Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Self‐Regulation in the First 3 Years of Life: A Key to Predict Successful Development?

Item

Title

Self‐Regulation in the First 3 Years of Life: A Key to Predict Successful Development?

Author

Pauen, Sabina

Evers, Wiebke

Research Area

Development

Topic

Developmental Processes

Abstract

Self‐regulation (SR) skills in young children are known to predict later achievements, but we still know only little about how various aspects of SR first emerge, how they are related to each other and what mechanisms underlie their development in infancy and beyond. To answer these questions we need to improve concepts and measures to describe early SR development, clarify whether SR development undergoes a sensitive period in infancy, and to identify factors that influence SR development in early years. The present report argues for a multi‐method, system‐oriented, and dynamic approach to meet these challenges.

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Identifier

etrds0453

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Self-Regulation in the First 3 Years of
Life: A Key to Predict Successful
Development?
SABINA PAUEN and WIEBKE EVERS

Abstract
Self-regulation (SR) skills in young children are known to predict later achievements,
but we still know only little about how various aspects of SR first emerge, how they
are related to each other and what mechanisms underlie their development in infancy
and beyond. To answer these questions we need to improve concepts and measures
to describe early SR development, clarify whether SR development undergoes a sensitive period in infancy, and to identify factors that influence SR development in early
years. The present report argues for a multi-method, system-oriented, and dynamic
approach to meet these challenges.

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During early childhood, children learn how to adapt to new situations at the
mental and/or behavioral level by modifying their own cognitive, emotional
and/or motivational states. In the literature, this capacity is often referred
to as self-regulation (SR), serving as an umbrella term for various concepts,
such as central attention, emotion regulation, impulse control, executive
functions, effortful control, self-control, or metacognitive control (Nigg,
2017). Each concept covers a somewhat different aspect of SR, depending
on which target process needs to be regulated (i.e., cognitive, emotional or
motivational), whether SR is referring to the mental or to the behavioral
level, and whether it is treated more like a state or a trait. Concepts also vary
in terms of their interpretation of SR as an innate predisposition or as an
acquired skill.
Numerous studies suggest that SR abilities in children predict mental or
physical health, academic achievement, and social skills in later years. The
Dunedin study provides a well-known example: This longitudinal study
started in the early 1970s and followed the lives of more than 1000 people in
New Zealand from toddlerhood to adulthood. Moffitt et al. (2011) computed
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

an integrative rating of self-control (SC) for each child, based on the performance in laboratory tasks and behavioral evaluations by different people
(experimenters, caregivers, and teachers) at multiple measurement points
(ranging from 3 to 10 years of age). Hence, SC was treated as the behavioral
expression of SR skills even though we cannot tell what specific aspects of
SR were covered by this compound measure. SC correlated substantially
with later drug abuse and addiction, academic performance, income and
financial planning, criminal record, and the risk of being a single parent
at the age of 32, even after controlling for IQ and SES. When considering
only data collected at the earliest measurement time (i.e., when children
were 3 years of age) corresponding effects were smaller but still significant.
Hence, the Dunedin study demonstrated that SC can already be assessed at
a very early age, seems to remain fairly stable throughout development and
has important implications for later development.
This raises a number of important questions: For example, we may ask
whether using a compound measure provides the best way to capture early
SR development, or whether we should assess various aspects of SR skills
separately to learn more about their individual role. In any case, it would
help to define SR components and their potential precursors more precisely
and to use corresponding definitions as a starting point for developing new
methods to test infants and toddlers, as reliable and valid measures for this
age group are still sparse. This would also enable us to investigate the emerging structure of SR. Furthermore, we could explore whether inter-individual
differences in SR are innate, whether infants need a specific input during a
sensitive period of brain maturation in order to develop their full potential
regarding SR, and/or which experiences in early childhood might have a
positive or a negative impact on SR development. Ultimately, work along
these lines will help us to determine whether SR can actually serve as a key
to predict successful development.
Against this background we thus see two major challenges for future
research: (i) improving concepts and measures to describe early SR development; and (ii) clarifying the role of experiences during infancy and
identifying potential determinants of SR development. This essay aims at
providing the reader with more detailed information on each challenge and
with some guidelines for future research.
IMPROVING CONCEPTUAL CLARITY AND MEASURES TO DESCRIBE
EARLY SR DEVELOPMENT
Despite the great progress in research on early SR during the past decades
(Blair, 2016; Diamond, 2013), we still know only little about how this capacity
emerges in first place. In newborns, largely separated lines of work focus

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on self-regulation of physiological needs (sleep and food intake), emotional
responses (stress), cognitive processes (attention), or motivational (intentional) states. In later infancy and toddlerhood, the role of cognitive and
behavioral control becomes increasingly important, as reflected by work on
effortful control and executive functions. Even though many authors speculate about potential cross-links between physiological, emotional, cognitive,
and motivational SR, longitudinal studies that assess multiple components
of SR in parallel and systematically explore their inter-dependence across
early years are still rare. As recently pointed out by Nigg (2017), bottom-up
and top-down processes of SR should be analyzed in their interplay—a topic
that seems of special relevance when talking about the very beginnings of
SR and its changes throughout early childhood. Corresponding work would
require conceptual clarification, however. It would also require measures
suitable for testing the same aspect of SR in an age-adaptive way across
early childhood. To illustrate the difficulties associated with a corresponding
approach, we take executive functions (EFs) as a prominent example:
CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEASURES—THE EXAMPLE OF EXECUTIVE
FUNCTIONS
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EFs are typically interpreted as a top-down mechanism of SR (Nigg, 2017)
and defined as a hierarchical construct (Miyake et al., 2000), including the
abilities (i) to hold and update information in working memory, (ii) to inhibit
dominant, fast, and nonreflected responses to stimulation, and (iii) to flexibly
shift the focus of one’s mental frame (Blair et al., 2005). Together, these three
abilities involve frontal-lobe processes that allow the child to gain and maintain cognitive control in challenging situations. The hierarchical structure of
EF proposed by Miyake et al. (2000) fits with data for school children and to
some extent even preschoolers. For infants and toddlers, results seem rather
inconsistent, however (Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008). Here, we still know
little about how individual EF components are organized, and how they
are related to other aspects of SR (e.g., emotion regulation). This raises the
question of how EFs can be reliably assessed in very young children.
Even though some computer-based test batteries for EFs in older toddlers,
preschool, and school children are available (Zelazo et al., 2013), methods
that allow for adaptive testing and age-sensitive measurements applicable
under the age of three are largely missing. This makes it difficult to investigate whether EFs should be regarded as stable personality characteristics or
as a set of malleable skills.
The availability of such methods would also allow us to investigate the
emerging structure of EFs and its changes in early years. The fact that infants
have only a limited attention span and limited abilities to understand or

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follow verbal instructions implies that paradigms applicable for infants
need to be simple and short. At the same time, they should allow researchers
to increase task-difficulty for testing older children without changing the
concepts. To provide an example of how such an experimental paradigm
might look like and what kind of problems researchers encounter when
trying to adapt it to different age groups we will describe a set of tasks
to assess visuo-spatial working memory as one central and well-defined
component of EFs.
Developmental psychologists probing working memory in young children often refer to the general Hide-and-Seek Paradigm (Bernier, Carlson, &
Whipple, 2010). In this paradigm, an attractive target is placed (or presented)
in one of multiple locations. Next, all locations are covered for a predefined
time interval before the child is allowed to search for the target. From trial
to trial, the hiding location changes; hence, the child needs to update the
position of the target to search in the correct location. In task versions
for infants, anticipatory looking to the hiding location can serve as the
dependent variable (Ropeter & Pauen, 2012). For older infants and toddlers,
manual search paradigms are more common (Diamond, 2013). To adjust
task difficulty for preschoolers and school children, the hiding locations are
sometimes mounted on a round platform, which can be rotated (while being
covered) before the child is allowed to start searching. It this case, children
typically fail to find the target on the very first trial and need to seek for it
repeatedly. That way, the experimenter can check whether the same location
is visited more than once, as this measure indicates the child’s ability to
hold in mind all previously searched locations. This manipulation also
implies a change of the feedback-structure. Whereas feedback in previously
mentioned versions of the Hide-and-Seek paradigm is irrelevant for the next
trial, this is not the case when the child is allowed to search repeatedly.
Although Hide-and-Seek tasks may vary with respect to the dependent
measure (anticipatory looking vs manual search), the kind, number, and
spatial arrangement of hiding locations, the delay before searching, the
number of search attempts allowed, and the feedback structure, the general
concept (i.e., updating visuo-spatial memory) remains the same. As demonstrated here, it thus seems possible to develop paradigms that are simple,
focused on a specific SR component and that can be adjusted for different
age groups of children.
CHALLENGES IN PLANNING AND CONDUCTING BEHAVIORAL SR STUDIES WITH VERY YOUNG
CHILDREN
Nonetheless, we need to remain cautious when interpreting findings of
behavioral studies conducted with very young children because even
subtle manipulations regarding the experimental procedure may change

