thank you so much for that introduction
and thank you so much for the
opportunity to
present in this symposium and to speak
with you about my research on
self-regulation I'm deeply appreciative
of
this opportunity I want to present a
model of
self-regulation and consider some of its
implications for development
and then sort of interrogate that model
with data from a longitudinal sample
that Nancy mentioned
that my collaborators and I have been
conducting and with results from an
education experiment as well so with that
now for anyone with more than a
passing familiarity with
research on self-regulation in
children and adults you know that they
were confronted with a variety of terms
constructs
definitions that seems to define this
phenomenon of self-regulation
and it's natural to wonder to what
extent are these really
terms for the same thing are they synonymous
terms for different things or are they
kind of overlapping or not really
overlapping very much and
to tell you the truth I have no idea
although I'm an expert in this area but
I do think it makes sense to begin to
group these in particular domains to think
about the more cognitive aspects of
self-regulation to think about the more
emotional
reward sensitivity based aspects of
self-regulation
to think more about the personality
temperament
manifestations of self-regulation and
to think about the ways in which these
different domains work together in a
system of self-regulation
system that's characterized by recursive
processes that's both
top-down and bottom-up that is whereas
we know we can use executive functions
to regulate attention to regulate
emotion
to regulate physiologically by that same
token we know that
as experiences registered
physiologically emotionally and more automatic
less volitional processes that's going
to have implications for
our ability to control our attention
when needed and to engage the executive
functions they could facilitate it
but it can also really undercut it which is
more phenomenal
more familiar to us as the stress
phenomenon
I think there's some advantages to
thinking about self-regulation in this way
one is it allows for sort of ready
incorporation of a genetic level of
analysis we know that we differ
in a bottom-up perspective in variance of genes that are associated with
sensitivity to catecholamines in glucocorticoids that are
expressed in the stress response and
as well it incorporates a sort of an
epigenetic process but top-down and bottom-up
with the emphasis on circulating levels
of glucocorticoids in the ways
in which these levels may influence
processes of
gene expression in epigenesis
as well I think it's valuable to think
about this model because
its well-grounded in a tradition
in cybernetic theory going back sixty or
more years
in which we think of these biological
systems as a system that is self
regulating that it's going to be
adaptive in response to the context in
which it's situated
and then finally I really like this
modeler thinking about self regulation
because it has
kinda of an amazing neurobiology behind
it
we know that experiences register
rapidly I'm trying to find the cursor
oh here it is thank you as experiences
registered rapidly in
membrane and lambic structures and
production catecholamine and glucocorticoids
they feed
forward whoops I gotta go back
rats sorry guys
I gotta be careful with this mouse so
hear let me use this one
as they feed forward to prefrontal
cortex they are
potentiating synoptic activity
in prefrontal cortex and feeding back
on
this system this loop to sort of
optimize
levels of arousal and attention as if it's
you know saying hey
stimulation occurring pay attention be
goal-directed and the ideas
behind this system is that the
catecholamine levels
actually function literally in an
inverted U shape fashion
potentiating activity neural activity in
prefrontal cortex
associated with executive functions and
as measured behaviorally by working
memory tasks by inhibitory control tasks
by attention shifting tasks
but as catecholamines and glucocorticoids rise beyond an
intermediate level they began to
shut down activity
in prefrontal cortex in the seat of executive functions and the volitional control of attention
and as they rise further and further
indicating that the organism is
under stress and a little freaked out
we see this sort of loss of this top-down
prefrontal control
and an increase in more reactive
less volitional responses to
stimulation and of course this
research is the research of Amy Arsten at
Yale University
and well established through
pharmacology
and through single unit physiology
in non-human primates but it's very
helpful
to me in sort of providing a basis for
understanding
self-regulation as a system and then
beginning to consider some of the
implications for development
if self-regulation is working in this way
how would we began to study
the development of higher order
executive function abilities in early
childhood and the
volitional regulation of behavior and the volitional regulation of attention
well we would focus on reactivity and
regulation of the lower
level systems early in development there
in advance
of presumably development and
higher-order systems and we would
look there for the extent to which
activity there is predictive of later
executive function development
as well it really helps sharpen
our focus on experience in early
childhood in terms of individual
differences in the sort of parenting
that children receive as well as their
early care experiences outside of the home
with the idea that the
early care experiences are shaping
this self regulation system they're
influencing the
development of this neural network
that's important for
the regulation of behavior in brain development
and
through that are shaping sort of a more
reactive
versus more reflective phenotype
that's the theory
behind this model
and the idea it's a theory based in a psycho-biological
principal referred to as
experiential channelization
forwarded by Gilbert Gottlieb one of my
mentors and spiritual advisers on
the way in which environment and biology
combine
to shape development in ways that are
appropriate
for the context in which development's
occurring so that's the
canonization process is  characteristic
of biological
psycho- biological systems and my
colleagues Cybele Raver
