations in adolescents in our current study. Methods: Adolescents and their mothers (n = 123) both self-reported data on their own emotion regulation, and mothers also self-reported data on their own personality dysfunction. We operationalized maternal and adolescent emotion regulation as emotion suppression, a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy that is commonly used by adolescents. Results: Our data demonstrated that both maternal emotion suppression and interpersonal personality dysfunction were positively associated with adolescent emotion suppression. No associations among maternal intrapersonal personality functioning and adolescent emotion suppression were detected. Conclusions: Maternal personality dysfunction and emotion suppression both independently predicted adolescent emotion suppression use. These results support the idea that maternal characteristics play a role in shaping emotion regulation in adolescence.
Children's Private Speech During an Emotion-Eliciting Task
Day, Kimberly L. (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-30)
This study informs research on how private speech, which is typically seen as a cognitive ability, is utilized during an emotion-eliciting task. This research helps to bridge the divide between cognitive and emotional aspects of children's self-regulation by integrating how cognitive private speech strategies may be used to regulate emotion. Preschool-aged children (n = 116) completed a frustration task. Emotional expressions (anger and sadness), emotion regulation strategies (distraction and self-comforting behaviors), persistence (latency to quit and duration of on-task behavior), and children's private speech were coded. Whereas higher levels of nonfacilitative task-relevant private speech were associated with higher levels of both sadness and anger, social speech was positively associated with sadness, and inaudible muttering was positively associated with anger. Private speech, specifically vocalizations and task-irrelevant private speech, was also positively associated with the regulation strategies of self-comforting and distraction. Facilitative task-relevant private speech, however, was negatively associated with distraction. Finally, higher levels of social speech were associated with less persistence, while higher levels of facilitative task-relevant private speech was associated with more persistence. Findings from this study support the idea that private speech can have a regulatory effect during frustrating situations that children experience. Private speech occurred alongside emotions and regulation strategies in meaningful ways. Including measures of private speech in future studies on emotion regulation will add more detail and depth to researchers' understanding of children's regulatory abilities. In the future, interventions could be created to encourage children's use of private speech to enhance their emotion regulatory abilities.
Cognitive Development in Late Childhood: An Examination of Working Memory and Inhibitory Control
Adkins, Denise Rene (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-07)
An interactive framework of working memory and inhibitory control has been endorsed for examining cognitive development across the lifespan (Roberts & Pennington, 1996). According to this framework, the interaction between working memory and inhibitory control (WMIC) is necessary for adaptive daily functioning (Roberts & Pennington, 1996) and crucial for the development of executive functioning in childhood (Brocki & Bohlin, 2004). Empirical work from early developmental periods supports the interactive WMIC framework (e.g., Bell, 2001; Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002) and has identified sources of variability (brain electrical activity, temperament, and language) associated with WMIC functioning in infancy and early childhood (Wolfe & Bell, 2004). Although there is some evidence to suggest the interdependent nature of working memory and inhibitory control in late childhood and adulthood (Diamond, 2002; Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar, & Sweeney, 2004), work in these later developmental periods has focused primarily on the independent processes of working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) and the interactive WMIC framework has not been directly investigated from late childhood onward. Therefore, the first goal of the current study was to examine the interactive framework in a late childhood sample. The second goal of the study was to examine sources of variability in WMIC functioning in late childhood, with the intention of determining which sources of variability were associated with and contributed unique variance in explaining WMIC performance. Thirty-eight children (19 male) completed four age-appropriate interactive WMIC tasks (the color-word Stroop, the Fruit Stroop, the counting go/no-go and the Wisconsin Card Sort Test) and two language tasks. Both parents and children responded to a temperament questionnaire. Brain electrical activity was collected via EEG recordings during a two-minute baseline and WMIC tasks. The four interactive WMIC tasks were tested for relation of the independent (WM, IC) and combined (WMIC) components within tasks and across tasks. The four WMIC tasks were not correlated with one another. However, the independent (WM, IC) components were correlated both with one another and with the combined WMIC measure within each task, providing some support for an interactive framework in late childhood. The sources of variability associated with the independent (WM, IC) and combined (WMIC) components of each task were identified. These sources were used to explain both collective and unique variance in WMIC functioning for each task. Different sources of variability explained independent (WM, IC) and combined (WMIC) performance across tasks. Unique and shared contributors within and across tasks (the color-word Stroop, the Fruit Stroop, the counting go/no-go and the Wisconsin Card Sort Test) and components (WM, IC, WMIC) are discussed in an effort to determine how sources of variability may be related to WMIC functioning.