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the meaning of results. In our view, it is very well possible that the
observed instability in EF findings for young children can at least partly be
attributed to such minor task variations. Getting back to the example of the
Hide-and-Seek paradigm, any change of the hiding location between trials
requires the child to inhibit the impulse to search for the target at the same
location as before. Since it is well-known that manual versions of this task
are generally more demanding than visual versions (Cuevas & Bell, 2010),
we cannot rule out the possibility that this change in the dependent measure
affects the outcome. Furthermore, the specific mixture of working memory
and inhibition skills required may differ between tasks that allow the child
to search for the target only once (as this is typically the case in tasks for
younger children) in comparison to multiple times (as this is often the case
in tasks for older children).
If tasks for older children provide more overlap of distinct EF components,
and we study EFs longitudinally, we may thus conclude that all three EF components become integrated with age whereas—in reality—it is the mixture of
EFs in our specific tasks that changes rather than the general organization of
cognitive processes underlying children’s performance.
Furthermore, EFs can be affected by emotional and motivational aspects
of SR: Whenever children are offered a reward or are being praised for their
performance on a given trial, this is likely to increase their motivation to succeed. Very young children are highly sensitive to social cues and typically
show better performance when the experimenter provides them with emotional and motivational support. When working with toddlers, it is almost
impossible to not provide social support in order to avoid dropouts. The
specific degree of co-regulation may vary between experimenters and the
need for co-regulation may vary from child to child. Even though this is
likely to have an impact on SR findings, descriptions of experimental procedures in SR research only rarely address this issue. Moreover, systematic
research on the impact of task manipulations and experimenter behavior in
research with young children is still missing even though a theoretical framework for planning corresponding work (i.e., PROSECO—PROcess of SElfand CO-regulation in dyadic task settings) is already available (Pauen & the
EDOS group, 2016).
To improve behavioral research on SR at a very young age, researchers
should standardize the procedure to increase comparability of interactive
quality, emotional support, and feedback-structure across different
experimenter-child dyads and across different studies. A detailed
description of the procedure that highlights aspects relevant for evaluating the degree of co-regulation provided would also be helpful. Yet
another way to de-contaminating performance in SR-tasks from the
impact of social influences, would be to use eye-tracking paradigms and

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computer-programmed feedback systems. These methods are still very rare
in SR research with infants and toddlers.
INVESTIGATING THE STRUCTURE OF SR IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: A CALL FOR MULTI-METHOD
ASSESSMENTS

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Conceptual and methodological challenges multiply when the goal is to learn
more about the structure of different SR components. This is probably one of
the main reasons why coherent models relating different lines of SR research
in infancy and toddlerhood are not available.
To illustrate the conceptual difficulties that any model-building implies,
EFs can again serve as an illustrative example: Zelazo and Carlson (2012)
recently introduced the distinction between “hot” and “cold” EFs, thus highlighting the fact that tasks requiring “cool” problem solving and tasks requiring “hot” regulation of emotional or motivational states activate different
brain regions. This leaves us with the question what “hot” EFs are and how
they match to or differ from the concept of ER. Cognitive strategies are often
needed to effectively deal with emotional arousal or intentional states, and
this is what Zelazo and colleagues refer to. But emotional and intentional
states may also have an impact on cognitive performance and this impact
may even include a time delay, as indicated by recent evidence. Seehagen,
Schneider, Rudolph, Ernst, and Zmyi (2015) found that previously stressed
infants revealed less flexibility in subsequently administered cognitive tasks.
The authors thus speculate that a lack of ER (i.e., stress regulation) in infancy
leads to reduced performance in shifting tasks.
To assess different aspects of SR in parallel, it seems helpful to combine
behavioral tests in laboratory settings with other data: researchers primarily
interested in ER often refer to cortisol-measures (derived saliva, hair, and
blood), testing how strong a given child responds to a given stimulation
and/or how fast she recovers from externally induced arousal. One can also
take heart measures (e.g., heart rate changes or variability) as indicators of
emotional arousal and their temporal dynamics. Importantly, physiological
and neurophysiological measures may also be useful for probing cognitive
SR, even though corresponding studies are still scarce (Feldman, 2015;
Schneider-Hassloff et al., 2016).
In addition, caregiver questionnaires can provide complementary information since they cover everyday behavior (Evers, Walk, Quante, & Hille,
2016). Some inventories to asses SR skills have already been introduced
to the literature (e.g., BRIEF-P; Gioia, Andrews, & Isquith, 1996), but more
instruments are needed that focus on the development of specific SR
components in nonclinical populations. It should be noted that such data is
always confounded with the quality of the relation between the child and

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the caregiver. Hence, it would seem useful to design instruments that allow
for an assessment of the interplay between parental expectations regarding
their child’s SR at a given age, the child’s SR competencies (as perceived
by parents) as well as parental strategies to deal with situations that require
co-regulation. A first attempt in this direction has already been made (IMMA
0–6; Bechtel-Kuehne, Strodthoff, & Pauen, 2016).
Ecological momentary assessments (EMA), a new technique to document
the frequency and duration of specific behaviors or states during the day
by using a smartphone app provide a promising way to monitor children’s
behavior and/or caregiver responses in everyday settings. Corresponding
data would allow us distinguish between state and trait aspects of SR more
precisely.
Finally, we should provide more evidence for the external validity of different SR-measures. New methods need to be validated by correlating them
with performance in other tasks probing associated skills. For example, it
makes sense to correlate performance in specific EF tasks with performance
in tasks assessing problem-solving, planning, perspective taking, theory of
mind, creativity, or social understanding. Corresponding studies for older
children already exist but more evidence for toddlers is still needed (Pauen &
Bechtel-Kuehne, 2016).
In sum, future work can promote the field of research on SR in infancy
and early childhood by (i) defining concepts more clearly, (ii) developing paradigms that assess the same specific aspect of SR across different
ages, (iii) providing a detailed task-analysis and discussing the potential
overlap with other aspects of SR, (iv) standardizing and/or monitoring
experimenter behavior carefully, (v) remaining careful when it comes to
generalizing findings, (vi) combining physiological, neurophysiological,
behavioral, questionnaire and EMA data, (vii) providing evidence for the
validity of new SR-measures, and (viii) using a multi-method approach.
Only if we improve our conceptual and methodological approaches will
we be able to advance knowledge about the development of SR skills, their
inter-relation, and structure across the first years of life.
CLARIFYING THE ROLE OF INFANCY AND IDENTIFYING RELEVANT
DETERMINANTS FOR LATER SR
Some authors assume that SR skills are part of infants’ temperament,
whereas others point out that later SR capacities depend upon early experiences. Regarding postnatal development, the great majority of researchers
assume that SR skills result from a combination of genetic predispositions,
brain maturation, and experiences.

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INFANCY AS A SENSITIVE PERIOD FOR SR DEVELOPMENT?

