Child Psychology

A Handbook of Contemporary Issues

Lawrence Balter, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Lawrence Balter, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781848724822
• eBook ISBN: 9781317655770
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This third edition of Child Psychology continues the tradition of showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of developmental science, including individual differences, dynamic systems and processes, and contexts of development. While retaining a similar structure to the last edition, this revision consists of completely new content with updated programmatic research and contemporary research trends and interests.

The first three sections highlight research that is organized chronologically by age: Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence. Within each section, individual chapters address contemporary research on a specific area of development, such as learning, cognition, social, and emotional development at that period in childhood. The fourth section, Ecological Influences, emphasizes contextual influences relevant to children of all ages, including risk and protective processes, family and neighborhood context, race and ethnicity, peer relations, the effects of poverty, and the impact of the digital world.

Child Psychology also features a unique focus on four progressive themes. First, emphasis is placed on theory and explanation—the "why and how" of the developmental process. Second, explanations of a transactional and multidimensional nature of development are at the forefront of all chapters. Third, the multi-faceted approach to development highlights contextual influences and cultural diversity among children from different communities and backgrounds. Finally, methodological innovation is a key concern, and research tools presented across chapters span the full array available to developmental scientists who focus on different systems and levels of analysis.

The thoroughness and depth of this book, in addition to its methodological rigor, make it an ideal handbook for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and advanced students across a range of disciplines, including psychology, education, economics and public policy.

Part I
Infancy

1
A Biopsychosocial Model of Self-Regulation in Infancy

Susan D. Calkins, Nicole B. Perry, and Jessica M. Dollar

Introduction

Infant development has long been a source of great interest among developmental scientists. No period of development is characterized by as much growth in physical, psychological, and social skills as is the first two years of life. One significant area of growth in early development is in infants’ self-regulation. Self-regulation can be broadly defined as an infant’s ability to control emotions and behaviors in order to cope effectively with environmental demands across a variety of contexts (Calkins, 2010). We use the term self-regulation to refer to a specific set of processes or control mechanisms that function at the biological, behavioral, and social level, and enable individuals to manage attention, emotion, and cognition in adaptive ways (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Calkins, 2010; Calkins & Fox, 2002).

The ability to regulate at these levels emerges, at least in a rudimentary form, during the prenatal period (e.g., sucking, head turning), and continues throughout early childhood. The maturation of neural systems is fundamental to this development because it provides a functional mechanism for the behavioral integration of control abilities that are ultimately observed in later, more sophisticated developmental processes (Calkins, 2010; Lewis, Todd, & Xu, 2010). Of central importance is the notion that the mastery of early self-regulatory skills is a critical aspect of, and may even constrain, later functioning (Calkins & Fox, 2002; Calkins & Hill, 2007). Given the fundamental role played by these basic processes, it is essential to understand the early development of specific self-regulatory skills, such as the regulation of emotion and attention, in order to identify mechanisms underlying normative and atypical development.

In early infancy, successful regulation depends heavily on the parent’s awareness, flexibility, and responsivity to the child’s needs; however, dramatic developmental changes in self-regulation also occur. Thus, the development of infant self-regulation may be broadly described as one in which an infant gradually develops the ability to control attention and emotion through self-initiated behaviors (Calkins, 1994; Sroufe, 1996). In one of the earliest conceptualizations of self-regulatory processes, Kopp (1982, 1989) provided an excellent overview of the early regulatory milestones. Newborns initially rely on innate physiological mechanisms to regulate, although the range of behaviors that are regulated is limited to basic biological processes related to sleep/wake cycles and eating, and elimination. From 3–9 months, development in regulatory abilities such as gaze aversion and self-soothing is supported by infants’ engagement in voluntary sensorimotor activities, such as looking, reaching and touching, and through interactions with the environment (Piaget 1952, 1954). The se activities and social interactions teach infants about contingencies between their arousal, their behavior, and environmental responses, which is fundamental to their developing awareness of their own ability to control their behavior and attention.

