“I believe the research the group will discuss tonight illustrates both the critical importance of regulatory processes to human functioning and also the importance of considering developmental processes when studying regulation,” said Eisenberg.
The Key Role of Good Parents
Developmental psychologist Clancy Blair of New York University explained the role that positive parenting plays in the development of self-control. In a longitudinal study called the Family Life Project, Blair and collaborators have tracked early signs of emotional regulation beginning at 7 months through several follow-up points. The work calls for researchers to observe parent–child interactions at home and collect samples of the stress hormone cortisol, among other measures.
What they’ve found so far is that cortisol levels in children from more chaotic homes show a sustained elevation compared to those from more stable homes. Blair likens the result to a thermostat: It’s as if the heat has been left on all the time in fear of a severe winter storm. Cortisol levels in children from more stable homes, meanwhile, seem to adapt to the situation. To continue the metaphor: it’s as if these thermostats can regulate themselves in response to the outside temperature.
“Early care experiences are shaping this self-regulation system,” said Blair. “They’re influencing the development of this neural network that’s important for regulation behavior.”
That’s the bad news. Here’s the good: Blair and collaborators have shown that these cortisol levels in children can change in the desired direction as parenting style improves. “I think there are several implications about thinking of self-regulation in this way and fostering child development — particularly for families in poverty,” said Blair, “and [about] the idea that maternal sensitivity and parenting behavior is changeable.”
Psychological scientist Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel also studies the development of self-control through the lens of mother–infant relations. Feldman’s work has found that one of the key indicators of healthy regulation is what she calls “synchrony” — the coordination of behavior between parent and child. Achieving behavioral synchrony also seems to put the family’s biology in sync, says Feldman.
“We found that during moments of mother–infant interactive synchrony, there’s also coupling of maternal and infant heart rhythm, coordinated release of oxytocin, and brain-to-brain synchrony in alpha rhythms across the social brain,” she said.
In one study, conducted with Shir Atzil, Feldman videotaped 23 mothers interacting with their infants, then played the tape to the women when they were inside a brain scanner. Some of the mothers were “synchronous” (their behavior fell into accord with the child) while others were “intrusive” (they either overstimulated the infant or disregarded the child’s signals).
Synchronous mothers showed more activation in an area of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens, which is tied to the reward system, while intrusive mothers showed higher activation in the amygdala, a fear center, they report in Neuropsychopharmacology. By rewarding synchrony, the brain might be alerting the parent that this harmony helps strengthen emotional regulation in the child.
“So the human parental brain, which is the apex of the evolution process, not only builds a more self-regulated and socialized adult,” said Feldman, “it also sensitizes the adult brain to the most important function of evolutionary adaptation, the successful rearing of infants to become collaborative members of the human family.”
The Adolescents Are (Basically) all Right
Skipping over early childhood, APS Fellow BJ Casey of Weill Cornell Medical College advanced the discussion of regulatory development into adolescence.
Casey said the common wisdom of teenage years being risky ones lacking in self-control is a bit of an exaggeration.
“Too often the way we describe this period is as if it’s a brain that has no brakes, no steering wheel, and only an accelerator,” she said.
Casey’s neural circuitry model of the adolescent brain suggests these controls do exist (in the prefrontal cortex) but that they’re not fully mature, so the system tends to be more vulnerable to rewards (in the nucleus accumbens) and fears (in the amygdala).
“What I’m suggesting to you is it would make sense during this period of development you’d want regions to call a system that’s going to help you regulate so you no longer need your parent to be your self-regulation and you can do it on your own,” she said.
In several studies, Casey and others have shown that risk behavior of adolescents results, in part, from their sensitivity to rewards, threats, and social influences. For one brain scan experiment, done with Adriana Galvan, Casey and company showed teenagers meaningless money cues in the course of a simple identification task and found they had exaggerated activity in the reward center (accumbens) relative to the control center (prefrontal cortex) compared with children or adults. Simply put, these areas of the brain correlated with risks may just be developing faster than the regulatory areas at this point in life.
“Adolescence is usually described as a roller-coaster ride with a lot of thrills, but actually they’re thrills and fears,” said Casey. “And it’s important for those to have the opportunity to grow so they can rewire the system to help regulate these systems moving forward and being able to engage in adaptive behavior that’s necessary in adulthood.”
That’s not to say early indications of low self-control don’t matter. Casey and a large group of collaborators found the opposite when they followed up with Mischel’s marshmallow participants some 40 years later and conducted brain scans during an impulse control task. The participants who had been bad at delaying gratification as children showed greater activity in the nucleus accumbens when suppressing alluring cues, the researchers report in PNAS in 2011. They conclude that resisting temptation seems to be a “relatively stable individual difference.”
Five Things Teenagers Can Do About it
Not all hope is lost. Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania outlined a five-part “process model” (borrowed from emotional researcher and APS Fellow James Gross) that she believes offers a blueprint for teenagers and young adults to keep their impulses in check. The sooner some of these strategies are employed, the better the outcome in terms of self-control.
“It is by intervening in the process of impulse-generation earlier rather than later that we can be really smart about how to exercise self-control in our lives,” she said.
The first step in the model, and also the strongest, is called situation selection. That refers to putting yourself in a position to succeed — making a rule of sitting in the first row of lecture, for instance, or locking yourself in a room without a phone when it’s time to study. The second step, if you can’t select a situation, is to modify it. If you have to bring a laptop to class, for instance, close it while the teacher is talking so you can’t browse eBay or post to Facebook.
In a 1-week field study with high-school students, Duckworth and collaborators found that those who used situation modification strategies accomplished more stated goals than did those students who used a more basic self-control method (simple willpower) or no strategy at all. And in addition to refraining from outside temptation, said Duckworth, the modification students reported actually feeling less temptation.
The third part of the process model preaches “selective attention” — looking right at a teacher rather than out the window, as students do in KIPP charter schools, for example. (In the marshmallow test, some youngsters employed this tactic on the treat in question.) The fourth strategy to is reframe a situation; as one example, a study conducted in collaboration with Mischel found that fifth graders had an easier time regulating a lingering negative emotion when they replayed the event in the third- rather than the first-person, as if watching it happen to someone else.
The fifth and final approach is “response modulation,” which Duckworth described as “just good old-fashioned ‘don’t do it.’ ”
So regulation among children, adolescents, and young adults might be an uphill battle but it isn’t a lost cause. Duckworth quoted Mischel as saying: “The most important scientific discovery about self-control is that it can be taught.” In fact, she said, she made up the quote, but emailed him one day to make sure it was all right.
“And he wrote back: sure,” she said, getting a big laugh from the ballroom crowd. “I think this is a relatively accurate statement of what Walter does believe.”