| Development of the self-regulatory elements of executive control is one of the most critical and significant developmental achievements of early childhood. Executive control and self-regulation are constructs that lie at the nexus of developmental, neuropsychological, and clinical investigations. Effortful Control (EC) is a construct representing a hybridization of these separate but intertwined notions. It describes the self regulatory aspects of the executive control system. The construct is of special interest and use, because, despite the traditional practice of conceptualizing cognitive and emotional processes independently of one another, the construct of EC places emotional, cognitive, and behavioral self-regulatory capacities together. EC is meant to refer to emotional, social, and cognitive regulatory function, with the understanding that the separation of emotional, social, and cognitive developmental processes is an artifact of the fractionization of psychology, rather than an organically based distinction. The purpose of the study is to examine if securely attached children differ from children who manifest insecure attachment behavior in regard to their subsequent formation of EC processes after controlling for the effects of social contextual adversity. |
