The parent-child relationship undergoes substantial reorganization over the transition to adolescence. Navigating this change is a challenge for parents because teens desire more behavioral autonomy as well as input in decision-making processes. Although it has been demonstrated that changes in parental socialization approaches facilitates adolescent adjustment, very little work has been devoted to understanding the underlying mechanisms supporting parents’ abilities to adjust caregiving during this period. Guided by self-regulation models of parenting, the present study examined how parental physiological and cognitive regulatory capacities were associated with hostile and insensitive parent conflict behavior over time. From a process-oriented perspective, we tested the explanatory role of parents’ dysfunctional child-oriented attributions in this association. A sample of 193 fathers, mothers, and their early adolescent (ages 12–14) participated in laboratory-based research assessments spaced approximately 1 year apart. Parental physiological regulation was measured using square root of the mean of successive differences during a conflict task; cognitive regulation was indicated by set-shifting capacity. Results showed that parental difficulties in vagal regulation during parent-adolescent conflict were associated with increased hostile conflict behavior over time; however, greater set-shifting capacity moderated this association for fathers only. In turn, father's dysfunctional attributions regarding adolescent behavior mediated the moderating effect. The results highlight how models of self-regulation and social cognition may explain the determinants of hostile parenting with differential implications for fathers during adolescence.

Identifying Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) constructs in early childhood is essential for understanding etiological pathways of psychopathology. Our central goal was to identify early emotion knowledge and self-regulation difficulties across different RDoC domains and examine how they relate to typical versus atypical symptom trajectories between ages 3 and 10. Particularly, we assessed potential contributions of children's gender, executive control, delay of gratification, and regulation of frustration, emotion recognition, and emotion understanding at age 3 to co-occurring patterns of internalizing and externalizing across development. A total of 238 3-year-old boys and girls were assessed using behavioral tasks and parent reports and reassessed at ages 5 and 10 years. Results indicated that very few children developed “pure” internalizing or externalizing symptoms relative to various levels of co-occurring symptoms across development. Four classes of co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems were identified: low, low-moderate, rising, and severe-decreasing trajectories. Three-year-old children with poor executive control but high emotion understanding were far more likely to show severe-decreasing than low/low-moderate class co-occurring internalizing and externalizing symptom patterns. Child gender and poor executive control differentiated children in rising versus low trajectories. Implications for early intervention targeting self-regulation of executive control are discussed.

This study investigated the longitudinal associations among prenatal substance use, socioeconomic adversity, parenting (maternal warmth, sensitivity, and harshness), children's self-regulation (internalization of rules and conscience), and conduct problems from infancy to middle childhood (Grade 2). Three competing conceptual models including cascade (indirect or mediated), additive (cumulative), and transactional (bidirectional) effects were tested and compared. The sample consisted of 216 low-income families (primary caretaker and children; 51% girls; 74% African American). Using a repeated-measures, multimethod, multi-informant design, a series of full panel models were specified. Findings primarily supported a developmental cascade model, and there was some support for additive effects. More specifically, maternal prenatal substance use and socioeconomic adversity in infancy were prospectively associated with lower levels of maternal sensitivity. Subsequently, lower maternal sensitivity was associated with decreases in children's conscience in early childhood, and in turn, lower conscience predicted increases in teacher-reported conduct problems in middle childhood. There was also a second pathway from sustained maternal depression (in infancy and toddlerhood) to early childhood conduct problems. These findings demonstrated how processes of risk and resilience collectively contributed to children's early onset conduct problems.

Although many children adopted internationally show remarkable recovery once placed in families, as a group they continue to exhibit persisting developmental deficits and delays in self-regulation. The current study uses a stratified, randomized, controlled trial to evaluate the effects of mindfulness-based and executive function trainings (EFTs) on internationally adopted (IA) children's self-regulation, including effortful/inhibitory control, attention, delay of gratification, and emotion-regulation. IA children ages 6–10 years were randomized into mindfulness training (MT), EFT, or no intervention (NI) groups. The MT and EFT groups attended 12 one-hour group sessions. Ninety-six children (MT, n = 33; EFT, n = 32; NI, n = 31) completed the study and were tested on computerized and non-computerized measures of self-regulation. Compared with the NI group, the MT group improved delay of gratification, and the EFT group improved inhibitory control and selective attention. There was no effect of either intervention on emotion regulation. MTs and EFTs show promise for improving self-regulation in IA children.

