Explores some attributional determinants of third and fourth graders' self-punishment following transgression in a moral situation. Results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that children who are told by adults that they possess desirable moral characteristics experience particularly strong remorse when they fail to exercise…

Fifth-grade boys and girls were administered the Matching Familiar Figures Test and a projective measure of fantasy aggression and its control. They were also rated sociometrically by peers and teachers on physical, verbal, and indirect forms of overt aggression. Results indicated that conceptual tempo was related to aggression and its control.…

Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue) considered many important conceptual and methodological issues in their discussion of emotion regulation. Although it may be necessary to develop an integrated definition of the construct of emotion regulation, the definition provided in the Cole et al. article is too encompassing. It is important to…

Affective neuroscience and cognitive science approaches are useful for understanding the components of emotion regulation; several examples from current research are provided. Individual differences in emotion regulation and a focus on the context of emotion experience and expression provide additional tools to study emotion regulation, and its…

This study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in one hundred and forty-one 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes. Measures of effortful control, false belief understanding, and the inhibitory control and attention-shifting aspects of executive function in preschool were related to measures of math and…

A total of 127 fifth-grade boys and girls were presented a TAT-like projective test to measure fantasy aggression and controls over aggression. Overt peer-oriented aggression was measured by peer and teacher ratings. (JMB)

Examined relationship of regulatory control to preschoolers' peer interactions. Found that children high in effortful control were relatively unlikely to experience high levels of negative emotional arousal in response to peer interactions, but this relationship held only for moderate to high intense interactions. Socially competent responding was…

Examined whether putative regulatory behaviors widely assumed to be conceptually associated with certain behavioral strategies were associated with the changes in fearful and angry distress in 6-, 12-, and 18-month-olds. The key finding was that the use of some putative regulatory behaviors (distraction and approach) reduced the observable…

A total of 146 disadvantaged preschool children were trained in 1 of 3 different types of fantasy activities. The effects of this training were evaluated over a variety of tasks measuring cognitive development and impulse control. (Author/JMB)

Emotion regulation has emerged as a popular topic, but there is doubt about its viability as a scientific construct. This article identifies conceptual and methodological challenges in this area of study and describes exemplar studies that provide a substantive basis for inferring emotion regulation. On the basis of those studies, 4 methods are…

Emotion regulation cannot be temporally distinguished from emotion in the brain, but activation patterns in prefrontal cortex appear to mediate cognitive control during emotion episodes. Frontal event-related potentials (ERPs) can tap cognitive control hypothetically mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex, and developmentalists have used these…

Preschool children in a free-play situation experienced one of two training sequences: saying then doing, or doing then saying. The effect of training on the development of a correspondence between children's verbal and nonverbal behaviors was examined. The say-do sequence produced higher levels of correspondence. (ST)

Live behavioral and televised behavioral models were the most effective, and live verbal models were the least effective. The effects of the deviant models were more stable over time than the effects of the conforming models. (Authors)

Parental agreement was found to be more implicative for the psychological functioning of boys than girls and was positively related to the development of ego control in boys but negatively related to the development of ego control in girls. (Author/MP)