Cognitive Reappraisal in Middle Childhood
Garcia Meza, Tatiana (Virginia Tech, 2019)
Cognitive reappraisal (CR) involves changing one’s mental states in response to an emotionally eliciting event in order to down regulate the potential emotional impact. In this study, 50 children who were 9-10 years old were instructed to engage in CR during a sad film. Children were then exposed to a disappointing situation and asked to self-report on their CR after the disappointment task. As hypothesized, there was variability in level of CR use during the disappointment task. Contrary to hypothesis, children’s CR was not related to parent CR. Nor was the association between parent CR and child CR moderated by child baseline frontal EEG asymmetry, as hypothesized. Post-hoc analyses revealed that parent CR moderated the association between child baseline frontal EEG asymmetry and task-related frontal EEG asymmetry, such that children presenting with left frontal asymmetry at baseline and who had parents with higher CR showed left frontal asymmetry during the disappointment task. This was conceptualized as physiological regulation during an emotion event. Post-hoc analyses also revealed that children’s CR after the disappointment task was predicted by task-related frontal EEG asymmetry, as well as self-reports of ER strategies. I conclude that task-specific CR can be assessed in preadolescents but that much research is needed to determine the correlates of child use of CR during emotional situations.
Cross-Cultural Differences in the Determinants of Maternal Emotion Coaching: Role of Maternal Emotional Awareness and Emotion Regulation
Tan, Lin (Virginia Tech, 2017-04-28)
Despite many positive outcomes associated with emotion coaching, factors related to individual differences in emotion coaching have yet to be explored. The current study examined cultural differences in the role of maternal characteristics, specifically emotional awareness and emotion regulation, as determinants of emotion coaching. These findings will facilitate culturally desired emotion socialization practices leading to optimal emotional development of children. In the current study, I translated two English-based questionnaires into Chinese to assess maternal emotional awareness and emotion coaching. Next, I examined relations of reappraisal, suppression, and emotional awareness to maternal emotion coaching. I also investigated the role of maternal emotional awareness as a mediator in the relation of maternal use of reappraisal and suppression to maternal emotion coaching in both Chinese and American cultures. Participants included American (n=164) and 163 Chinese (n=163) mothers. Maternal emotional awareness was measured using subscales of Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20 and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Emotion regulation strategies were assessed using Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. To measure emotion coaching, mothers completed Parents' Beliefs about Children's Emotions questionnaire. Structural equation models were estimated to examine how maternal emotional awareness and emotion regulation related to emotion coaching. Results confirmed the reliability and validity of the Chinese questionnaires. Maternal emotion coaching did not include mothers' views about negative emotions because equivalence could not be established across Chinese and American cultures; therefore, the emotion coaching discussed in this study is different from previous research on emotion coaching that typically involves responses to negative emotions. Maternal emotional awareness was associated with their emotion coaching in both samples and the strength of the association was not different across cultures. However, relations of reappraisal and suppression to emotional awareness and emotion coaching were different across Chinese and American samples. Emotional awareness mediated the relation of reappraisal to emotion coaching only in the American sample. Additionally, emotional awareness was a mediator of the relation of suppression to emotion coaching in both samples. Overall, the findings of this study supported that maternal emotional awareness and use of emotion regulation strategies are important determinants of maternal emotion coaching in both cultures.
Differentiating Externalizing Behaviors in Early Childhood: The Role of Negative Affectivity and Attentional Control
Ermanni, Briana L. (Virginia Tech, 2022-12-14)
My thesis project aimed to assess potential meaningful differences in the behavioral subtypes of externalizing behaviors in children. Externalizing behaviors are a style of behavioral adjustment that are characteristic of early childhood behavior problems. They are commonly measured in developmental and clinical research using the Externalizing Scale of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The scale is comprised of Aggressive and Rule-Breaking Behaviors, which are divergent in their developmental trajectory and personological distinctions: aggressive behaviors have emotional underpinnings like frustration, whereas rule-breaking is linked to behavioral impulsivity. In situations of low regulation, negative affectivity may differentially predispose children to these behaviors due to a reactive propensity for anger and frustration. Attentional control can act to regulate these behaviors through shifting and focusing of attention, but may execute this regulation differently based on the situational context. The role of contextual attentional control in predicting two distinct externalizing behaviors has not been sufficiently evaluated in children. AC was behaviorally coded for during a frustrating context. Child behavior problems and temperament were assessed via parent report. Two mediation models were assessed with NA, AC, and aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors, but no indirect effects were found. When individual components of AC were assessed separately as moderations as opposed to mediations, attention shifting played a prominent role and moderated both the aggressive and rule-breaking models. Findings further clarify the role of attention in the relation between temperament and childhood behavior problems.
