When encountering a challenge, one often elicits a variety of emotions and exhibits a series of self-regulatory techniques. Part of the self-regulation process involves the presence of persistence, the trait that allows individuals to continue despite having faced challenges and setbacks (Dennis, 2006; Sansone et al., 2010). Although past studies have focused on self-regulation, the measurements used do not cover children’s dynamic emotional and regulation patterns that may occur when faced with a challenging task. In addition, their individual differences (e.g. age) are not accounted for since they are treated as being uniform.

 

To address these gaps, researchers conducted a longitudinal study, spanning from 2005 to 2012, in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States on children and their mothers. The study focused on three research questions. First, the researchers aimed to group the children based on their changes in anger, sadness, and persistence in the face of challenging tasks. Additionally, they explored how emotions and persistence differ from toddlerhood to preschool age. Lastly, the researchers examined the relationship between children’s group membership and their sustained attention and engagement in different tasks. There were three waves of data collection in total (toddlerhood, preschool, and primary school age) with the first two requiring mothers to complete questionnaires reporting their children’s temperamental anger and sadness. During the first data collection, the children= completed two tasks following live demonstrations of it: 1) A locked-box task (removing the duck toy from the container within two minutes after playing with it for one minute) and 2) a sorting task (sorting a large number of rings by color within three minutes). During the second data collection, children first received the locked-box task in which they practiced unlocking a container using a key and chose toys that were to be locked in a container. The children were then tasked to unlock the container using a set of keys within four minutes, with none being the correct one. Afterward, the experimenter helped them unlock it using the correct key. Another task completed during this time was the sorting task where the children had to sort beads by color within four minutes with a book placed at the corner of their tables serving as a potential distraction that they could engage in, without the presence of their mothers. During the third wave of data collection, children engaged in a yarn tangle task in which they were told to untangle a ball of yarn for whatever time needed, without their mothers. After five minutes, the experimenter told them that they had actually found yarn that didn’t need to be untangled. The locked-box tasks measured the children’s anger, sadness, and persistence while the sorting tasks and yarn tangle tasks measured sustained attention and engagement. 

 

Results indicated two distinct groups during toddlerhood: low-effort class (children who did not put in the effort to complete the locked-box tasks correlated with low levels of anger and sadness) and decreased-effort class (active attempts to complete such tasks followed by loss of effort and low levels of sadness correlated with a decrease in anger and persistence). Three groups existed during preschool ages: decreased effort class (those with decreasing efforts and increasing sadness throughout the task resulted in disengaging with the task), moderate effort class (those with curvilinearly increasing sadness, curvilinearly decreasing persistence, and moderate levels of anger continued attempting the task less than half of the time in the end), and high effort class (those with consistent high persistence, moderate anger, and low sadness continued to work on the task for more than half of the time). Overall, these findings suggest that a higher level of self-regulation is best shown in children with high levels of persistence and moderate to low levels of anger and sadness. Moreover, the group classification in preschool-age predicted sustained attention and engagement in the same and later ages, suggesting that children’s self-regulation skills in preschool may likely reveal their future self-regulation performance. 

 

Tan et al.’s (2022) study provides insights for both educators and for EPIC researchers. To facilitate and sustain students’ persistence when they face challenges in the way to obtain their goals, educators can not only emphasize the importance of effort but also guide students to adaptively use their negative emotions when encountering challenges. In relation to EPIC, we can explore behavioral measures of persistence and how those relate to students’ emotional experiences when faced with challenges. This line of work may also inform certain interventions on enhancing persistence to better cope with and overcome their failures.

 

Address the author and their study: 

If you want to learn more about Tan et al.’s (2022) study, check it out at: 

https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13868 

 

This post was written by Jessica Wang.

 

Reference:

Dennis, T. (2006). Emotional self-regulation in preschoolers: The interplay of child approach reactivity, parenting, and control capacities. Developmental Psychology, 42, 84–97. https://doi. org/10.1037/0012-1649.42.1.84

Sansone, C., Thoman, D., & Smith, J. (2010). Interest and self-regulation: Understanding, interest and self-regulation individual variability in choices, efforts and persistence over time. In R. H. Hoyle (Ed.), Handbook of personality and self-regulation (pp. 192–217). Wiley-Blackwell.

Tan, L., Shin, E., Page, K., & Smith, C. L. (2022). Changes in children’s anger, sadness, and persistence across blocked goals: Implications for self‐regulation. Child Development.