College of Education
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Item Preschoolers’ temperament and social functioning in novel and routine contexts(Frontiers, 2022-12-22) Vaughan, Helena Shoplik; Teglasi, HedwigIntroduction: The centrality of social competence to children’s short and long-term well-being has sparked interest in the factors that contribute to its development, including temperament, a set of biologically based dispositions. A large body of work documents two types of temperamental dispositions associated with young children’s social functioning: reactivity and regulation. There is consensus about the detrimental effects of negative reactive tendencies, called negative affective reactivity (NA), and about the beneficial effects of regulatory tendencies, called effortful control (EC), on social functioning. Another reactive component of temperament, Extraversion/Surgency (E/S) is less consistent in its relation with social functioning. Although NA is exacerbated by lack of familiarity, its contribution to social functioning in novel and routine contexts has not been systematically addressed. Methods: To test this study’s hypotheses, we devised a structured interview of adaptive responsiveness in context (ARC) which was completed by parents of preschoolers along with a comprehensive temperament questionnaire. Additionally, children completed an individually administered task measuring emotion-situation knowledge (N = 92) and their teachers completed a standard social competence questionnaire. Results and Discussion: A path analysis that controlled for variance shared across contexts and temperamental traits showed that NA was the only unique predictor of social functioning in the Novel context, that EC was the only unique predictor of social functioning in the Routine context and that E/S was not a unique predictor of social functioning in either context. Bivariate analyses, conducted without controlling for context overlap, showed all reactive emotional traits (subsumed within NA and E/S) to correlate exclusively with ARC in the Novel contexts. However, regulatory traits showed a mixed pattern. Inhibitory Control correlated with ARC in both contexts but more highly in the Routine context, and Perceptual Sensitivity correlated with ARC in the Novel context.Item The Roles of Anger and Self-Regulation on School Readiness in Kindergarten(2020) Callan, Sabrina; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Young children who are anger-prone or have poor self-regulation skills tend to have difficulties in school (Diaz et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2018; Valiente et al., 2012). However, few studies have explored how anger may work together with different self-regulatory tendencies to predict children’s school readiness. This study examined the relations of anger, effortful control, executive functioning, and school readiness among kindergarteners (n = 72). Executive functioning skills were found to be particularly important for academic readiness, whereas anger and effortful control were found to be particularly important and to work together to predict social-emotional readiness. These findings provide evidence for the conceptual distinctions between executive functioning and effortful control as two distinct types of self-regulation, and demonstrate the need for tailored approaches to social-emotional learning (SEL). Future SEL programs would benefit from approaches that take children’s pre-existing tendencies for anger and self-regulation into account in anger management training.