Effects of Emotion- and Gratitude-Focused Expressive Writings on Incoming College Students' Adjustment
Booker, Jordan Ashton (Virginia Tech, 2015-04-28)
The transition to college can introduce new roles, opportunities, and challenges for growth and adjustment. Effective management of these challenges promotes personal adjustment and academic success (Chemers, Hu, and Garcia, 2001). However, difficulty in managing aspects of this transition introduces risks for dysfunction in emotional, social, and academic areas (Heiligenstein and Guenther, 1996). These risks are exacerbated for students who from underrepresented backgrounds at their college and within their field of study (Strayhorn, 2012). Among undergraduates, expressive writing interventions have been used to improve adjustment. These brief activities of self-reflection were originally used to address past hurts and have been adapted to attend to life's benefits. Reflections on both negative and positive life experiences have been tied to improvements in well-being, social success, and physical health (Emmons and McCullough, 2003; Sloan and Marx, 2004). This is the first study to directly compare effects of expressive writings focused on strong negative emotional experiences with effects of writings focused on positive emotional experiences (gratitude). Furthermore, questions remain about mechanisms of influence for these two writing paradigms. The current study tested the influence of these paradigms on student adjustment during the college transition, and assessed emotion mechanisms specific to each writing paradigm. One hundred sixty-one incoming college students were recruited into an online study during the fall semester. Students reported on emotional, social, and academic outcomes at the third, fifth, and eighth weeks of the incoming academic semester. Students were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups: a group writing on emotion-focused prompts; a group writing on gratitude-focused prompts; and a control group with no assigned writings. During the fourth week of the semester, students in the experimental groups spent four days writing about their respective group prompts. Students in the emotion-focused writing group showed improvements in willingness to share intimate life events with others (i.e., length of writing, comfort with self-disclosure, recent heart-to-heart conversations). Students in the gratitude-focused writing group showed increases and maintenance of psychological resources (i.e., life satisfaction, involvement in group meetings, instances of studying). I discuss the implications of these findings below.
The Effects of Maternal Characteristics on Adolescent Emotion Regulation
Phillips, Jennifer J. (Virginia Tech, 2021-05-10)
Emotion regulation is an important skill to acquire during childhood, as an inability to do so can lead to negative outcomes such as aggression, anxiety, eating disorders, and personality disorders during adolescence. Much research has demonstrated that maternal factors play a role in childhood emotion regulation; however, little research has looked at how these factors might predict emotion regulation during adolescence. Therefore, my thesis study assessed how maternal personality, parenting behaviors, and emotion regulation during middle childhood and adolescence predicted adolescent emotion regulation. Specifically, I hypothesized that maternal parenting behaviors during middle childhood would positively predict adolescent cognitive reappraisal, that this association would be moderated by maternal intrapersonal and interpersonal personality, and that maternal cognitive reappraisal during middle childhood would positively predict adolescent cognitive reappraisal. Participants included 122 mother-child dyads who provided data on parenting and maternal emotion regulation when the children were 9-years-old, in addition to data on child emotion regulation, maternal emotion regulation, and maternal personality when the children were adolescents. My initial hypotheses were not supported by the data, but post-hoc analyses revealed that maternal emotion suppression during middle childhood and adolescence predicts adolescent emotion suppression and that this association between maternal emotion suppression during middle childhood and adolescent emotion suppression was moderated by maternal intrapersonal personality. These results support the idea that maternal characteristics continue to play a role in shaping emotion regulation in children through adolescence, but not in the manner I had originally predicted.
