Lea Pulkkinen, born in Finland in 1939, is Emerita Professor of Psychology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). She is best known for creating the ongoing Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (JLSPSD). The study was specifically intended to test the hypothesis that the human brain allows for more variation in behavior than the simple ‘fight or flight’ response observed in animal studies of aggression. She further hypothesized that humans’ capacity for cognitive control over emotional behavior was the key factor involved in controlling aggressive behavior. These hypotheses led her to devise an impulse control model to depict behavioral alternatives, which she tested with teacher and peer ratings of aggressive and nonaggressive behaviors. Forty years later, the JLSPSD revealed the long-term significance of self-regulation for socio-emotional behavior. Results from the study showed that aggressive behavior during childhood tends to be associated with other types of under-controlled behavior during adulthood. On the other hand, ‘constructive’ behavior in childhood tends to lead to positive social relations, mental health, and successful integration in the work force.

Epstein concludes the policy section by explaining that although the dangers ofdisinformation campaigns are real and growing quickly, effective interventions haveremained elusive. Why is it so difficult to regulate online disinformation? This explorationbuilds on the chapter by Heidi Tworek and analyzes three major challenges to effectiveregulation: defining the problem clearly so that regulators can address it, deciding whoshould be in charge of creating and enforcing regulations, and understanding what effectiveregulation might actually look like. After analyzing these challenges, Epstein suggests fourstandards for effective disinformation. First, disinformation regulation should target thenegative effects of disinformation while consciously minimizing any additional harm causedby the regulation itself. Second, regulation should be proportional to the harm caused.Third, effective regulation must be able to adapt to changes in technology anddisinformation strategies. And fourth, regulators should be as independent as possible frompolitical and corporate leadership.

This chapter provides an overview of research factors and interventions that facilitate delaying gratification in academic settings. In learning settings, academic delay of gratification refers to students’ postponement of immediately available opportunities to satisfy impulses in favor of pursuing important academic rewards or goals that are temporally remote but ostensibly more valuable. The first section of this chapter provides a brief overview and the theoretical underpinnings of Bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory and Zimmerman’s (2013) self-regulated learning model, with an emphasis on delay of gratification. The second section focuses on how school psychologists can help educators to put in place schoolwide processes that help make it easier for students to delay gratification. The third section describes interventions that can be implemented by school psychologists, teachers, and administrators to assist students who struggle with delaying gratification. The final section provides recommendations for facilitating delaying gratification in school environments and suggests future research.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss research in motivation, self-regulation, and emotion that includes gender as a variable. Specifically, we propose using an intersectionality perspective and a culturally situated understanding of women’s motivational and emotional experiences, and describe data from our labs in Germany and Singapore in order to illustrate this position. Our findings indicate that women’s motivational experience in achievement domains is tied to avoidant motivation and their lower ability to self-regulate negative emotion in the face of goal difficulties or goal failure. Compared to men, women’s more fearful enactment of the implicit achievement motives is related to their adoption of a lower self-attributed achievement motive, which, in turn, lowers women’s well-being. We discuss how cultural norms and gender socialization lead to a complex interplay of parenting, social-normative, and personality systems and processes that contribute to a different motivational and emotional experience for men versus women.

Earlier neurobiological models of substance addictions proposed that addiction is the product of an imbalance between two separate, but interacting, neural systems: (1) an impulsive and amygdala-striatum dependent system that promotes automatic and habitual behaviors, and (2) a “reflective” prefrontal cortex dependent system for decision-making, forecasting the future consequences of a behavior, and inhibitory control. These impulsive and reflective systems are analogous to Daniel Kahneman’s model of System I and System II thinking, or the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS). Here, the reflective system controls the impulsive system through several distinct mechanisms that regulate impulses. However, this control is not absolute – hyperactivity within the impulsive system can override the reflective system. Most prior research has focused either on the impulsive system (especially the ventral striatum and its mesolimbic dopamine projections) as a mechanism promoting the motivation and drive to seek drugs, or on the reflective system (prefrontal cortex) as a mechanism for decision-making and impulse control. More recent evidence suggests that a largely overlooked structure, the insula, also plays a key role in maintaining addiction (craving). Hence, a triadic model of addiction incorporates these three systems that are associated with archetypal behaviors in addiction: craving, motivation to procure the drug, poor decision-making, lack of impulse control, and deficits in self-regulation.