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So far, we do not know whether SR development is a continuous process.
This view is supported by the fact that the frontal lobe is closely associated
with EF development and shows rapid and continuous growth of neural
connections throughout the early years. Furthermore, top-down control of
cognitive, emotional, and motivational states or behavior seems to emerge
gradually throughout early childhood. Alternatively, SR development may
undergo a “sensitive period” during infancy and early toddlerhood. A sensitive period is a predefined time window of brain maturation during which
learning experiences of a specific kind are most critical for later capacities
(e.g., SR skills). Considering the fact that SC performance at 3 years of age is
predictive for long-term outcomes (Moffitt et al., 2011), this idea seems plausible. In any case, the relevance of the first years for later SR needs to be further
clarified.
To learn more about the specific timing of SR development, its biological basis, and the impact of external influences, researchers would have to
(i) assess SR skills from birth onwards at different levels, (ii) identify and
monitor closely external stimulation and its impact on SR development over
time, (iii) find brain correlates that inform us about changes in SR competencies at a young age, (iv) compare the impact of critical experiences during
different time intervals (maybe even manipulating them), and (v) check for
the long-term outcomes in SR skills. In any case, it seems important to take a
dynamic perspective on early SR development.
As will be argued in the following section, there is good reason to assume
that social experiences in infancy and toddlerhood are of special relevance
for later SR development, thus indirectly supporting the idea that the early
years are highly critical for later SR development.
IDENTIFYING AND EVALUATING SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF SR DEVELOPMENT
Caregivers play a central role for shaping infants’ brain and SR skills in
the postnatal phase (Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, & Lalonde, 2015): Stable
positive relations, positive parenting, and interactive sensitivity of the caregiver are all associated with secure attachment, better social competencies,
and better SR in later years. According to the literature, an authoritarian
parental style associated with clear rules, high demands, but also warmth,
openness, and responsiveness to the child’s needs, has a positive impact
on SR development whereas a more harsh and punitive parental style has
negative effects (Ispa, Su-Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017). But we shall
also keep in mind that the association between social experiences and SR
development is bi-directional in the sense that that poor SR skills of the child
can lead to increased stress levels in caregivers, which—in turn—reduces

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the likelihood to show positive co-regulation. Whether all SR components
are equally affected by social influences and which type of social experience
is supportive or harmful for SR development under which circumstances,
still needs to be investigated.
With regard to the first question, it seems intuitively plausible that inhibition skills or ER vary with caregivers’ interactive style. It is the caregiver
who needs to co-regulate the child (e.g., by calming him down in states of
fear, anger, frustration, or pain, or by reminding him to refrain from actions
that might be harmful). How often and in which manner caregivers provide
corresponding support is likely to influence children’s SR development. In a
recent study from our lab, we used the IMMA questionnaire (Bechtel-Kuehne
et al., 2016) to explore this issue. In this study, high parental expectations
regarding SR of their child were associated with more compliance of the child
in situations when parents asked their offspring to show inhibition (i.e., to
respect a prohibition). In the same study, negative parenting strategies (e.g.,
becoming angry or shouting at the child in cases of conflict) were associated with less impulse control in the child. Due to the correlational nature
of this study, it is not possible to draw any causal conclusions at this point.
Since ethical considerations prevent researchers from systematically manipulating how caregivers treat infants, a different approach would be to study
caregiver–child interactions longitudinally and to run path analyses exploring how infant and caregiver-behavior as well as interactive quality jointly
affect SR in the child. An interesting avenue for future research might also be
to explore how the frequency, temporal delay, degree, and kind of caregiver
support in response to the child’s calls for co-regulation impact the development of various SR components at different ages. Work in this area might
also profit from EMA technology.
When exploring the impact of caregiver behavior on SR development, the
impact on cognitive SR (e.g., in terms of attention regulation, shifting, or
working memory) should not be forgotten! Training studies with kindergarten and preschool children reveal that EF training can be quite effective
(Diamond & Lee, 2011), thus suggesting that caregivers’ support in developing EFs may also support toddlers’ development in a positive way.
All arguments raised so far are not only relevant for parental behavior
but also for profession caregivers’ interventions (Berry, Blair, Ursache,
Willoughby, & Granger, 2014). Even though positive parenting, high-quality
childcare as well as early EF training all show positive effects on SR development, more detailed knowledge is needed about which strategies of
caregiving, upbringing, and education work best at what age, for which
given caregiver-child dyad, and under which societal conditions. In general,
future work should take the broader societal context into account: Factors
that directly affect the well-being of adults taking care of young children

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(such as workload, financial situation, availability and quality of social
support and child care) jointly modulate the stress level of caregivers which
in turn affects the SR development of the child via modulating interactive
quality. If we want to explain and improve SR in early years, we thus need
to take a systemic approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) and track the temporal
dynamics of interactive quality in the caregiver-child dyad over the first
years of life (McClelland et al., 2018).
CONCLUDING REMARKS

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SR has been shown to develop early and to be highly relevant for later development. By increasing our knowledge about SR development in the very
early period and by linking this knowledge to long-term outcomes, we may
improve our means to support young children during a period of development that is most critical for their future well-being, academic, social, and
economic performance. This can best be achieved by carefully defining and
measuring critical concepts, by exploring empirical relations between them,
changes with age, and the interplay of co- and self-regulation in different
settings, using a multi-method, dynamic, and systemic approach. Studies
considering the issues addressed in this paper will help us shed more light
on a promising new key to successful development of the next generation.
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Ispa, J. M., Su-Russell, C., Palermo, F., & Carlo, G. (2017). The interplay of maternal sensitivity and toddler engagement of mother in predicting self-regulation.
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McClelland, M., et al. (2018). Self-regulation. In N. Halfon, C. B. Forrest, R. M. Lerner
& E. M. Faustman (Eds.), Handbook of life course health development (pp. 275–298).
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Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wagner, T.
D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions
to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology,
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Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H.,
& Sears, M. R. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth,
and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693–2698.
Nigg, J. T. (2017). Annual Research Review: On the relations among self-regulation,
self-control, executive functioning, effortful control, cognitive control, impulsivity,
risk-taking, and inhibition for developmental psychopathology. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(4), 361–383.
Pauen, S., & Bechtel-Kuehne, S. (2016). How toddlers acquire and transfer tool
knowledge: Developmental changes and the role of executive functions. Child
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Pauen, S., & the EDOS group (2016). Understanding early development of
self-regulation and co-regulation: EDOS and PROSECO. Journal of Self-Regulation
and Regulation, 2(2), 3–16.
Ropeter, A., & Pauen, S. (2012). Relating 7-month-olds visuo-spatial working memory to other basic mental skills assessed with two different versions of the
habituation- dishabituation paradigm. Infancy, 18(4), 443–638.
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and adolescence: Development and plasticity. Child Development Perspectives, 6(4),
354–360.

Sabina Pauen is a full professor of Developmental and Biological Psychology at Heidelberg University and editor of a new interdisciplinary Journal
“Self-Regulation and Regulation.” Her own work focuses on cognitive and
brain development in early childhood, covering a broad range of topics,
including categorization, causal and functional reasoning, problem-solving,
and social learning. In recent years, research on early self-regulation has
become a main focus of her research.
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Wiebke Evers worked as a researcher in the field of executive functions at
the ZNL TransferCenter for Neuroscience and Learning at Ulm University
before she started a new position in Pauen’s lab. She is currently finishing
her PhD on the structure and development of executive functions in early
childhood.
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for Adult Development and Aging (Psychology), Alexandra M. Freund
Early Childhood Education and Care Services and Child Development: Economic Perspectives for Universal Approaches (Economics), Christa K. Spiess

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Self-Regulation in the First 3 Years of
Life: A Key to Predict Successful
Development?
SABINA PAUEN and WIEBKE EVERS

Abstract
Self-regulation (SR) skills in young children are known to predict later achievements,
but we still know only little about how various aspects of SR first emerge, how they
are related to each other and what mechanisms underlie their development in infancy
and beyond. To answer these questions we need to improve concepts and measures
to describe early SR development, clarify whether SR development undergoes a sensitive period in infancy, and to identify factors that influence SR development in early
years. The present report argues for a multi-method, system-oriented, and dynamic
approach to meet these challenges.