The Effects of Profanity in Violent Video Game Content on Players' Hostile Expectations, Accessibility of Aggressive Thoughts, Aggressive Feelings, and Other Responses
Ivory, Adrienne Holz (Virginia Tech, 2010-08-30)
Although the effects of violent video games on aggression in users have been researched extensively and the resulting body of research shows that violent video games can increase aggressive behaviors, aggression-related feelings and thoughts, and physiological arousal, no empirical studies to date have examined whether there are similar and parallel effects of verbal aggression (e.g., profanity) in video game content. A 2 X 2 between-subjects factorial experiment (N = 321) tested the effects of profanity used by protagonists (protagonist profanity present versus absent) and antagonists (antagonist profanity present versus absent) on users' hostile expectations, accessibility of aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, perceived arousal, use of profanity, enjoyment, presence, and perceived performance while taking into account the potential moderating role of gender and controlling for several individual difference variables. The study's factors were manipulated via the creation of four versions of an original three-dimensional "first-person shooter" video game. Profanity used by both protagonist and antagonist characters was found to have significant effects on players' hostile expectations, an important higher-order aggressive outcome that is the most direct precursor to aggressive behaviors in the process described by the general aggression model. There was limited evidence for effects of profanity in game content on players' accessibility of aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, and perceived arousal. Additionally, profanity had little impact on how much players used profanity themselves, how much they enjoyed the game, feelings of presence, and how they rated their performance in the game. These trends were consistent across a range of demographic, personality, and video game experience dimensions that were measured, even though several of these individual difference variables were found to be related to some outcome variables and to each other. Therefore, while this study's findings did not necessarily indicate imitative modeling of profanity, they point to the possibility of more general effects regarding aggressive outcomes. This study's findings emphasize the need for future research investigating the effects of profanity in video games and other media.
Emotion Regulation and Screen Use among Parents of Toddlers: A Moderating Role of Parental Personality
Gurdal, Mahmut Sami (Virginia Tech, 2024-05)
Despite the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (2016) recommendation to limit screen exposure in the early years, toddlers’ screen use exceeds these guidelines (Rideout & Robb, 2020). Given the significant role of parental media use in children’s exposure to screens (Domoff et al., 2020; Lauricella et al., 2015), it is important to understand the factors that contribute to parental screen use. Digital technologies have been posited as tools for emotion regulation (Wadley et al., 2020), suggesting that parental emotion regulation may serve as a significant determinant of parental media use. Prior studies have shown the association between emotion regulation strategies and different types of screen use, including non-interactive and interactive media (Extremera et al., 2019; Rozgonjuk & Elhai, 2021). It has also been suggested that the role of emotion regulations strategies may differ by personality traits (Gross & John, 2003). However, limited research to date examined these associations with the focus on parents of toddlers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the association between parents’ emotion regulation strategies on their screen use and the moderating role of personality traits in this association. This study used secondary data collected from an online survey of 296 mothers of children between 18 to 36 months in the United States. Linear regression models were fitted to examine the association between emotion regulation strategies and parental screen use, with a focus on two specific regulation strategies and interactive and non-interactive screen use. They were founded that cognitive reappraisal was not related either non-interactive and interactive screen uses and that expressive suppression was only associated with non-interactive screen use. Cognitive reappraisal was related to agreeableness and expressive suppression was related to extraversion. No moderator roles of agreeableness on the association between cognitive reappraisal and both types of screen use and extraversion on the association between expressive suppression and both types of screen use were found. Future research is needed to test the possible biases resulting from the self-report technique, understand the causation between emotion regulation strategies and screen use, and include the context of screen media for deeper understanding.