Children with prenatal tobacco exposure (PTE) exhibit early self-regulatory impairments, reflecting a life-course persistent propensity toward behavioral disinhibition. Previously, we demonstrated the protective role of parental responsiveness for reducing the risk of exposure-related disruptive behavior in adolescence. Here, we expanded this line of inquiry, examining whether responsiveness moderates the relation of PTE to a broader set of behavioral disinhibition features in early childhood and testing alternative diathesis-stress versus differential susceptibility explanatory models. PTE was assessed prospectively using interviews and bioassays in the Midwestern Infant Development Study (MIDS). Mother-child dyads (N = 276) were re-assessed at approximately 5 years of age in a preschool follow-up. We quantified maternal responsiveness and child behavioral disinhibition using a combination of directly observed activities in the lab and developmentally sensitive questionnaires. Results supported a diathesis-stress pattern. Children with PTE and less responsive mothers showed increased disruptive behavior and lower effortful control compared with children without PTE. In contrast, exposed children with more responsive mothers had self-regulatory profiles similar to their non-exposed peers. We did not observe sex differences. Findings provide greater specification of the protective role of maternal responsiveness for self-regulation in children with PTE and help clarify mechanisms that may underscore trajectories of exposure-related behavioral disinhibition.

We tested the hypothesis that high activity levels in infancy would predict self-regulatory problems and later symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a longitudinal study of British families (N = 321). Infants’ activity levels were assessed at 6 months, using 3 informants’ reports from the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) and ActiGraphs during baseline, attention, and restraint tasks. At a mean of 33 months, the children were assessed on self-regulatory tasks; at a mean of 36 months, 3 informants reported symptoms of ADHD. At a mean of 7.0 years, the children were assessed on executive function tasks; 3 informants reported on the child's symptoms of ADHD; and diagnoses of disorder were obtained using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment. Informants’ reports of high activity levels at 6 months predicted ADHD symptoms in early childhood and diagnoses of ADHD with clinical impairment at age 7. The IBQ activity scale was also associated with the children's later performance on self-regulation tasks in early and middle childhood. Activity level in infancy reflects normal variation and is not a sign of psychopathology; however, these findings suggest that further study of the correlates of high activity level in infancy may help identify those children most at risk for disorder.

This article discusses the roles of ethicists in the governance of synthetic biology. I am particularly concerned with the idea of self-regulation of bioscience and its relationship to public discourse about ethical issues in bioscience. I will look at the role of philosophical ethicists at different levels and loci, from the “embedded ethicist” in the laboratory or research project, to ethicists’ impact on policy and public discourse. In a democratic society, the development of governance frameworks for emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology, needs to be guided by a well-informed public discourse. In the case of synthetic biology, the public discourse has to go further than merely considering technical issues of biosafety and biosecurity, or risk management, to consider more philosophical issues concerning the meaning and value of “life” between the natural and the synthetic. I argue that ethicists have moral expertise to bring to the public arena, which consists not only in guiding the debate but also in evaluating arguments and moral positions and making normative judgments. When ethicists make normative claims or moral judgments, they must be transparent about their theoretical positions and basic moral standpoints.

The main goal of this study is to understand the relationship between different types of prosocial behaviors and different forms of self-regulation, as part of the adaptation and validation of the Portuguese version of the Prosocial Tendencies Measure-Revised (PTM-R). A total of 403 early adolescents (M = 11.81; SD = .92; 52.91% girls) completed self-reported measures. The evaluation of psychometric properties of the PTM-R involved a confirmatory factorial analysis, followed by the examination of factorial internal consistency and factorial invariance analyses across gender groups and school retention groups (retention vs. no-retention). The results support the premise that a 6-factor model similar to the original measure is the most appropriate factorial solution for the PTM-R Portuguese version (χ2(174) = 1.725, p < .001, CFI = .95, RMSEA = .030, SRMR = .08). The levels of internal consistency for the different subscales ranged from .67 to .78. Further convergent and divergent validity tests reveal that different forms of prosocial behavior are more often related to girls’ cognitive, affective and behavioral regulation and that students who failed at least one school year and thus had to repeat it denote poorer relations between prosocial behaviors and self-regulation dimensions, as opposed to more successful students. In conclusion, the Portuguese version of the PTM-R has adequate psychometric properties and its use for research purposes in the field of social development may be appropriate. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for future research on prosociality.

We examined the relations between perceived health (e.g., self-perceived health status) and driving self-regulatory practices (e.g., frequency of driving, avoiding challenging driving situations) as mediated by driving attitudes and perceptions (i.e., driving comfort, positive and negative attitudes towards driving) in data collected for 928 drivers aged 70 and older enrolled in the Candrive II study. We observed that specific attitudes towards driving (e.g., driving comfort, negative attitudes towards driving) mediate the relations between health symptoms and self-regulatory driving behaviours at baseline and over time. Only negative attitudes towards driving fully mediated the relationships between changes in perceived health symptoms and changes in driving behavior. Perceived health symptoms apparently influence the likelihood of avoiding challenging driving situations through both initial negative attitudes towards driving as well as changes in negative attitudes over time. Understanding influences on self-regulatory driving behaviours will be of benefit when designing interventions to enhance the safety of older drivers.

