Sharon L. Lo

Neurophysiological evidence of an association between cognitive control and defensive reactivity processes in young children

Highlights • ERN, Pe, startle reflex, and parietal asymmetry were measured in young children.• Reduced ERN was related to a larger startle and greater right parietal activity.• Age predicted smaller startle, larger ERN, and better behavioral performance.• Age did not moderate the association between ERN and startle.• Age did not moderate the association between ERN and parietal asymmetry.

Ecological validity of laboratory assessments of child temperament: Evidence from parent perspectives.

The structure, stability, and validity of child temperament traits have primarily been examined with parent questionnaire methods, but laboratory methods represent an important complement. However, the novel setting and contrived scenarios of laboratory methods and their low convergence with parent questionnaire methods have led some to question their ecological validity. We tested this assumption by employing parents as sources of information regarding the ecological validity of laboratory assessments of child temperament. Parents observed their child participating in 10 different laboratory tasks and reported on the typicality of their childs behavior. The results suggested parents considered their childs responses during the laboratory tasks as highly typical representations of their childs behavior outside of the lab, supporting the ecological validity of trait-relevant behavior elicited with laboratory tasks.

Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset

Individuals who believe intelligence is malleable (a growth mindset) are better able to bounce back from failures than those who believe intelligence is immutable. Event-related potential (ERP) studies among adults suggest this resilience is related to increased attention allocation to errors. Whether this mechanism is present among young children remains unknown, however. We therefore evaluated error-monitoring ERPs among 123 school-aged children while they completed a child-friendly go/no-go task. As expected, higher attention allocation to errors (indexed by larger error positivity, Pe) predicted higher post-error accuracy. Moreover, replicating adult work, growth mindset was related to greater attention to mistakes (larger Pe) and higher post-error accuracy. Exploratory moderation analyses revealed that growth mindset increased post-error accuracy for children who did not attend to their errors. Together, these results demonstrate the combined role of growth mindset and neural mechanisms of attention allocation in bouncing back after failure among young children.

Codevelopment of Preschoolers’ Temperament Traits and Social Play Networks Over an Entire School Year.

Children enter preschool with temperament traits that may shape or be shaped by their social interactions in the peer setting. We collected classroom observational measures of positive emotionality (PE), negative emotionality (NE), effortful control (EC), and peer social play relationships from 2 complete preschool classrooms (N = 53 children) over the course of an entire school year. Using longitudinal social network analysis, we found evidence that children’s traits shaped the formation of play relationships, and that the traits of children’s playmates shaped the subsequent development of children’s own traits. Children who exhibited high levels of NE were less likely to form social play relationships over time. In addition, children were more likely to form play relationships with peers who were similar to their own levels of PE. Over the course of the school year, children’s level of PE and EC changed such that they became more similar to their playmates in levels of these traits. Finally, we observed moderate to strong rank-order stability of behavioral observations of PE, NE, and EC across the school year. Our results provide evidence for the effects of traits on the formation of play relationships, as well as for the role of these play relationships in shaping trait expression over time.