Faculty Bibliography

Emotionally arousing stimuli have been largely unsuccessful in eliciting cortisol responses in young children. Whether or not emotion challenge will elicit a cortisol response, however, may in part be determined by the extent to which the tasks elicit behavioral reactivity and regulation. We examined relations of behavioral reactivity and regulation to emotional arousal in the context of fear and frustration to the cortisol response at 7, 15, and 24 months of age in a low income, rural population based sample of 1,292 families followed longitudinally from birth. At each age, children participated in fear and frustration inducing tasks, and cortisol samples were taken at three time points (before the tasks began, 20 min following peak emotional arousal or after the series of tasks ended, and 40 min after peak arousal or the tasks ended) in order to capture both increases (reactivity) and subsequent decreases (regulation) in the cortisol response. Using multilevel models, we predicted the cortisol response from measures of behavioral reactivity and regulation. At 7 months of age, cortisol reactivity and recovery were related to behavioral reactivity during a frustration-eliciting task and marginally related to behavioral reactivity during a fear-eliciting task. At 15 and 24 months of age, however, cortisol reactivity and recovery were related only to behavioral reactivity during a fear-eliciting task. Results indicate that while behavioral reactivity is predictive of whether or not infants and young children will exhibit a cortisol response to emotionally arousing tasks, behavioral and cortisol reactivity are not necessarily coupled.

A considerable body of literature suggests that children's child-care experiences may impact adrenocortical functioning in early childhood. Yet emerging findings also suggest that the magnitude and sometimes the direction of child-care effects on development may be markedly different for children from higher risk contexts. Using data from a large population-based sample of families from predominantly low-income backgrounds in rural communities, we tested the degree to which links between children's child-care experiences (at 7-36 months) and their subsequent cortisol levels (at 48 months) were moderated by their level of cumulative environmental risk. Our results provided evidence of a crossover interaction between cumulative risk and child-care quantity. For children from low-risk contexts, greater weekly hours in child care were predictive of higher cortisol levels. In contrast, for children facing several cumulative risk factors, greater hours in child care per week were predictive of lower cortisol levels. These effects were robust after adjusting for several controls, including children's cortisol levels in early infancy. Child-care quality and type were not predictive of children's cortisol levels, and neither mitigated the conditional effect of child-care quantity on cortisol. These findings suggest that links between child care and children's development may differ as a function of children's broader ecologies.

Prior research with adults suggests mixed evidence for the relations of state and trait anxiety to prefrontal executive functions (EF). Trait anxiety is hypothesised to impair the efficiency of prefrontal areas and goal-directed attention and has been largely associated with poorer performance on executive functioning tasks. Fewer studies have investigated state anxiety, and the findings have been mixed. As studies of these processes in children have been limited by small sample sizes and a focus on working memory, we examine whether state and trait anxiety are associated with performance on two EF tasks in a sample of urban, low-income children, ages 9-12. Results indicated that higher trait anxiety predicted lower executive functioning on both tasks. In addition, higher state anxiety was related to better performance on the Stroop task. Results demonstrate that, consistent with the adult literature, higher trait anxiety is related to lower executive functioning in children.

Recent studies have demonstrated alterations in the cortisol awakening response (CAR) and brain abnormalities in adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). While adolescents with T2DM exhibit similar brain abnormalities, less is known about whether brain impairments and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis abnormalities are already present in adolescents with pre-diabetic conditions such as insulin resistance (IR). This study included 33 adolescents with IR and 20 without IR. Adolescents with IR had a blunted CAR, smaller hippocampal volumes, and greater frontal lobe atrophy compared to controls. Mediation analyses indicated pathways whereby a smaller CAR was associated with higher BMI which was in turn associated with fasting insulin levels, which in turn was related to smaller hippocampal volume and greater frontal lobe atrophy. While we had hypothesized that HPA dysregulation may result from brain abnormalities, our findings suggest that HPA dysregulation may also impact brain structures through associations with metabolic abnormalities.

This article reviews the literature on self-regulation and the development of school readiness and academic competence in early childhood. It focuses on relations between the development of cognitive aspects of regulation-referred to as executive functions and defined as abilities used to regulate information and to organize thinking in goal-directed activities-and the development of reactivity and regulation in stimulus-driven emotion, attention, and physiological stress response systems. It examines a bidirectional model of cognition-emotion interaction in the development of self-regulation in which top-down executive control of thought and behavior develops in reciprocal and interactive relation to bottom-up influences of emotion and stress reactivity. The bidirectional model is examined within the context of innovative preschool interventions designed to promote school readiness by promoting the development of self-regulation.

Young children's self-regulation has increasingly been identified as an important predictor of their skills versus difficulties when navigating the social and academic worlds of early schooling. Recently, researchers have called for greater precision and more empirical rigor in defining what we mean when we measure, analyze, and interpret data on the role of children's self-regulatory skills for their early learning (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004; Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008). To address that call, this chapter summarizes our efforts to examine self-regulation in the context of early education with a clear emphasis on the need to consider the comprehensiveness and precision of measurement of self-regulation in order to best understand its role in early learning.