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During early childhood, children learn how to adapt to new situations at the
mental and/or behavioral level by modifying their own cognitive, emotional
and/or motivational states. In the literature, this capacity is often referred
to as self-regulation (SR), serving as an umbrella term for various concepts,
such as central attention, emotion regulation, impulse control, executive
functions, effortful control, self-control, or metacognitive control (Nigg,
2017). Each concept covers a somewhat different aspect of SR, depending
on which target process needs to be regulated (i.e., cognitive, emotional or
motivational), whether SR is referring to the mental or to the behavioral
level, and whether it is treated more like a state or a trait. Concepts also vary
in terms of their interpretation of SR as an innate predisposition or as an
acquired skill.
Numerous studies suggest that SR abilities in children predict mental or
physical health, academic achievement, and social skills in later years. The
Dunedin study provides a well-known example: This longitudinal study
started in the early 1970s and followed the lives of more than 1000 people in
New Zealand from toddlerhood to adulthood. Moffitt et al. (2011) computed
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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an integrative rating of self-control (SC) for each child, based on the performance in laboratory tasks and behavioral evaluations by different people
(experimenters, caregivers, and teachers) at multiple measurement points
(ranging from 3 to 10 years of age). Hence, SC was treated as the behavioral
expression of SR skills even though we cannot tell what specific aspects of
SR were covered by this compound measure. SC correlated substantially
with later drug abuse and addiction, academic performance, income and
financial planning, criminal record, and the risk of being a single parent
at the age of 32, even after controlling for IQ and SES. When considering
only data collected at the earliest measurement time (i.e., when children
were 3 years of age) corresponding effects were smaller but still significant.
Hence, the Dunedin study demonstrated that SC can already be assessed at
a very early age, seems to remain fairly stable throughout development and
has important implications for later development.
This raises a number of important questions: For example, we may ask
whether using a compound measure provides the best way to capture early
SR development, or whether we should assess various aspects of SR skills
separately to learn more about their individual role. In any case, it would
help to define SR components and their potential precursors more precisely
and to use corresponding definitions as a starting point for developing new
methods to test infants and toddlers, as reliable and valid measures for this
age group are still sparse. This would also enable us to investigate the emerging structure of SR. Furthermore, we could explore whether inter-individual
differences in SR are innate, whether infants need a specific input during a
sensitive period of brain maturation in order to develop their full potential
regarding SR, and/or which experiences in early childhood might have a
positive or a negative impact on SR development. Ultimately, work along
these lines will help us to determine whether SR can actually serve as a key
to predict successful development.
Against this background we thus see two major challenges for future
research: (i) improving concepts and measures to describe early SR development; and (ii) clarifying the role of experiences during infancy and
identifying potential determinants of SR development. This essay aims at
providing the reader with more detailed information on each challenge and
with some guidelines for future research.
IMPROVING CONCEPTUAL CLARITY AND MEASURES TO DESCRIBE
EARLY SR DEVELOPMENT
Despite the great progress in research on early SR during the past decades
(Blair, 2016; Diamond, 2013), we still know only little about how this capacity
emerges in first place. In newborns, largely separated lines of work focus

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on self-regulation of physiological needs (sleep and food intake), emotional
responses (stress), cognitive processes (attention), or motivational (intentional) states. In later infancy and toddlerhood, the role of cognitive and
behavioral control becomes increasingly important, as reflected by work on
effortful control and executive functions. Even though many authors speculate about potential cross-links between physiological, emotional, cognitive,
and motivational SR, longitudinal studies that assess multiple components
of SR in parallel and systematically explore their inter-dependence across
early years are still rare. As recently pointed out by Nigg (2017), bottom-up
and top-down processes of SR should be analyzed in their interplay—a topic
that seems of special relevance when talking about the very beginnings of
SR and its changes throughout early childhood. Corresponding work would
require conceptual clarification, however. It would also require measures
suitable for testing the same aspect of SR in an age-adaptive way across
early childhood. To illustrate the difficulties associated with a corresponding
approach, we take executive functions (EFs) as a prominent example:
CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEASURES—THE EXAMPLE OF EXECUTIVE
FUNCTIONS
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EFs are typically interpreted as a top-down mechanism of SR (Nigg, 2017)
and defined as a hierarchical construct (Miyake et al., 2000), including the
abilities (i) to hold and update information in working memory, (ii) to inhibit
dominant, fast, and nonreflected responses to stimulation, and (iii) to flexibly
shift the focus of one’s mental frame (Blair et al., 2005). Together, these three
abilities involve frontal-lobe processes that allow the child to gain and maintain cognitive control in challenging situations. The hierarchical structure of
EF proposed by Miyake et al. (2000) fits with data for school children and to
some extent even preschoolers. For infants and toddlers, results seem rather
inconsistent, however (Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008). Here, we still know
little about how individual EF components are organized, and how they
are related to other aspects of SR (e.g., emotion regulation). This raises the
question of how EFs can be reliably assessed in very young children.
Even though some computer-based test batteries for EFs in older toddlers,
preschool, and school children are available (Zelazo et al., 2013), methods
that allow for adaptive testing and age-sensitive measurements applicable
under the age of three are largely missing. This makes it difficult to investigate whether EFs should be regarded as stable personality characteristics or
as a set of malleable skills.
The availability of such methods would also allow us to investigate the
emerging structure of EFs and its changes in early years. The fact that infants
have only a limited attention span and limited abilities to understand or

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follow verbal instructions implies that paradigms applicable for infants
need to be simple and short. At the same time, they should allow researchers
to increase task-difficulty for testing older children without changing the
concepts. To provide an example of how such an experimental paradigm
might look like and what kind of problems researchers encounter when
trying to adapt it to different age groups we will describe a set of tasks
to assess visuo-spatial working memory as one central and well-defined
component of EFs.
Developmental psychologists probing working memory in young children often refer to the general Hide-and-Seek Paradigm (Bernier, Carlson, &
Whipple, 2010). In this paradigm, an attractive target is placed (or presented)
in one of multiple locations. Next, all locations are covered for a predefined
time interval before the child is allowed to search for the target. From trial
to trial, the hiding location changes; hence, the child needs to update the
position of the target to search in the correct location. In task versions
for infants, anticipatory looking to the hiding location can serve as the
dependent variable (Ropeter & Pauen, 2012). For older infants and toddlers,
manual search paradigms are more common (Diamond, 2013). To adjust
task difficulty for preschoolers and school children, the hiding locations are
sometimes mounted on a round platform, which can be rotated (while being
covered) before the child is allowed to start searching. It this case, children
typically fail to find the target on the very first trial and need to seek for it
repeatedly. That way, the experimenter can check whether the same location
is visited more than once, as this measure indicates the child’s ability to
hold in mind all previously searched locations. This manipulation also
implies a change of the feedback-structure. Whereas feedback in previously
mentioned versions of the Hide-and-Seek paradigm is irrelevant for the next
trial, this is not the case when the child is allowed to search repeatedly.
Although Hide-and-Seek tasks may vary with respect to the dependent
measure (anticipatory looking vs manual search), the kind, number, and
spatial arrangement of hiding locations, the delay before searching, the
number of search attempts allowed, and the feedback structure, the general
concept (i.e., updating visuo-spatial memory) remains the same. As demonstrated here, it thus seems possible to develop paradigms that are simple,
focused on a specific SR component and that can be adjusted for different
age groups of children.
CHALLENGES IN PLANNING AND CONDUCTING BEHAVIORAL SR STUDIES WITH VERY YOUNG
CHILDREN
Nonetheless, we need to remain cautious when interpreting findings of
behavioral studies conducted with very young children because even
subtle manipulations regarding the experimental procedure may change

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the meaning of results. In our view, it is very well possible that the
observed instability in EF findings for young children can at least partly be
attributed to such minor task variations. Getting back to the example of the
Hide-and-Seek paradigm, any change of the hiding location between trials
requires the child to inhibit the impulse to search for the target at the same
location as before. Since it is well-known that manual versions of this task
are generally more demanding than visual versions (Cuevas & Bell, 2010),
we cannot rule out the possibility that this change in the dependent measure
affects the outcome. Furthermore, the specific mixture of working memory
and inhibition skills required may differ between tasks that allow the child
to search for the target only once (as this is typically the case in tasks for
younger children) in comparison to multiple times (as this is often the case
in tasks for older children).
If tasks for older children provide more overlap of distinct EF components,
and we study EFs longitudinally, we may thus conclude that all three EF components become integrated with age whereas—in reality—it is the mixture of
EFs in our specific tasks that changes rather than the general organization of
cognitive processes underlying children’s performance.
Furthermore, EFs can be affected by emotional and motivational aspects
of SR: Whenever children are offered a reward or are being praised for their
performance on a given trial, this is likely to increase their motivation to succeed. Very young children are highly sensitive to social cues and typically
show better performance when the experimenter provides them with emotional and motivational support. When working with toddlers, it is almost
impossible to not provide social support in order to avoid dropouts. The
specific degree of co-regulation may vary between experimenters and the
need for co-regulation may vary from child to child. Even though this is
likely to have an impact on SR findings, descriptions of experimental procedures in SR research only rarely address this issue. Moreover, systematic
research on the impact of task manipulations and experimenter behavior in
research with young children is still missing even though a theoretical framework for planning corresponding work (i.e., PROSECO—PROcess of SElfand CO-regulation in dyadic task settings) is already available (Pauen & the
EDOS group, 2016).
To improve behavioral research on SR at a very young age, researchers
should standardize the procedure to increase comparability of interactive
quality, emotional support, and feedback-structure across different
experimenter-child dyads and across different studies. A detailed
description of the procedure that highlights aspects relevant for evaluating the degree of co-regulation provided would also be helpful. Yet
another way to de-contaminating performance in SR-tasks from the
impact of social influences, would be to use eye-tracking paradigms and

