Do bottom-up aspects of self-regulation predict executive functioning?: Testing a bi-directional model of self-regulation and applying it to home and school contexts

Research on self-regulation has largely focused on effortful, top-down aspects of self-control, and when more automatic processes such as emotion, stress physiology, and attention have been studied, they have rarely been conceptualized within the framework of children's development of executive functions. In taking a novel approach, the current studies are framed by a bi-directional model of self-regulation, which highlights ways in which children's development of effortful executive functioning can be supported or impaired by more automatic aspects of self-regulation. Examining relations between more automatic and more effortful self-regulatory processes in childhood is particularly important given the protracted development of self-regulation during which earlier emerging automatic processes set the stage for top-down executive functioning. These papers thus utilize three cross-sectional early and middle childhood samples of children growing up in both urban and rural contexts of poverty to examine the extent to which bottom-up processes are related to children's executive functioning.;Paper 1 first tests and extends the bi-directional model by examining the relation of individual level bottom-up emotional arousal in the form of both state and trait anxiety to executive functioning. Papers 2 and 3 apply the model to examine ways in which both home and school contexts, respectively, are related to children's development of executive functioning.;Paper 1 provides empirical support for the bi-directional model in that higher trait anxiety, a manifestation of bottom-up emotional processes, was related to lower executive functioning across two tasks. Paper 2 suggests that perceived and objective aspects of socioeconomic status and stress are related to both bottom-up processes of stress physiology and top-down processes of executive functioning. Paper 3 in turn demonstrates associations between classroom quality and executive functioning skills in first grade.;Generally, results aligned with the hypothesis that experiencing or being in contexts indicative of higher levels of stress would be associated with impairments in executive functions whereas being in contexts that support more moderate levels of arousal would be associated with higher executive functioning. As such, this set of studies demonstrates the importance of considering ways in which more automatic, bottom-up processes can shape children's top-down processes of executive function.