José Antonio Carranza

Temperament and attention in the self-regulation of 7-year-old children

Abstract The present work assessed the implications of the posterior orienting and the anterior executive attentional networks on self-regulation abilities in children through studying the relations of 7-year-old children’s temperament characteristics to different forms of attentional control. Children were classified in terms of their temperament traits measured through the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire. Children carried out two Stroop tasks, with and without distracting stimuli, and flanker and Stroop interference effects were calculated as measures of the orienting and the executive attentional networks, respectively. Results indicated that children scoring high in Anger, Discomfort, Sadness (only girls) and Approach-Anticipation (only girls) showed a stronger flanker interference effect, exhibiting greater difficulty to filter out the non relevant information than children scoring low did. On the other hand, children scoring high in Activity Level and Impulsivity (only girls), and low in Inhibitory Control, showed a stronger Stroop interference effect, indicating less ability to suppress prepotent behaviors under instructions. Also, patterns of interactions between some pairs of scales revealed that negative emotionality and self-regulatory aspects of temperament predicted both Stroop and flanker interference performance.

Force-related information and exploratory behavior in infancy

Exploratory behavior allows the child to get to know its own possibilities of action in the environment. The aim of this study was to analyze how children explore the sense of force and to know if they are able to detect and adjust the forces necessary to perform a pulling task. 30 children between 10 and 24 months of age could activate the lights and music of a doll pulling from a ring with a certain force specified by the experimenter. Four decreasing ranges of force were used. Results show that all children were able to adjust their force to the requirements of the task, but the oldest children showed more exploratory behavior than the youngest ones.

Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Infant Fear A Multi-Method Study in Spain and the United States

Cross-cultural investigations addressing the development of individual differences are important because these speak to the generalizability of results and the extent to which the development of temperament and personality differs by culture. The present study was aimed at comparing manifestations of fear, defined in infancy as startle or distress to sudden changes in stimulation (e.g., facial/bodily expressions of fear), and inhibited approach to novelty (e.g., escape/avoidance), for samples from Spain (n = 51) and the United States (n = 102). We obtained data from mothers of U.S. and Spanish infants at 12 months of age, also observing these babies in the context of a structured laboratory procedure designed to elicit fearful reactivity. Data reduction efforts produced coherent observation-based fearfulness constructs for both groups, and individual indicators were also examined. Significant differences between U.S. and Spanish infants for the observation-based fear composite and component indices of distress vocalizations, bodily fear, and escape intensity, but not for the parent-report of this attribute, were demonstrated. A significant culture-by-gender interaction emerged for the laboratory-based fear composite and the intensity of facial fear indicator, wherein Spanish female infants exhibited higher intensity of expression, relative to the U.S. counterparts.