Explicit Memory and Brain-Electrical Activity in 10-month-old Infants
Morasch, Katherine Colona (Virginia Tech, 2007-04-13)
One of the most intriguing and enduring issues in contemporary developmental cognitive neuroscience centers on the development of the ability to remember past experiences and the neural systems which support this capacity. Over the past 25 years, through methodological advancements and direct challenges to established assumptions, the focus of this developmental question has shifted to highlight the second half of the first year of life as the time when true explicit memory functionally emerges and begins to rapidly develop. The purpose of the following study was to test specific hypotheses regarding the biobehavioral development of explicit memory during infancy and present a new approach to studying the behavioral and physiological expression of this system. This study, which was guided by hypothesized neural substrates of this memory system, is the first direct investigation of continuous brain electrical activity during both the encoding and retrieval phases of explicit memory processing in infants. Memory-related differences in behavior and task-related brain activity in individual cortical areas were of particular interest. The results of this study provided some support for the hypothesis that baseline-to-task changes in EEG power can distinguish between successful and unsuccessful ordered-recall memory. Specifically, decreases in brain-electrical activity relative to a baseline period were found at both frontal and temporal locations during stimulus encoding and retrieval for infants who failed the recall tests. However, either no change, or increases in EEG power at frontal and temporal sites was related to successful performance on this task. In addition, different patterns of brain-electrical activity were present for correct and incorrect responses from the same child. This study contributes to our understanding of the biobehavioral expression of infant explicit memory in three main ways. First, changes in both frontal and temporal lobe activity are directly involved in explicit memory processing both during event encoding as well as retrieval. Second, this work provides evidence of a developmentally appropriate and valid pattern of electrophysiology specific to explicit memory processing. Finally, this study bridges the gap between a classic behavioral task of infant memory (which has been conceptually linked to neuropsychological data) and current developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Exploring the Role of Language Development and Verbal Encoding in Short-Term Recognition Memory in Early Childhood
Cardell, Annie Maria (Virginia Tech, 2009-05-15)
There is evidence that language ability is related to a number of cognitive processes, including memory. As children become more proficient language-users, they develop the ability to use language as a memory attribute. This study used EEG coherence to investigate the extent to which verbal encoding strategies account for individual differences in two short-term recognition memory tasks in 50 3-year-olds. Children with better expressive and receptive language performed better on the picture memory task (which contains stimuli that can easily be labeled) but not the abstract memory task, indicating that language may support memory processes for some types of stimuli more than for others. Analyses of EEG coherence at the hypothesized electrode pairs (F7-T3 and F8-T4) at baseline and encoding were not significant, indicating that verbal encoding does not account for individual differences in short-term memory performance. When these electrode pairs were examined at baseline and retrieval for the picture memory task, EEG coherence analyses indicated that it may be the use of language as a retrieval cue rather than an encoding strategy that explains individual differences in short-term recognition memory.
Health-Related Quality of Life in Children with Type 1 Diabetes: The Role of Family Environment, Parental Perceived Social Support, and Children's Coping
Williams, Isha D. (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-16)
Children diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes face lifetime issues that will affect their health-related quality of life (HRQoL). These challenges require varied coping skills to manage the disease and a commitment to find ways to increase HRQoL. It was proposed that children’s general coping styles would be mediators in both the relation of family environment and children’s health-related quality of life and the relation of parental perceived social support and children’s health-related quality of life in children aged 8-16 with Type 1 diabetes. Age was also proposed to be a moderator in the relation of children’s coping to their health-related quality of life. Children aged 8 to 16 and their primary caregivers (N = 56) were recruited to participate in the study at a university hospital tertiary care clinic. Children completed the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 3.0 Diabetes Module for children and adolescents (PedsQL 3.0) and the Children’s Coping Strategies Checklist-Revision 1. Primary caregivers completed the PedsQL 3.0 for parents, the Family Environment Scale and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. Regression analyses were used to identify a model that explained the contribution of each factor to predict HRQoL. It was hypothesized that children’s active, distraction, and support-seeking general coping strategies would be mediators in the relation of family environment and parental perceived social support to children’s health-related quality of life and that children’s general avoidant coping strategies would not mediate either the relation of family environment or parental perceived social support to children’s health-related quality of life. Although children’s active, distraction, and support-seeking coping strategies were not found to mediate the relation of family environment to children’s health-related quality of life or the relation of parental perceive social support to health-related quality of life, children’s avoidant coping strategies were found to be a mediator in the relation of family environment to children’s health-related quality of life and in the relation of parental perceived social support to health-related quality of life. It was also hypothesized that children’s age would moderate the relation of children’s active, distraction, and support-seeking coping strategies to children’s health-related quality of life. Age moderated the relation of avoidant coping to HRQoL. Avoidant coping was negatively associated with HRQoL for the older children but the association was not significant for younger children. To facilitate a better health-related quality of life for children with Type 1 diabetes, therapists and healthcare professionals should identify ways to help parents feel more supported as they care for and create a more cohesive and low conflict family environment, which contributes to their children’s health-related quality of life. Additionally, therapists should work with children and their parents to increase children’s use of active, distraction, and support-seeking coping strategies, which are related to more positive outcomes compared to children’s use of avoidant coping strategies, which are related to less positive outcomes.