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computer-programmed feedback systems. These methods are still very rare
in SR research with infants and toddlers.
INVESTIGATING THE STRUCTURE OF SR IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: A CALL FOR MULTI-METHOD
ASSESSMENTS

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Conceptual and methodological challenges multiply when the goal is to learn
more about the structure of different SR components. This is probably one of
the main reasons why coherent models relating different lines of SR research
in infancy and toddlerhood are not available.
To illustrate the conceptual difficulties that any model-building implies,
EFs can again serve as an illustrative example: Zelazo and Carlson (2012)
recently introduced the distinction between “hot” and “cold” EFs, thus highlighting the fact that tasks requiring “cool” problem solving and tasks requiring “hot” regulation of emotional or motivational states activate different
brain regions. This leaves us with the question what “hot” EFs are and how
they match to or differ from the concept of ER. Cognitive strategies are often
needed to effectively deal with emotional arousal or intentional states, and
this is what Zelazo and colleagues refer to. But emotional and intentional
states may also have an impact on cognitive performance and this impact
may even include a time delay, as indicated by recent evidence. Seehagen,
Schneider, Rudolph, Ernst, and Zmyi (2015) found that previously stressed
infants revealed less flexibility in subsequently administered cognitive tasks.
The authors thus speculate that a lack of ER (i.e., stress regulation) in infancy
leads to reduced performance in shifting tasks.
To assess different aspects of SR in parallel, it seems helpful to combine
behavioral tests in laboratory settings with other data: researchers primarily
interested in ER often refer to cortisol-measures (derived saliva, hair, and
blood), testing how strong a given child responds to a given stimulation
and/or how fast she recovers from externally induced arousal. One can also
take heart measures (e.g., heart rate changes or variability) as indicators of
emotional arousal and their temporal dynamics. Importantly, physiological
and neurophysiological measures may also be useful for probing cognitive
SR, even though corresponding studies are still scarce (Feldman, 2015;
Schneider-Hassloff et al., 2016).
In addition, caregiver questionnaires can provide complementary information since they cover everyday behavior (Evers, Walk, Quante, & Hille,
2016). Some inventories to asses SR skills have already been introduced
to the literature (e.g., BRIEF-P; Gioia, Andrews, & Isquith, 1996), but more
instruments are needed that focus on the development of specific SR
components in nonclinical populations. It should be noted that such data is
always confounded with the quality of the relation between the child and

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the caregiver. Hence, it would seem useful to design instruments that allow
for an assessment of the interplay between parental expectations regarding
their child’s SR at a given age, the child’s SR competencies (as perceived
by parents) as well as parental strategies to deal with situations that require
co-regulation. A first attempt in this direction has already been made (IMMA
0–6; Bechtel-Kuehne, Strodthoff, & Pauen, 2016).
Ecological momentary assessments (EMA), a new technique to document
the frequency and duration of specific behaviors or states during the day
by using a smartphone app provide a promising way to monitor children’s
behavior and/or caregiver responses in everyday settings. Corresponding
data would allow us distinguish between state and trait aspects of SR more
precisely.
Finally, we should provide more evidence for the external validity of different SR-measures. New methods need to be validated by correlating them
with performance in other tasks probing associated skills. For example, it
makes sense to correlate performance in specific EF tasks with performance
in tasks assessing problem-solving, planning, perspective taking, theory of
mind, creativity, or social understanding. Corresponding studies for older
children already exist but more evidence for toddlers is still needed (Pauen &
Bechtel-Kuehne, 2016).
In sum, future work can promote the field of research on SR in infancy
and early childhood by (i) defining concepts more clearly, (ii) developing paradigms that assess the same specific aspect of SR across different
ages, (iii) providing a detailed task-analysis and discussing the potential
overlap with other aspects of SR, (iv) standardizing and/or monitoring
experimenter behavior carefully, (v) remaining careful when it comes to
generalizing findings, (vi) combining physiological, neurophysiological,
behavioral, questionnaire and EMA data, (vii) providing evidence for the
validity of new SR-measures, and (viii) using a multi-method approach.
Only if we improve our conceptual and methodological approaches will
we be able to advance knowledge about the development of SR skills, their
inter-relation, and structure across the first years of life.
CLARIFYING THE ROLE OF INFANCY AND IDENTIFYING RELEVANT
DETERMINANTS FOR LATER SR
Some authors assume that SR skills are part of infants’ temperament,
whereas others point out that later SR capacities depend upon early experiences. Regarding postnatal development, the great majority of researchers
assume that SR skills result from a combination of genetic predispositions,
brain maturation, and experiences.

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INFANCY AS A SENSITIVE PERIOD FOR SR DEVELOPMENT?

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So far, we do not know whether SR development is a continuous process.
This view is supported by the fact that the frontal lobe is closely associated
with EF development and shows rapid and continuous growth of neural
connections throughout the early years. Furthermore, top-down control of
cognitive, emotional, and motivational states or behavior seems to emerge
gradually throughout early childhood. Alternatively, SR development may
undergo a “sensitive period” during infancy and early toddlerhood. A sensitive period is a predefined time window of brain maturation during which
learning experiences of a specific kind are most critical for later capacities
(e.g., SR skills). Considering the fact that SC performance at 3 years of age is
predictive for long-term outcomes (Moffitt et al., 2011), this idea seems plausible. In any case, the relevance of the first years for later SR needs to be further
clarified.
To learn more about the specific timing of SR development, its biological basis, and the impact of external influences, researchers would have to
(i) assess SR skills from birth onwards at different levels, (ii) identify and
monitor closely external stimulation and its impact on SR development over
time, (iii) find brain correlates that inform us about changes in SR competencies at a young age, (iv) compare the impact of critical experiences during
different time intervals (maybe even manipulating them), and (v) check for
the long-term outcomes in SR skills. In any case, it seems important to take a
dynamic perspective on early SR development.
As will be argued in the following section, there is good reason to assume
that social experiences in infancy and toddlerhood are of special relevance
for later SR development, thus indirectly supporting the idea that the early
years are highly critical for later SR development.
IDENTIFYING AND EVALUATING SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF SR DEVELOPMENT
Caregivers play a central role for shaping infants’ brain and SR skills in
the postnatal phase (Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, & Lalonde, 2015): Stable
positive relations, positive parenting, and interactive sensitivity of the caregiver are all associated with secure attachment, better social competencies,
and better SR in later years. According to the literature, an authoritarian
parental style associated with clear rules, high demands, but also warmth,
openness, and responsiveness to the child’s needs, has a positive impact
on SR development whereas a more harsh and punitive parental style has
negative effects (Ispa, Su-Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017). But we shall
also keep in mind that the association between social experiences and SR
development is bi-directional in the sense that that poor SR skills of the child
can lead to increased stress levels in caregivers, which—in turn—reduces