Resilience is complex and multifaceted, attracting research across a number of disciplines. The focus of this chapter is the importance of teachers’ everyday practice in early years settings (preschools and schools) for supporting resilience.The chapter begins with a brief outline of how resilience is defined, and highlights how the building of resilience is an important element in children’s learning as noted in curriculum frameworks that guide teachers practice. It then moves on to describe ways in which teachers working across the early years promote resilience. The final section of the chapter lists questions that can be useful to help early years teachers reflect on their own practice in relation to resilience.

Resilience is complex and multifaceted, attracting research across a number of disciplines. The focus of this chapter is the importance of teachers’ everyday practice in early years settings (preschools and schools) for supporting resilience.The chapter begins with a brief outline of how resilience is defined, and highlights how the building of resilience is an important element in children’s learning as noted in curriculum frameworks that guide teachers practice. It then moves on to describe ways in which teachers working across the early years promote resilience. The final section of the chapter lists questions that can be useful to help early years teachers reflect on their own practice in relation to resilience.

Although preserving social relationships plays a critical role in successful aging, a large body of work has shown that the size of older adults’ social networks declines with age. This decline could reflect older adults’ increased desire to preserve their emotional well-being (having greater positive than negative affect). However, because emotional well-being is associated with longer lifespans whereas having smaller social networks is not, other factors may contribute to older adults’ declining network. This chapter reviews one such possibility: age-related declines in social cognition. Core social cognitive functions that play an integral role in developing and maintaining social relationships – understanding the mental states of others, emotion recognition, inhibiting socially inappropriate responses, and prejudice reduction – are impaired in aging populations. This chapter reviews each of these, and considers how they might influence older adults’ ability to develop and maintain high-quality social networks.

In this chapter, we argue that to understand intelligence one must understand motivation. In the past, intelligence was often cast as an entity unto itself, relatively unaffected by motivation. In our chapter, we spell out how motivational factors determine (1) whether individuals initiate goals relating to the acquisition and display of intellectual skills, (2) how persistently they pursue those goals, and (3) how effectively they pursue those goals, that is, how effectively they learn and perform in the intellectual arena. As will be seen, motivational factors can have systematic and meaningful effects on intellectual ability, performance, and accomplishment over time. Our discussion emphasizes that heritability is not incompatible with the malleability of intelligence and that motivation is the vehicle through which intellectual skills are successfully acquired, expressed, and built upon.

Paternalist policymakers face a severe knowledge problem that is analogous to the knowledge problem faced by central planners. They do not and often cannot possess the kind of local and tacit knowledge needed to craft policy interventions that reliably improve human welfare. We provide a taxonomy of types of knowledge that paternalist planners need but typically do not have: true preferences, extent of bias, self-debiasing and small-group debiasing, dynamic impacts on self-regulation, counteracting behaviors, bias interactions, and population heterogeneity. We also critique two leading efforts to surmount knowledge problems of behavioral paternalism: the augmented revelatory frame approach and unified behavioral revealed preference.

The policies recommended by behavioral paternalists rest on certain posited empirical facts or regularities about human behavior. Some of these supposed facts have not been established with much confidence. Specifically, psychological findings are highly context-specific, and thus lack the generality required for policymaking; generalizing quantitative results from the laboratory to the real world is unreliable; most existing research does not account adequately for incentives and learning; most existing research does not consider small-group debiasing; and most existing research does not adequately assess self-regulation and self-debiasing. Establishing reliable answers to these questions is a prerequisite for crafting and calibrating paternalistic policies with a reasonable expectation of improving welfare.

In Chapter 1, we present an overview of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), including an explanation of how regulatory processes arise from the routine practices of social life. As part of this overview, we provide an explicit definition of cultural practices. To elaborate how a practice perspective is beneficial for understanding behavioral regulation, we describe how basic elements of an activity theoretic framework capture defining elements of a social practice. This framework offers a useful model for conceptualizing and observing how social practices come into existence and bring/create contextual resources that influence behavioral regulation. These resources are contextually embedded and include such elements as cultural tools, sign systems and symbols, goal-directed activities, and tasks. To better understand how regulatory processes emerge from participation in a community’s valued activities, we offer definitions of self-, other-, and co-regulation from a practice perspective.