at NYU and I have really thought about
the extent to which
this characterizes self-regulation
development in children
this appropriate development within
context a highly disadvantaged context
a more reactive phenotype and highly
supported context more
advantageous phenotype in terms of reflection
but really the questions have to do with
the extended developmental malleability
in the system to what extent when
children are moving from
an advantageous to a 
disadvantageous context or from a
disadvantageous to a more hopeful
advantageous contact
are we seeing changes in self-regulation
in the systems
where we would expect them so we've been
interrogating this model
with longitudinal data from the
sample that Nancy mentioned the Family
Life Project
this is a wonderful study it's a
longitudinal population-based sample
of children and families followed
from birth really
in and around small towns in rural
Pennsylvania and rural North Carolina
it's a joint project with my
colleagues at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
and Penn State University in its first
two rounds it was funded as a program project
by NICHD and the projects were
focused on
family ecology parenting work-family
relations language development and of
course self-regulation
and it has data collection in the home
at these time points with follow up
through the second grade
and I'm happy to say we recently just
got funded to follow the sample into early adolescence
finally
and I'm also happy to say that
the first phase of the data collection
are now publicly available
up to 36 months so if you're interested
in
this dataset and longitudinal analysis
by all means go to the ICPSR
with this succession number and download
the datasets
you can even check some of the stuff that
I'm gonna talk to you about today
if you're interested in sort of checking my work so what
I'm gonna
focus on is really parenting and
parenting sensitivity is the thing that
we're most interested in here
in the Family Life Project so we're
collecting
that in a structured freeplay interaction
were collecting saliva
from children in infancy in the toddler
periods
we're collecting that saliva both at
baseline
adjusted for the time of day and looking
at that
stress hormone the glucocorticoid hormone
cortisol
as an indicator of activity of the
physiological system and we're also
collecting it in response to emotion
challenge so toy
removal task and a scary mask
presentation
and we're looking at relations of
parenting
and child physiology both at baseline in
response to the task and emotional
reactivity emotional regulation that are
coded
second by second in response to these
tasks and we're relating those to
measures and executive function with
these types of tasks
that we develop for longitudinal use
and so just to recap really quickly
we're getting cortisol from saliva
at these time points at baseline in
response to emotion tasks
we're looking at parenting observed in a
structured freeplay
measures of risk in the home risk in
the household
and then executive function as children
enter preschool
and here just a a first analysis looking
at
just the base samples cortisol
collected
acid from saliva samples collected at
baseline what we're seeing here is
an expected or typical decline I don't
think we really had had data like this
before
from infancy up through the toddler
period for children
in the dark mine and more stable less
chaotic homes
but here for children and more chaotic
less stable homes
we're not seeing that that decline it's as
if that
cortisol levels are elevated in staying
elevated
and thereby being less flexible in
response to experience
the analogy would be sort of like a home
in which the thermostats not working
well but there's going to be
unpredictable severe cold out
so you might just turn the heat on and
leave it on
the house may burn down or become
damaged in some other way but it will
predict it will protect against that
unpredictable severe cold however in a
home in which thermostats working well
it will be flexibly regulated in
response to the outside temperature
so that flexible regulation we think
is really
being driven by maternal stimulation
and maternal sensitivity so we then looked
at that
Cortisol in response to the
emotion challenge and what we found is that
seven months of age
the children experiencing
more sensitive care as measured by the
freeplay interaction were showing
unexpected increase and decrease in
response to the emotion challenge
here's the idea is that the physiology and
the behavior of going along that children
in the dashed line experiencing the less
sensitive care and more chaotic homes
they're just as emotionally aroused
by the tasks
but the physiology and behavior are less
well-coordinated
so the idea here is that maternal
behavior early caregiving behavior is
organizing the system's early on to work
together
rather than individually and we follow
the sample forward to
to 15 months of age and follow the sample forward to 24 months of age
and see similar sorts of patterns in
particular at 24 months of age
this is the third time that children
have seen these tasks and some of them are still
emotionally aroused by them and some
are not and what we see is high levels
of maternal sensitivity
are associated with high levels of
cortisol when children are exhibiting
an emotional response however when
they're not
cortisol levels are low overall so again this idea
of a coordination of the physiology
and the behavior in the context of
high quality care I and then of course
we have
this measured longitudinally so we can
begin to ask interesting questions about
change in maternal sensitivity because it
is changeable and can change
so looking at this change in
behavior
and looking at change in Cortisol was
what my at the time postdoc Dan Berry
decided to do Dan's now an assistant
professor at the University of Illinois
but he had this brilliant idea would we
see if we see with in person changes
and maternal sensitivity within mom
changes in
maternal sensitivity when we see within
kid changes
in Cortisol and of course we do and
it's this dark bar
here and the really fascinating
thing about this analysis
is it's in the lower levels of sensitive
parenting
that we see the big effect of change
that is moms who were initially low
in their sensitivity and increase their