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the likelihood to show positive co-regulation. Whether all SR components
are equally affected by social influences and which type of social experience
is supportive or harmful for SR development under which circumstances,
still needs to be investigated.
With regard to the first question, it seems intuitively plausible that inhibition skills or ER vary with caregivers’ interactive style. It is the caregiver
who needs to co-regulate the child (e.g., by calming him down in states of
fear, anger, frustration, or pain, or by reminding him to refrain from actions
that might be harmful). How often and in which manner caregivers provide
corresponding support is likely to influence children’s SR development. In a
recent study from our lab, we used the IMMA questionnaire (Bechtel-Kuehne
et al., 2016) to explore this issue. In this study, high parental expectations
regarding SR of their child were associated with more compliance of the child
in situations when parents asked their offspring to show inhibition (i.e., to
respect a prohibition). In the same study, negative parenting strategies (e.g.,
becoming angry or shouting at the child in cases of conflict) were associated with less impulse control in the child. Due to the correlational nature
of this study, it is not possible to draw any causal conclusions at this point.
Since ethical considerations prevent researchers from systematically manipulating how caregivers treat infants, a different approach would be to study
caregiver–child interactions longitudinally and to run path analyses exploring how infant and caregiver-behavior as well as interactive quality jointly
affect SR in the child. An interesting avenue for future research might also be
to explore how the frequency, temporal delay, degree, and kind of caregiver
support in response to the child’s calls for co-regulation impact the development of various SR components at different ages. Work in this area might
also profit from EMA technology.
When exploring the impact of caregiver behavior on SR development, the
impact on cognitive SR (e.g., in terms of attention regulation, shifting, or
working memory) should not be forgotten! Training studies with kindergarten and preschool children reveal that EF training can be quite effective
(Diamond & Lee, 2011), thus suggesting that caregivers’ support in developing EFs may also support toddlers’ development in a positive way.
All arguments raised so far are not only relevant for parental behavior
but also for profession caregivers’ interventions (Berry, Blair, Ursache,
Willoughby, & Granger, 2014). Even though positive parenting, high-quality
childcare as well as early EF training all show positive effects on SR development, more detailed knowledge is needed about which strategies of
caregiving, upbringing, and education work best at what age, for which
given caregiver-child dyad, and under which societal conditions. In general,
future work should take the broader societal context into account: Factors
that directly affect the well-being of adults taking care of young children

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(such as workload, financial situation, availability and quality of social
support and child care) jointly modulate the stress level of caregivers which
in turn affects the SR development of the child via modulating interactive
quality. If we want to explain and improve SR in early years, we thus need
to take a systemic approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) and track the temporal
dynamics of interactive quality in the caregiver-child dyad over the first
years of life (McClelland et al., 2018).
CONCLUDING REMARKS

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SR has been shown to develop early and to be highly relevant for later development. By increasing our knowledge about SR development in the very
early period and by linking this knowledge to long-term outcomes, we may
improve our means to support young children during a period of development that is most critical for their future well-being, academic, social, and
economic performance. This can best be achieved by carefully defining and
measuring critical concepts, by exploring empirical relations between them,
changes with age, and the interplay of co- and self-regulation in different
settings, using a multi-method, dynamic, and systemic approach. Studies
considering the issues addressed in this paper will help us shed more light
on a promising new key to successful development of the next generation.
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354–360.

Sabina Pauen is a full professor of Developmental and Biological Psychology at Heidelberg University and editor of a new interdisciplinary Journal
“Self-Regulation and Regulation.” Her own work focuses on cognitive and
brain development in early childhood, covering a broad range of topics,
including categorization, causal and functional reasoning, problem-solving,
and social learning. In recent years, research on early self-regulation has
become a main focus of her research.
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Wiebke Evers worked as a researcher in the field of executive functions at
the ZNL TransferCenter for Neuroscience and Learning at Ulm University
before she started a new position in Pauen’s lab. She is currently finishing
her PhD on the structure and development of executive functions in early
childhood.
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Hawkes and James Coxworth
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Moin Syed and Lauren L. Mitchell
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The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa
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Understanding Risk-Taking Behavior: Insights from Evolutionary Psychology (Psychology), Karin Machluf and David F. Bjorklund
Social-Emotional Responding: A Perspective from Developmental Psychology (Psycholocy), Tina Malti, Stefania Sette, and Sebastian P. Dys
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for Adult Development and Aging (Psychology), Alexandra M. Freund
Early Childhood Education and Care Services and Child Development: Economic Perspectives for Universal Approaches (Economics), Christa K. Spiess

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Self-Regulation in the First 3 Years of
Life: A Key to Predict Successful
Development?
SABINA PAUEN and WIEBKE EVERS

Abstract
Self-regulation (SR) skills in young children are known to predict later achievements,
but we still know only little about how various aspects of SR first emerge, how they
are related to each other and what mechanisms underlie their development in infancy
and beyond. To answer these questions we need to improve concepts and measures
to describe early SR development, clarify whether SR development undergoes a sensitive period in infancy, and to identify factors that influence SR development in early
years. The present report argues for a multi-method, system-oriented, and dynamic
approach to meet these challenges.

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During early childhood, children learn how to adapt to new situations at the
mental and/or behavioral level by modifying their own cognitive, emotional
and/or motivational states. In the literature, this capacity is often referred
to as self-regulation (SR), serving as an umbrella term for various concepts,
such as central attention, emotion regulation, impulse control, executive
functions, effortful control, self-control, or metacognitive control (Nigg,
2017). Each concept covers a somewhat different aspect of SR, depending
on which target process needs to be regulated (i.e., cognitive, emotional or
motivational), whether SR is referring to the mental or to the behavioral
level, and whether it is treated more like a state or a trait. Concepts also vary
in terms of their interpretation of SR as an innate predisposition or as an
acquired skill.
Numerous studies suggest that SR abilities in children predict mental or
physical health, academic achievement, and social skills in later years. The
Dunedin study provides a well-known example: This longitudinal study
started in the early 1970s and followed the lives of more than 1000 people in
New Zealand from toddlerhood to adulthood. Moffitt et al. (2011) computed
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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an integrative rating of self-control (SC) for each child, based on the performance in laboratory tasks and behavioral evaluations by different people
(experimenters, caregivers, and teachers) at multiple measurement points
(ranging from 3 to 10 years of age). Hence, SC was treated as the behavioral
expression of SR skills even though we cannot tell what specific aspects of
SR were covered by this compound measure. SC correlated substantially
with later drug abuse and addiction, academic performance, income and
financial planning, criminal record, and the risk of being a single parent
at the age of 32, even after controlling for IQ and SES. When considering
only data collected at the earliest measurement time (i.e., when children
were 3 years of age) corresponding effects were smaller but still significant.
Hence, the Dunedin study demonstrated that SC can already be assessed at
a very early age, seems to remain fairly stable throughout development and
has important implications for later development.
This raises a number of important questions: For example, we may ask
whether using a compound measure provides the best way to capture early
SR development, or whether we should assess various aspects of SR skills
separately to learn more about their individual role. In any case, it would
help to define SR components and their potential precursors more precisely
and to use corresponding definitions as a starting point for developing new
methods to test infants and toddlers, as reliable and valid measures for this
age group are still sparse. This would also enable us to investigate the emerging structure of SR. Furthermore, we could explore whether inter-individual
differences in SR are innate, whether infants need a specific input during a
sensitive period of brain maturation in order to develop their full potential
regarding SR, and/or which experiences in early childhood might have a
positive or a negative impact on SR development. Ultimately, work along
these lines will help us to determine whether SR can actually serve as a key
to predict successful development.
Against this background we thus see two major challenges for future
research: (i) improving concepts and measures to describe early SR development; and (ii) clarifying the role of experiences during infancy and
identifying potential determinants of SR development. This essay aims at
providing the reader with more detailed information on each challenge and
with some guidelines for future research.
IMPROVING CONCEPTUAL CLARITY AND MEASURES TO DESCRIBE
EARLY SR DEVELOPMENT
Despite the great progress in research on early SR during the past decades
(Blair, 2016; Diamond, 2013), we still know only little about how this capacity
emerges in first place. In newborns, largely separated lines of work focus

