Self-regulation

Regulation of attention, behaviour or emotion in relation to goals. Measures of executive function, temperament, waiting behaviour and classroom engagement can overlap without being interchangeable.

Effortful control concerns deliberate regulation of attention and action, including inhibiting a dominant response and sustaining a less automatic one. It is an aspect of self-regulation, studied through both everyday ratings and performance tasks. These methods sample different settings and demands, so their scores need not be interchangeable.

An original task example gives a child a simple response rule, then asks for a different response when a familiar cue appears. Accuracy can depend on response inhibition, but also on understanding and remembering the rule. A low score therefore does not isolate inhibition without further comparisons. A rating of everyday effortful control instead summarizes behavior across observations and informants.

Clancy Blair and Rachel Peters Razza examined effortful control, executive function and false-belief understanding together in relation to emerging mathematics and literacy performance. Comparing these predictors helps distinguish overlapping constructs; a predictive association alone does not show that training one measured component causes an academic improvement.^[ref]

Processes influencing the course, intensity or expression of emotional responses. What is useful depends on the situation and goal; successful regulation does not require suppression of every unpleasant emotion.

Changing the interpreted meaning of an event in a way that changes its emotional implications. An experiment that alters interpretation can support a causal role for cognitive appraisal; it does not by itself show that appraisal is necessary for every emotion.

Foregoing an immediate outcome in favour of a preferred later one. Waiting can depend on control, strategy, current motivation and expectations that the later outcome will occur.^[ref]

A task offering an immediate edible reward or a larger or preferred reward after waiting. Reward visibility, instructions, experimenter reliability and the maximum permitted waiting time affect its interpretation; a duration is not automatically a pure measure of self-control.