The Impact of Fearfulness on Childhood Memory: Attention, Effortful Control, and Visual Recognition Memory
Diaz, Anjolii (Virginia Tech, 2012-05-10)
Fear is an integral and adaptive aspect of emotion related development (Gullone, 1999) and is one of the earliest regulatory systems influencing the control of behaviors (Rueda, Posner & Rothbart, 2004). This study examined the potential role of child fearfulness on the relation between attention, effortful control and visual recognition memory. Behavioral and physiological measurements of fear as well as measures of attention and recognition memory were examined. Behavioral tendencies of fearfulness rather than discrete behavioral acts were associated with right frontal asymmetry. VRM performance was also associated with more right frontal functioning. Fearfulness regulated the relation between attention and VRM as well as moderated the relation between effortful control and VRM. This study provided some evidence for the influencing role of normal variations of fear (i.e., non-clinical levels of fear) on the cognitive processes of developing children.
Individual Differences in Inhibitory Control Skills at Four Years of Age
Watson, Amanda J. (Virginia Tech, 2014-04-30)
Inhibitory Control (IC), a vital facet of childhood development, involves the ability to suppress a dominant response, as well as the ability to suppress irrelevant thoughts and behaviors. This ability emerges during the first year of life and develops rapidly during the preschool years. A variety of tasks have been developed to measure IC in this age group and, recently, research has demonstrated important differences in task performance according to various distinctions among these tasks. One under-researched distinction is that of whether an IC task requires the child to give a verbal or a motoric response. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine, in 4-year-old children, the differences and similarities among IC tasks requiring either a verbal or a motoric response. Differences were explored with respect to the contributions to verbal and motoric IC performance of language, intelligence, temperament, and frontal encephalography, as well as with respect to social and school readiness outcomes. IC was best described by a two-component model, distinguishing verbal and motoric IC. Both baseline and task electrophysiology contributed to task performance in the verbal Yes-No task as well as the motoric IC composite. Language and intelligence, too, were associated with both verbal and motoric IC, although nonverbal intelligence was less strongly correlated with verbal IC than it was with motoric IC. All laboratory measures of IC related to parent report of children’s IC as well as to other parent-reported temperament scales and factors. Children’s verbal and motoric IC were associated, too, with children’s social development, surprisingly showing the most consistent associations with social inhibition. Asocial behavior positively correlated more strongly with motoric IC than with verbal IC. Children’s laboratory IC positively correlated with their school readiness, even when controlling for their intelligence although children’s emergent literacy more positively related to their motoric, rather than verbal, IC. An interaction of intelligence and IC contributed to social variables, but not to school readiness. This research supports the important distinction between verbal and motoric IC, and demonstrates the utility of including an array of measures of both in early childhood research.
Language Development and Verbal Encoding: Implications for Individual Differences in Short-Term Memory in 3-Year-Olds
Cardell, Annie Maria (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-10)
There is evidence that language ability is related to a number of cognitive processes, including memory. This study used EEG to investigate the extent to which verbal encoding strategies account for individual differences in short-term recognition memory performance in 44 3-year-olds. As hypothesized, children with better language ability (as measured by the PPVT-III) performed better on the memory task. Analyses of EEG power at the hypothesized electrode sites were not significant, but the hypothesis that children who perform better on the recognition memory task will use more verbal encoding strategies than children who perform less well was partially supported by EEG coherence analyses. Children in the high memory group had significantly greater frontal-temporal coherence in the left hemisphere (F7-T3) than the low memory group. However, this was true both at baseline and during encoding, implying that children in the high memory group have greater overall connectivity between these brain areas and that they tend to use more verbal strategies than the low memory group, as they interact with their environments in general, not just during a memory task.