By the end of the first year of life, infants are much more active and purposeful in their attempts to self-regulate; they employ organized motor behavior that enables them to retreat, redirect, and self-soothe in a flexible manner, suggesting they are responsive to environmental cues. In addition, their signaling and redirection of attention becomes overtly social, as they are more aware that caregivers and others may behave in a way that will assist them in regulating their arousal. During the second year of life, infants’ use of active methods to self-regulate (i.e., distraction and help-seeking strategies) becomes even more common, though such methods are not always successful. During this developmental period, infants respond to caregiver instructions, and as a consequence, compliance and behavioral self-regulation begin to emerge. In addition, the capacity for upright locomotion, improvements in memory and problem-solving abilities, and the use of self-directed speech to guide behavior all contribute to the young child’s increased self-regulatory skills (Kopp, 1982).

As can be se en, tremendous growth in self-regulatory abilities occurs throughout infancy. We, along with many of our colleagues (e.g., Beauchaine et al., 2013; Bell & Deater-Deckard, 2007; Blair & Razza, 2007; Eisenberg, Champion, & Ma, 2007; Hastings & De, 2008; Rothbart & Sheese, 2007), believe that these developmental changes are occurring at various levels of child functioning and span multiple developmental domains. Prior conceptualizations of self-regulatory development, however, have not well integrated self-regulatory processes across levels and within domains. In this chapter, we employ tenets of the biopsychosocial theoretical perspective to build a model of infant self-regulation that addresses these issues. We consider self-regulation within three domains: attentional, emotional, and cognitive. Attention regulation refers to the ability to modulate the direction or re-direction of attentional processes toward specific stimuli; emotion regulation reflects individuals’ ability to control the expression and experience of emotional arousal; and cognitive regulation allows for the organization of thoughts, more sophisticated planning, prioritization, and decision making. We also describe self-regulatory processes as functioning at three levels of analysis within these domains: biological, behavioral, and social. We believe the proposed model has strong empirical utility and extends our current understanding of self-regulatory development by incorporating the integration of, and acknowledging the strong interdependence among, developmental domains and levels in a unified way. We first provide a historical context for the study of infant self-regulation, including a discussion of more general multilevel models of self-regulatory development and a presentation of our own biopsychosocial model of infant self-regulation. Then, we use this theoretical perspective to highlight the interdependence among self-regulatory domains and processes at multiple levels, including a discussion of our relevant empirical work on this topic. Finally, we highlight future directions for theoretical and empirical work.

Historical Context

Although there are various theories of temperament (e.g., Goldsmith & Campos, 1982; Kagan, 1984), much of the developmental work examining self-regulatory processes stems from Rothbart’s theory of temperament (Rothbart & Bates, 2006; Posner & Rothbart, 2000), which focuses on individual differences in infant and child reactivity and regulation. Specifically, at birth, infants can be characterized by varying reactions to sensory stimuli, with some infants being very reactive to stimulation and others less so. This reactivity is believed to be a relatively stable characteristic of the infant (Kagan, 1984; Rothbart & Derry-berry, 1981). The ability to regulate this reactivity begins to develop prenatally and continues throughout childhood and adolescence (Posner & Rothbart, 2000). A central aspect of Rothbart’s theoretical perspective is the idea that much of self-regulatory development is a result of increasing control over attentional processes. The ability to resolve conflicts among different stimuli, plan new actions, and inhibit behavior on command all develop between 9 and 36 months (Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996), and are critical for the mastery of later, more advanced emotional and cognitive functioning. Thus, Rothbart’s theoretical perspective imposes a hierarchy among developmental domains such that attentional self-regulation is thought to play a foundational role in the emergence of independent emotional and cognitive regulation.

Also inherent in Rothbart and colleagues’ theory is the view that neurobiological systems underlie children’s self-regulatory skills (Posner & Rothbart, 2000). For example, Posner and Rothbart (1992, 1998) have identified frontal brain regions that play a functional role in the deployment of attention and in the processing and regulation of emotion and cognition. It is because of the maturation of these prefrontal-limbic neural connections that the development of sophisticated behavioral self-regulation is thought to stem from early neurophysiological processes (Beauregard, Levesque, & Paquette, 2004; Ochsner & Gross, 2004).