sensitivity over time
are having a big effect on
children's cortisol levels which is
good news right in many ways and exactly
what we would want to see
and of course important because what we
see is that the positive this more
sensitive parenting
and cortisol levels are predicting
executive function
at age 3 the first time point when we're
able to measure executive function
it's mediating some of the risk
characteristics in the home
through parenting through Cortisol
to executive function in support of this
model of self-regulation and self-regulation
development so of course I've been
talking about
sort of base line low levels of Cortisol
but also the flexible regulation of
Cortisol so which is
Clancy you can't have it both ways well you kind of can
so we then based on that we hypothesize that
moderate variability in cortisol levels
in early childhood
around a low average mean would be
associated with the highest levels of
executive function
at school entry if you follow me on that
and that's kinda exactly what we found there
with this so I think there are several
implications of
thinking about self-regulation in this
way and
fostering job child development
particularly for
for families in poverty and the idea
that maternal sensitivity parenting
behavior is
changeable and
as part of the work in my lab and shared
with Cybele Raver
in our last jointly we're part of a
group that
as a consortium of six
universities ran a buffering toxic
stress consortium
these are funded by the
administration for children and families
who oversees the Early Head Start
program and our goals in this really are
kind of validation of the relations
among
parenting in poverty stress physiology
and child outcomes but also mom outcomes
mom self-regulation
I i'm looking at influences are mother
self-regulation
on child self-regulation mechanism of inergeneration transmission
looking at the potential for
implementing a high quality parenting
program
through the early headstart home visit
and conducting
an experimental evaluation of that so
simple tasks like that
where were getting through this
study now and we'll have data I think soon
from the consortium on the viability of
doing these
these things and the potential for high
quality parenting support
as a focus for
the types of services that are being
provided by ACF
and then I think there are also some important
implications for education I just wanna
wrap up with
this thinking about self-regulation
in this way as a psycho-biological model
it's one manifestation of this sometimes
an easy relationship between
neuroscience and education
the idea that what we know about the
neurobiology of the brain and brain
development can really inform
educational practice it can help us
answer the question
what we should do and how we should
do it and what we should measure
and I kind of think this is an early
education version of working memory
training if you're familiar with the
working memory training literature
that literature Torkel Klingberg Susanne Jaeggi have shown that
that brain is plastic even into
adulthood right
when young adults do repetitive
practice on working memory tasks
they get better at the task and we see
concomitant changes in the neural
networks that underlie
this behavior the problem is
very little of that generalizes to
anything that we're really interested in
if you want to get better at working
memory
tasks you can't do it so in education we
can build on this but let's embed
the tasks the working memory tasks in
things that we want children to do where
we want them to generalize
so what would that look like in terms of
education well it would look like
reflection on experience planning
self-direction
even in three four five year olds and
that would be a great way to try to
embed self-regulation in
children's development
in their early educational experience so
rather than
have to invent the wheel I found a
program there are probably several
programs that do this
but one that really makes this the
explicit
focus of its pedagogy is tools of the
mind and there's a
pre-kindergarten version of tools and
there's a kindergarten version of tools
and I don't have time to go into it because
I'm just about out of time but
there's lots of information on Tools of Mind
on the web if you're interested in this
but the bottom line is we conducted a
randomized controlled trial of the
kindergarten version with this many
school districts that many schools that
many classrooms
and that many kids and importantly
schools range from
three percent very advantage schools to very
disadvantaged schools in terms of
free and reduced lunch we had executive
measures of executive function control
of attention
speed of information processing academic outcomes
and of course
cortisol and what we really found in the
sample overall
is not much to write home about there
were small effects
so you can think of a standard
deviation as about a year growth so
in the sample overall we saw small
effects on working memory
executive function reaction time a
little bit on math and a little bit on reading
but when we look in high-poverty school
that's when we really got the
eye-popping results
right and there we saw pretty big about
on average a half standard deviation effect
in these high poverty schools for this
very
focused program on self-regulation
developments so looking at
across these outcomes including
reasoning and vocabulary so
a very interesting and provocative set
of findings I think there are
really relatively few evaluations like
this this education research is hard to do
but we were able to follow the sample
forward into
the first grade and found effects on
growth and reading
and growth in vocabulary so with that
I have to stop I'm out of time I would
love to talk with you more
take-home message from this talk is
let's as much as possible make our scientific
understanding of self-regulation and
the neurobiology of self-regulation
inform what we do how we do it and
what we're measuring
in terms of the outcome so with that I
want to thank all of my
collaborators at Penn State UNC Chapel
Hill and New York University
folks with Tools of the Mind and
I appreciate the very generous
funding from NICHD Institute of
Education Sciences
and the administration for children and
families and thank you for your time and attention