To date, associations between psychosocial driving variables and behaviour have been examined only cross-sectionally. Using three waves of data collected annually from 928 older drivers (mean age = 76.21 years; 62% male) enrolled in the Candrive II cohort, we examined in this study whether changes in attitudes and perceptions towards driving (decisional balance and day and night driving comfort) were associated with changes in older adults’ reported restrictions in driving practices and perceived driving abilities. Multi-level models revealed that older adults who showed an increase in negative attitudes towards driving over time were more likely to report more-restricted practices (greater avoidance of challenging driving situations) and perceived declines in driving abilities compared to individuals whose attitudes towards driving remained stable across two years. This work supports previous findings and offers a new understanding of how attitudes relate to driving perceptions (e.g., comfort) and self-regulation in older adults over time.

How do humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) define and institutionalise global accountability standards? This article process-traces the case of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership-International (HAP-I), a voluntary, self-regulatory collective accountability initiative, to investigate the processes through which NGOs define collective rules, standards, and practices for accountability. This article shows the limitations of traditional representative and principal-agent models of NGO accountability when applied to the global inter-organisational realm and argues that mutual accountability better conceptualises these relationships. In this important case, the article finds that transnational coordination of NGO accountability practices results from social learning that generates a global accountability community (GAC) constituted by mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of practices. Data from the process tracing shows a collaborative not hierarchical or coercive relationship between NGOs and states, where salient donors changed their understandings and practices of accountability during the process of developing the HAP-I benchmarks. Thus, GACs both regulate the behaviour of members and constitute their social identities, interests, and practices.

The present research investigated the relationship between extra-curricular involvement (ECI) and self-regulated behaviours in 8 to 9 year old children, and identified sex, location, and socio-economic status (SES) differences in their ECI and self-regulatory behaviours. 550 children from 44 schools in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia completed the Child Self-Regulatory Process Inventory and questions about their ECI. Nearly 90% of students were involved in at least one extra-curricular activity with the mean number of activities being 1.27. Girls and urban children were significantly more involved in school-based extra-curricular activities than their male and rural counterparts; there were no significant differences among SES groups. Urban children and children in the high SES group reported significantly greater involvement for non-school based activities. For the three self-regulation strategies, girls scored significantly higher than boys. Moreover, children in the high ECI group reported significantly greater use of self-regulation strategies than children in the low ECI group and were more efficacious-persistent than children in both the low and medium ECI groups. implications of findings are discussed in light of the need for quality extra-curricular programs, especially in terms of emotional climate and self-directed activities.

Quality of carer-child attunement is recognised as a significant factor in child development, yet few parenting programmes appear to provide opportunities for whole families to engage in activities exploring sound attunement. Clever Connections was developed by a psychologist–clinician in private practice as an attunement-focused pilot programme to explore a collaborative approach for families with primary-school-aged children. Concepts from critical theories, applied linguistics, sensorimotor therapies, mindfulness, narrative practice and communal practice informed the theoretical positioning which guided the programme's development. The programme, run over four sessions, was trialled with a group of four families. The first session was a three-hour block for the adults only, during which the participants’ positionings and preferences were used to structure the programme. The following whole-family sessions involved a series of cooperative games, creative activities and linguistic tasks focusing on enhancing attunement. Feedback was gathered immediately following the programme regarding content and structure of the programme. Follow-up at six months indicated that sensorimotor and self-regulatory strategies explored in the programme continued to be of benefit to some of the families who participated. The outcomes suggest that further experimentation with this style of family programme is worthy of consideration.

Studies have highlighted the role of early Executive Functioning (EF) interventions with regard to preventing behavioral and mental health problems. In this sense, interventions to promote EF have been developed and tested; however, in Latin America, evidence of early EF-related interventions is still limited. We developed a program for EF promotion in children and applied it to first-grade students. Sixty-eight six-year-old children and their five teachers were divided into an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG). EG teachers administered the Intervention Program for Self-regulation and Executive Functions in a classroom context. The results of the ANCOVAs showed that children in the EG had significantly better performance in measures of cognitive flexibility (Trail Making Test for Preschoolers; p = .05), attention (Cancellation Attention Test – errors in the Part 3; p = .027), inhibition (Simon Task – interference score in the part 1; p = .008 and interference reaction time in the part 2; p = .010), and planning (CHEXI - planning scale; p = .041) than those in the CG. The results show that EF can be promoted using classroom intervention in public schools. These results expand previous findings for Latin America.