Regulation During the Second Year: Executive Function and Emotion Regulation Links to Joint Attention, Temperament, and Social Vulnerability in a Latin American Sample.

Although a growing body of work has established developing regulatory abilities during the second year of life, more work is needed to better understand factors that influence this emerging control. The purpose of the present study was to examine regulation capacities in executive functions (i.e., EF or cognitive control) and emotion regulation (i.e., ER or control focused on modulating negative and sustaining positive emotions) in a Latin American sample, with a focus on how joint attention, social vulnerability, and temperament contribute to performance. Sixty Latin American dyads of mothers and children aged 18 to 24 months completed several EF tasks, a Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) to examine ER (Weinberg et al., 2008), and the Early Social Communication Scale to measure joint attention (Mundy et al., 2003). Parents completed the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form to measure temperament (ECBQ-VS, Putnam et al., 2010) and the Social Economic Level Scale (SES) from INDEC (2000). Results revealed the typical responses expected for toddlers of this age in these EF tasks and in the SFP. Also, we found associations between EF and ER and between non-verbal communication related to monitoring infants' attention to objects (i.e., responding to joint attention) and initiation of pointing (e.g., pointing and showing of an object while the child alternates his gaze to an adult) with EF. Regarding social factors, family differences and type of housing contribute to regulation. For temperament, effortful control was associated with both regulatory capacities. Finally, only age predicted EF. These results suggest that many patterns regarding the development of these abilities are duplicated in the first months of life in a Latin American sample while further highlighting the importance of considering how the environment and the individual characteristics of infants may associate to these regulatory abilities, which is particularly relevant to developing public policies to promote their optimal development.

El desarrollo de la autorregulación en la infancia temprana y sus factores moduladores / The Development of Self-Regulation in Early Childhood and its Modulating Factors

La autorregulación emocional refiere a la capacidad intrínseca de los niños y niñas de modular y modificar respuestas tanto emocionales como cognitivas, por demandas de situaciones específicas (Lewis & Todd, 2007; Vohs & Baumeister, 2004). Sin embargo, su definición no está exenta de ambigüedades (Gross, 2013). La siguiente revisión tiene como objetivo analizar el concepto y desarrollo ontogenético de la autorregulación, y describir los principales factores endógenos y exógenos que modulan esta habilidad cognitiva en los primeros años de vida. Específicamente se trabajará con el período que abarca del momento de nacimiento hasta los 3 años de vida, denominado infancia temprana. Se realizó una revisión narrativa para explicitar el estado de conocimiento hasta el momento, utilizando las bases de datos Scopus, Medline y Web of Science, recuperándose un total de 146 referencias, de las cuáles se seleccionaron 48 que eran acordes a los objetivos establecidos. Los principales factores intrínsecos recabados fueron la maduración de las redes atencionales y el temperamento, mientras que los factores exógenos fueron la sensibilidad materna, los estilos de crianza y los entornos socioeconómicos. Se concluye que esta habilidad debe ser diferenciada conceptualmente de la regulación emocional y las funciones ejecutivas, y que la misma es el resultado de determinantes bio-psico-sociales. En futuros trabajos deberían realizarse más investigaciones empíricas con infantes y en Latinoamérica, para lograr una comprensión más acabada sobre la variable y guiar las políticas públicas para optimizar su desarrollo

Emotional self-regulation refers to the child s intrinsic ability to modulate and modify emotional and cognitive responses, due to the demands of specific situations (Lewis & Todd, 2007; Vohs & Baumeister, 2004). However, its definition is not without ambiguities (Gross, 2013). The following review aims to analyze the ontogenetic concept and development of self-regulation, and describe the main endogenous and exogenous factors that modulate this cognitive ability in the first years of life. Specifically, it will work with the period from the moment of birth to 3 years of life, called early childhood. A narrative review was carried out to explain the state of knowledge, using the Scopus, Medline and Web of Science databases, recovering a total of 146 references, of which 48 were selected according to that were consistent with the established objectives. The main intrinsic factors collected were maturation of the attentional networks and temperament, while the exogenous factors were maternal sensitivity, parenting styles and socio-economic environments. It is concluded that this ability must be conceptually differentiated from emotional regulation and executive functions, and that it is the result of bio-psycho-social determinants. In future work, more empirical research with infants and in Latin America should be carried out to achieve a more complete understanding of the variable and guide public policies to optimize their development