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on self-regulation of physiological needs (sleep and food intake), emotional
responses (stress), cognitive processes (attention), or motivational (intentional) states. In later infancy and toddlerhood, the role of cognitive and
behavioral control becomes increasingly important, as reflected by work on
effortful control and executive functions. Even though many authors speculate about potential cross-links between physiological, emotional, cognitive,
and motivational SR, longitudinal studies that assess multiple components
of SR in parallel and systematically explore their inter-dependence across
early years are still rare. As recently pointed out by Nigg (2017), bottom-up
and top-down processes of SR should be analyzed in their interplay—a topic
that seems of special relevance when talking about the very beginnings of
SR and its changes throughout early childhood. Corresponding work would
require conceptual clarification, however. It would also require measures
suitable for testing the same aspect of SR in an age-adaptive way across
early childhood. To illustrate the difficulties associated with a corresponding
approach, we take executive functions (EFs) as a prominent example:
CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEASURES—THE EXAMPLE OF EXECUTIVE
FUNCTIONS
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EFs are typically interpreted as a top-down mechanism of SR (Nigg, 2017)
and defined as a hierarchical construct (Miyake et al., 2000), including the
abilities (i) to hold and update information in working memory, (ii) to inhibit
dominant, fast, and nonreflected responses to stimulation, and (iii) to flexibly
shift the focus of one’s mental frame (Blair et al., 2005). Together, these three
abilities involve frontal-lobe processes that allow the child to gain and maintain cognitive control in challenging situations. The hierarchical structure of
EF proposed by Miyake et al. (2000) fits with data for school children and to
some extent even preschoolers. For infants and toddlers, results seem rather
inconsistent, however (Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008). Here, we still know
little about how individual EF components are organized, and how they
are related to other aspects of SR (e.g., emotion regulation). This raises the
question of how EFs can be reliably assessed in very young children.
Even though some computer-based test batteries for EFs in older toddlers,
preschool, and school children are available (Zelazo et al., 2013), methods
that allow for adaptive testing and age-sensitive measurements applicable
under the age of three are largely missing. This makes it difficult to investigate whether EFs should be regarded as stable personality characteristics or
as a set of malleable skills.
The availability of such methods would also allow us to investigate the
emerging structure of EFs and its changes in early years. The fact that infants
have only a limited attention span and limited abilities to understand or

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follow verbal instructions implies that paradigms applicable for infants
need to be simple and short. At the same time, they should allow researchers
to increase task-difficulty for testing older children without changing the
concepts. To provide an example of how such an experimental paradigm
might look like and what kind of problems researchers encounter when
trying to adapt it to different age groups we will describe a set of tasks
to assess visuo-spatial working memory as one central and well-defined
component of EFs.
Developmental psychologists probing working memory in young children often refer to the general Hide-and-Seek Paradigm (Bernier, Carlson, &
Whipple, 2010). In this paradigm, an attractive target is placed (or presented)
in one of multiple locations. Next, all locations are covered for a predefined
time interval before the child is allowed to search for the target. From trial
to trial, the hiding location changes; hence, the child needs to update the
position of the target to search in the correct location. In task versions
for infants, anticipatory looking to the hiding location can serve as the
dependent variable (Ropeter & Pauen, 2012). For older infants and toddlers,
manual search paradigms are more common (Diamond, 2013). To adjust
task difficulty for preschoolers and school children, the hiding locations are
sometimes mounted on a round platform, which can be rotated (while being
covered) before the child is allowed to start searching. It this case, children
typically fail to find the target on the very first trial and need to seek for it
repeatedly. That way, the experimenter can check whether the same location
is visited more than once, as this measure indicates the child’s ability to
hold in mind all previously searched locations. This manipulation also
implies a change of the feedback-structure. Whereas feedback in previously
mentioned versions of the Hide-and-Seek paradigm is irrelevant for the next
trial, this is not the case when the child is allowed to search repeatedly.
Although Hide-and-Seek tasks may vary with respect to the dependent
measure (anticipatory looking vs manual search), the kind, number, and
spatial arrangement of hiding locations, the delay before searching, the
number of search attempts allowed, and the feedback structure, the general
concept (i.e., updating visuo-spatial memory) remains the same. As demonstrated here, it thus seems possible to develop paradigms that are simple,
focused on a specific SR component and that can be adjusted for different
age groups of children.
CHALLENGES IN PLANNING AND CONDUCTING BEHAVIORAL SR STUDIES WITH VERY YOUNG
CHILDREN
Nonetheless, we need to remain cautious when interpreting findings of
behavioral studies conducted with very young children because even
subtle manipulations regarding the experimental procedure may change

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the meaning of results. In our view, it is very well possible that the
observed instability in EF findings for young children can at least partly be
attributed to such minor task variations. Getting back to the example of the
Hide-and-Seek paradigm, any change of the hiding location between trials
requires the child to inhibit the impulse to search for the target at the same
location as before. Since it is well-known that manual versions of this task
are generally more demanding than visual versions (Cuevas & Bell, 2010),
we cannot rule out the possibility that this change in the dependent measure
affects the outcome. Furthermore, the specific mixture of working memory
and inhibition skills required may differ between tasks that allow the child
to search for the target only once (as this is typically the case in tasks for
younger children) in comparison to multiple times (as this is often the case
in tasks for older children).
If tasks for older children provide more overlap of distinct EF components,
and we study EFs longitudinally, we may thus conclude that all three EF components become integrated with age whereas—in reality—it is the mixture of
EFs in our specific tasks that changes rather than the general organization of
cognitive processes underlying children’s performance.
Furthermore, EFs can be affected by emotional and motivational aspects
of SR: Whenever children are offered a reward or are being praised for their
performance on a given trial, this is likely to increase their motivation to succeed. Very young children are highly sensitive to social cues and typically
show better performance when the experimenter provides them with emotional and motivational support. When working with toddlers, it is almost
impossible to not provide social support in order to avoid dropouts. The
specific degree of co-regulation may vary between experimenters and the
need for co-regulation may vary from child to child. Even though this is
likely to have an impact on SR findings, descriptions of experimental procedures in SR research only rarely address this issue. Moreover, systematic
research on the impact of task manipulations and experimenter behavior in
research with young children is still missing even though a theoretical framework for planning corresponding work (i.e., PROSECO—PROcess of SElfand CO-regulation in dyadic task settings) is already available (Pauen & the
EDOS group, 2016).
To improve behavioral research on SR at a very young age, researchers
should standardize the procedure to increase comparability of interactive
quality, emotional support, and feedback-structure across different
experimenter-child dyads and across different studies. A detailed
description of the procedure that highlights aspects relevant for evaluating the degree of co-regulation provided would also be helpful. Yet
another way to de-contaminating performance in SR-tasks from the
impact of social influences, would be to use eye-tracking paradigms and

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computer-programmed feedback systems. These methods are still very rare
in SR research with infants and toddlers.
INVESTIGATING THE STRUCTURE OF SR IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: A CALL FOR MULTI-METHOD
ASSESSMENTS

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Conceptual and methodological challenges multiply when the goal is to learn
more about the structure of different SR components. This is probably one of
the main reasons why coherent models relating different lines of SR research
in infancy and toddlerhood are not available.
To illustrate the conceptual difficulties that any model-building implies,
EFs can again serve as an illustrative example: Zelazo and Carlson (2012)
recently introduced the distinction between “hot” and “cold” EFs, thus highlighting the fact that tasks requiring “cool” problem solving and tasks requiring “hot” regulation of emotional or motivational states activate different
brain regions. This leaves us with the question what “hot” EFs are and how
they match to or differ from the concept of ER. Cognitive strategies are often
needed to effectively deal with emotional arousal or intentional states, and
this is what Zelazo and colleagues refer to. But emotional and intentional
states may also have an impact on cognitive performance and this impact
may even include a time delay, as indicated by recent evidence. Seehagen,
Schneider, Rudolph, Ernst, and Zmyi (2015) found that previously stressed
infants revealed less flexibility in subsequently administered cognitive tasks.
The authors thus speculate that a lack of ER (i.e., stress regulation) in infancy
leads to reduced performance in shifting tasks.
To assess different aspects of SR in parallel, it seems helpful to combine
behavioral tests in laboratory settings with other data: researchers primarily
interested in ER often refer to cortisol-measures (derived saliva, hair, and
blood), testing how strong a given child responds to a given stimulation
and/or how fast she recovers from externally induced arousal. One can also
take heart measures (e.g., heart rate changes or variability) as indicators of
emotional arousal and their temporal dynamics. Importantly, physiological
and neurophysiological measures may also be useful for probing cognitive
SR, even though corresponding studies are still scarce (Feldman, 2015;
Schneider-Hassloff et al., 2016).
In addition, caregiver questionnaires can provide complementary information since they cover everyday behavior (Evers, Walk, Quante, & Hille,
2016). Some inventories to asses SR skills have already been introduced
to the literature (e.g., BRIEF-P; Gioia, Andrews, & Isquith, 1996), but more
instruments are needed that focus on the development of specific SR
components in nonclinical populations. It should be noted that such data is
always confounded with the quality of the relation between the child and