A Latent Factor Analysis of Preschool Executive Functions: Investigations of Antecedents and Outcomes
Kraybill, Jessica Hershberger (Virginia Tech, 2014-02-06)
The current study investigated the nature of executive function (EF) abilities in preschoolers using confirmatory factor analysis; potential antecedents and outcomes were examined as well. Executive function refers to higher order cognitive abilities necessary to consciously and deliberately persist in a task; these abilities are associated with a wide variety of important developmental outcomes. Within the developmental literature, studies on EF development in early childhood have focused most often on the constructs of working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC). Whether WM and IC are dissociable cognitive abilities is an unresolved issue within the literature; accordingly, performance on a battery of EF tasks at ages 2 and 4 was assessed to determine if EF structure at these ages is best described by a single factor or two factors consisting of working memory and inhibitory control. At both ages, a unitary model fit the data well. Longitudinal relations between attention in infancy, preschool EF, and school readiness and social competency at age 4 were also examined. Although infant attention measures failed to significantly predict later EF, pathways between age 4 EF (but not age 2 EF) and all age 4 outcomes were significant and in the expected direction. Understanding the nature of EF and the factors associated with optimal regulatory abilities is necessary for both theoretical and practical purposes, and given the considerable improvements that happen to EF abilities during this time period in early childhood, longitudinal studies such as this one are necessary to address issues of developmental change.
Longitudinal bidirectional relations between children’s negative affectivity and maternal emotion expressivity
Tan, Lin; Smith, Cynthia L. (Frontiers, 2022-10-20)
Although children’s negative affectivity is a temperamental characteristic that is biologically based, it is framed within and shaped by their emotional environments which are partly created by maternal emotion expressivity in the family. Children, in turn, play a role in shaping their family emotional context, which could lead to changes in mothers’ emotion expressivity in the family. However, these theorized longitudinal bidirectional relations between child negative affectivity and maternal positive and negative expressivity have not been studied from toddlerhood to early school-age. The current study utilized a cross-lagged panel model to examine the reciprocal relations between children’s negative affectivity and maternal expressivity within the family over the course of early childhood. Participants were 140 mother–child dyads (72 boys, mean age = 2.67 years, primarily White). Mothers reported the positive and negative expressivity in the family and children’s negative affectivity in toddlerhood (T1), preschool (T2), and school-age (T3). Maternal negative expressivity and child negative affectivity at T1 were significantly correlated. Maternal negative expressivity at T1 significantly predicted child negative affectivity at T3. Children’s negative affectivity at T2 significantly predicted mothers’ negative expressivity at T3. Mothers’ positive expressivity was not related to children’s negative affectivity at any of the three time points. The findings demonstrate the reciprocal relations between children’s negative affectivity and maternal negative expressivity in the family, suggesting the importance of the interplay between child temperament and maternal expressivity within the family emotional context.
Maternal Emotion Regulation as a Moderator of Relation of Parenting Stress to Dyadic Interaction in Mother-Child Dyads during Preschool
Atanasio, Meredith (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-01)
Parenting stress has been closely studied largely in relation to implications for the parent and implications for children. Emotion regulation refers to the processes in which one interprets and experiences emotions. Little has been done examining how parenting stress and mother emotion regulation relates to dyadic interaction between mother and child. Because of the compounding nature of stress as identified in the ABCX model of family stress and resilience theory, understanding parenting stress in its entirety and how mothers experience and deal with said parenting stress is crucial to understanding family processes, as it is not possible to partition the mother and child into separate spheres, per family systems theory. Maternal parenting behaviors cannot be conceptualized in isolation of the mother-child dyad; therefore, it is important to understand maternal processes and behaviors that relate to parenting and also the dyad. The current study examined the moderating impact of maternal emotion regulation on the relation between maternal parenting stress and three facets of dyadic interaction, including conflict, cooperation, and reciprocity. Mothers and their 4-5.5-year-old children (n=116) participated in a teaching task wherein mothers instructed their child to build figures with interlocking blocks based on provided images. Six hypotheses were examined. Regression analyses revealed that neither maternal cognitive reappraisal nor maternal emotion suppression moderated the relation of total parenting stress to parent-child dyadic interaction. However, preliminary correlation analyses revealed that dyads with boys experienced higher scores of dyadic conflict. Boys in the sample were also younger than girls. Considerations for lack of significant findings are explored including the role of maternal characteristics, child characteristics, and goodness-of-fit. Future exploration is necessary to examine how parent characteristics like maternal emotion regulation and parenting stress may relate to dyadic interactions with children.

Browsing by Author "Smith, Cynthia L."

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