Following the work of Rothbart, other theoretical work further explicated the significance of assessing self-regulation at multiple levels and across multiple domains (Beauchaine & Gatzke-Kopp, 2012; Blair, 2002; Feldman, 2009; Fox & Calkins, 2003). For example, in prior work, we and others noted that self-regulation development has been explicitly described as adaptive control observed at the physiological, attentional, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive levels of child functioning (e.g., Feldman, 2009; Fox & Calkins, 2003). From this perspective, the control of physiological arousal that underlies the mastery of infant state regulation becomes integrated into the processes of attentional engagement and disengagement later in infancy (Porges, 1996). In turn, this attentional regulation becomes integrated into the child’s ability to regulate his/her emotions and behavior. Similarly, Feldman (2009) proposed and provided evidence of the sequential development of self-regulatory mechanisms across infancy and early childhood. Importantly, these perspectives highlight that physiological, attentional, and emotional self-regulatory abilities develop hierarchically, and that biological systems function in an integrated fashion to execute regulatory goals.

In another model, Blair and colleagues (Blair, 2002; Blair & Ursache, 2011) outlined the bidirectional associations between the development of emotion self-regulation and the development of advanced cognitive abilities, such as executive functioning. Blair notes that very high and very low levels of emotional arousal are thought to lead to deficits in cognitive processes, whereas moderate levels are associated with optimal learning. This model further highlights the importance of the environment for self-regulatory development because it proposes that, for some children, environmental influences (e.g., home and school experiences) foster levels of emotional expression, attention regulation, and stress responding that support high levels and appropriate use of cognitive capacities.

Taken together, these models suggest that self-regulatory mechanisms are biological and behavioral in nature, function to regulate attention, emotion, and cognition, and are influenced by the social environment in which the developing child is embedded. Moreover, these models acknowledge the dependence among self-regulatory mechanisms and posit that self-regulatory processes are built from biological, rudimentary skills and gradually develop into the advanced self-regulatory abilities observed in childhood. Although these models highlight the hierarchical nature of self-regulatory development and underscore the importance of considering multiple measures and levels of analysis, there is a lack of specificity regarding the interactional and interdependent nature among these processes, thereby limiting their empirical utility. Specifically, missing from these models is the explicit acknowledgment that biological, behavioral, and social self-regulatory processes function within the attentional, emotional, and cognitive domains. We next discuss how incorporating a biopsychosocial perspective, which underscores the importance of transactional influences across levels on development, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of infant self-regulation.

Theoretical and Empirical Considerations

Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Self-regulation

Psychobiological approaches to the study of early behavioral development stimulate conceptual and empirical work across biological, behavioral, and social levels of analysis. Such approaches provide greater specificity in how functioning at each of these levels explains human developmental phenomena. Gottlieb’s model of probabilistic epigenesis (c.f. Gottlieb, 1991; Gottlieb & Lickliter, 2007), for example, describes the changes that occur in genetic, neural, behavioral, and environmental levels of analysis across time, and outlines the bidirectional and transactional effects from one level to another. Guided by this model, some empirical work has aimed to elucidate how gene action at the cellular level occurs and influences various types of neural processes, some of which may be involved in producing complex behavior (Johnston & Edwards, 2002), in an effort to “unpack” the action within and across levels. Thus, inherent in this theoretical framework is the idea that coaction, interaction, and transactions across and within levels of child functioning characterize behavioral and social development in a biologically informed way (Sameroff, 2010).

Psychobiological approaches have been adapted to more general models of biopsychosocial functioning (c.f., Calkins, 2010), which, in turn, have been applied to the study of self-regulatory development. A biopsychosocial perspective encompasses a conceptual integration across biological, behavioral, and social levels of analysis in order to account for the emergence of patterns of child adjustment and maladjustment within his/her social context. Also central to this perspective is the notion that the child’s biology, behavior, and environment are thought to change one another continuously over the course of development, highlighting the dynamic and transactional nature of theses associations. Further, this perspective leads to a greater appreciation of the complex contribution of underlying biological processes in transactional models of development because of the assumption that genes are an initiating force behind developmental pathways to complex behavior. These pathways are receptive to influences that occur from the cellular level to the social context, and each pathway is a candidate for developmental interactions that may affect child adjustment (c.f., Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Thibodeau, 2012), including self-regulation (Calkins, Propper, & Mills-Koonce, 2013).

Biopsychosocial models, therefore, are well-suited to promote developmental theory and empirical work that reveals the dynamic nature of self-regulator...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• PREFACE
• Part I: Infancy
• Part II: Childhood
• Part III: Adolescence
• Part IV: Ecological Influences
• INDEX