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the caregiver. Hence, it would seem useful to design instruments that allow
for an assessment of the interplay between parental expectations regarding
their child’s SR at a given age, the child’s SR competencies (as perceived
by parents) as well as parental strategies to deal with situations that require
co-regulation. A first attempt in this direction has already been made (IMMA
0–6; Bechtel-Kuehne, Strodthoff, & Pauen, 2016).
Ecological momentary assessments (EMA), a new technique to document
the frequency and duration of specific behaviors or states during the day
by using a smartphone app provide a promising way to monitor children’s
behavior and/or caregiver responses in everyday settings. Corresponding
data would allow us distinguish between state and trait aspects of SR more
precisely.
Finally, we should provide more evidence for the external validity of different SR-measures. New methods need to be validated by correlating them
with performance in other tasks probing associated skills. For example, it
makes sense to correlate performance in specific EF tasks with performance
in tasks assessing problem-solving, planning, perspective taking, theory of
mind, creativity, or social understanding. Corresponding studies for older
children already exist but more evidence for toddlers is still needed (Pauen &
Bechtel-Kuehne, 2016).
In sum, future work can promote the field of research on SR in infancy
and early childhood by (i) defining concepts more clearly, (ii) developing paradigms that assess the same specific aspect of SR across different
ages, (iii) providing a detailed task-analysis and discussing the potential
overlap with other aspects of SR, (iv) standardizing and/or monitoring
experimenter behavior carefully, (v) remaining careful when it comes to
generalizing findings, (vi) combining physiological, neurophysiological,
behavioral, questionnaire and EMA data, (vii) providing evidence for the
validity of new SR-measures, and (viii) using a multi-method approach.
Only if we improve our conceptual and methodological approaches will
we be able to advance knowledge about the development of SR skills, their
inter-relation, and structure across the first years of life.
CLARIFYING THE ROLE OF INFANCY AND IDENTIFYING RELEVANT
DETERMINANTS FOR LATER SR
Some authors assume that SR skills are part of infants’ temperament,
whereas others point out that later SR capacities depend upon early experiences. Regarding postnatal development, the great majority of researchers
assume that SR skills result from a combination of genetic predispositions,
brain maturation, and experiences.

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INFANCY AS A SENSITIVE PERIOD FOR SR DEVELOPMENT?

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So far, we do not know whether SR development is a continuous process.
This view is supported by the fact that the frontal lobe is closely associated
with EF development and shows rapid and continuous growth of neural
connections throughout the early years. Furthermore, top-down control of
cognitive, emotional, and motivational states or behavior seems to emerge
gradually throughout early childhood. Alternatively, SR development may
undergo a “sensitive period” during infancy and early toddlerhood. A sensitive period is a predefined time window of brain maturation during which
learning experiences of a specific kind are most critical for later capacities
(e.g., SR skills). Considering the fact that SC performance at 3 years of age is
predictive for long-term outcomes (Moffitt et al., 2011), this idea seems plausible. In any case, the relevance of the first years for later SR needs to be further
clarified.
To learn more about the specific timing of SR development, its biological basis, and the impact of external influences, researchers would have to
(i) assess SR skills from birth onwards at different levels, (ii) identify and
monitor closely external stimulation and its impact on SR development over
time, (iii) find brain correlates that inform us about changes in SR competencies at a young age, (iv) compare the impact of critical experiences during
different time intervals (maybe even manipulating them), and (v) check for
the long-term outcomes in SR skills. In any case, it seems important to take a
dynamic perspective on early SR development.
As will be argued in the following section, there is good reason to assume
that social experiences in infancy and toddlerhood are of special relevance
for later SR development, thus indirectly supporting the idea that the early
years are highly critical for later SR development.
IDENTIFYING AND EVALUATING SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF SR DEVELOPMENT
Caregivers play a central role for shaping infants’ brain and SR skills in
the postnatal phase (Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, & Lalonde, 2015): Stable
positive relations, positive parenting, and interactive sensitivity of the caregiver are all associated with secure attachment, better social competencies,
and better SR in later years. According to the literature, an authoritarian
parental style associated with clear rules, high demands, but also warmth,
openness, and responsiveness to the child’s needs, has a positive impact
on SR development whereas a more harsh and punitive parental style has
negative effects (Ispa, Su-Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017). But we shall
also keep in mind that the association between social experiences and SR
development is bi-directional in the sense that that poor SR skills of the child
can lead to increased stress levels in caregivers, which—in turn—reduces

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the likelihood to show positive co-regulation. Whether all SR components
are equally affected by social influences and which type of social experience
is supportive or harmful for SR development under which circumstances,
still needs to be investigated.
With regard to the first question, it seems intuitively plausible that inhibition skills or ER vary with caregivers’ interactive style. It is the caregiver
who needs to co-regulate the child (e.g., by calming him down in states of
fear, anger, frustration, or pain, or by reminding him to refrain from actions
that might be harmful). How often and in which manner caregivers provide
corresponding support is likely to influence children’s SR development. In a
recent study from our lab, we used the IMMA questionnaire (Bechtel-Kuehne
et al., 2016) to explore this issue. In this study, high parental expectations
regarding SR of their child were associated with more compliance of the child
in situations when parents asked their offspring to show inhibition (i.e., to
respect a prohibition). In the same study, negative parenting strategies (e.g.,
becoming angry or shouting at the child in cases of conflict) were associated with less impulse control in the child. Due to the correlational nature
of this study, it is not possible to draw any causal conclusions at this point.
Since ethical considerations prevent researchers from systematically manipulating how caregivers treat infants, a different approach would be to study
caregiver–child interactions longitudinally and to run path analyses exploring how infant and caregiver-behavior as well as interactive quality jointly
affect SR in the child. An interesting avenue for future research might also be
to explore how the frequency, temporal delay, degree, and kind of caregiver
support in response to the child’s calls for co-regulation impact the development of various SR components at different ages. Work in this area might
also profit from EMA technology.
When exploring the impact of caregiver behavior on SR development, the
impact on cognitive SR (e.g., in terms of attention regulation, shifting, or
working memory) should not be forgotten! Training studies with kindergarten and preschool children reveal that EF training can be quite effective
(Diamond & Lee, 2011), thus suggesting that caregivers’ support in developing EFs may also support toddlers’ development in a positive way.
All arguments raised so far are not only relevant for parental behavior
but also for profession caregivers’ interventions (Berry, Blair, Ursache,
Willoughby, & Granger, 2014). Even though positive parenting, high-quality
childcare as well as early EF training all show positive effects on SR development, more detailed knowledge is needed about which strategies of
caregiving, upbringing, and education work best at what age, for which
given caregiver-child dyad, and under which societal conditions. In general,
future work should take the broader societal context into account: Factors
that directly affect the well-being of adults taking care of young children

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(such as workload, financial situation, availability and quality of social
support and child care) jointly modulate the stress level of caregivers which
in turn affects the SR development of the child via modulating interactive
quality. If we want to explain and improve SR in early years, we thus need
to take a systemic approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) and track the temporal
dynamics of interactive quality in the caregiver-child dyad over the first
years of life (McClelland et al., 2018).
CONCLUDING REMARKS

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SR has been shown to develop early and to be highly relevant for later development. By increasing our knowledge about SR development in the very
early period and by linking this knowledge to long-term outcomes, we may
improve our means to support young children during a period of development that is most critical for their future well-being, academic, social, and
economic performance. This can best be achieved by carefully defining and
measuring critical concepts, by exploring empirical relations between them,
changes with age, and the interplay of co- and self-regulation in different
settings, using a multi-method, dynamic, and systemic approach. Studies
considering the issues addressed in this paper will help us shed more light
on a promising new key to successful development of the next generation.
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Sabina Pauen is a full professor of Developmental and Biological Psychology at Heidelberg University and editor of a new interdisciplinary Journal
“Self-Regulation and Regulation.” Her own work focuses on cognitive and
brain development in early childhood, covering a broad range of topics,
including categorization, causal and functional reasoning, problem-solving,
and social learning. In recent years, research on early self-regulation has
become a main focus of her research.
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Wiebke Evers worked as a researcher in the field of executive functions at
the ZNL TransferCenter for Neuroscience and Learning at Ulm University
before she started a new position in Pauen’s lab. She is currently finishing
her PhD on the structure and development of executive functions in early
childhood.
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