Associations among children's negative emotionality, executive functions and performance on a cognitive task, and parenting among Korean preschoolers [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

A body of studies has demonstrated that cognitive self-regulation skills or executive functions (EF) during early childhood are a strong predictor for later academic success and social competence. Mother-child relationships, the most intense and enduring relationships of early childhood, presumably affect children's cognitive development including cognitive self-regulation. Although a greater attention has been paid to the mothers' contrition to children's development, a substantial body of literature suggests that difficult child temperament elicits negative parenting behaviors, which in turn increase children's difficult temperament or negative emotionality over time. However, little is known about ways in which different temperamental traits interact with each other affecting parenting behaviors. Also, according to the differential susceptibility hypothesis, children's difficult temperament, as a phenotypic marker of underlying neurobiological processes, interacts with an environment (e.g., parenting), generating variations in children's developmental outcomes. However, only few studies have tested the moderating role of temperament in the associations between parenting and children's cognitive development with most studies focusing on socio-emotional development. Also, even though maternal characteristics, such as educational attainment, are likely to affect maternal responses to children's difficult temperament, there have been only few studies examining this issue. Therefore, the current study shed light on these under-researched issues among parenting (parenting styles and interactional behaviors), children's temperament and cognitive outcomes (cognitive self-regulation (EF) and performance on a spatial cognitive task), and mothers' characteristic (educational attainment). Specifically, the present study addressed the following research questions: 1) Does parenting predict children's EF and performance on a spatial cognitive task?; 2) Do children's difficult temperamental characteristics predict parenting style?; 3) Do difficult temperamental traits (negative emotionality traits) interactively predict authoritarian parenting style?; 4) Does children's negative emotionality moderate the associations between parenting style and children's cognitive development (EF and performance on a spatial cognitive task)?; and 5) Do associations between children's negative emotionality and parenting style vary as a function of maternal educational attainment? Most of the prior studies addressing these issues have been conducted in Western countries, and thus, little is known about the degree to which the findings are culture-specific. Thus, in this study these questions were addressed with a non-Western sample, Korean mothers and children. Eighty mother-child dyads were recruited from 10 preschools in Seoul, Korea. Children's mean age was about 59 months (45 -- 66 months). Mothers assessed children's temperamental proneness to anger (anger proneness) and difficultness to soothe (unsoothability) as traits of negative emotionality through parent questionnaire. They also answered items regarding their own parenting style (authoritative and authoritarian dimensions). Their interactional behaviors during a mother-child joint puzzle task were videotaped (about 10 minutes) and analyzed: the frequency of different types of maternal behaviors (i.e., cognitive and emotional supportive and controlling (directive) behaviors) and the ratings of overall maternal sensitivity and autonomy support during the puzzle activity were coded as a proxy of their usual interactional behaviors. Children's performance during the puzzle activity was rated based on a five point scale with a higher score meaning a better performance, and six tasks, measuring children's inhibitory control, working memory, attention shifting, and delay of gratification, were administered to assess their cognitive self-regulation skills (EF). Two EF composites, memory/attention control and behavioral inhibition, deriving from principal component analysis of the five measures (except "day/night" task that measures inhibitory control) were included in the analyses. To address the research questions, multiple regression analyses were conducted. The main findings are as follows. First, maternal autonomy-supportive behaviors (a composite of maternal sensitivity and autonomy support (rating-based) and directive and controlling behavior (frequency-based)) did not predict children's performances on EF composites. Also, when children possessed two negative emotionality traits at the same time, that is, when they were prone to anger and simultaneously difficult to soothe, mothers were inclined to show more authoritarian parenting (relative to authoritative parenting) than when children were only difficult to soothe but not prone to anger. Next, depending on the degrees of children's negative emotionality (a composite of anger proneness and unsoothability), associations between children's performance on a spatial cognitive task (reflecting children's cognitive abilities) and parenting varied. Among children with higher levels of negative emotionality (above the sample mean), a relatively greater amount of warm and democratic parenting (authoritative) was associated with lower performances on a spatial cognitive task and a greater degree of structure and control in parenting (authoritarian) with higher performances on the task, while the opposite pattern was observed among better-regulated children with low negative emotionality (below the mean). Finally, mother's educational attainment was found to moderate the associations between negative emotionality and parenting style. Specifically, compared to two-year college graduates, mothers with 4-year-college or graduate degrees tended to show more authoritative parenting when their children's negative emotionality was higher than the sample mean. More-educated mothers' parenting style tended to be associated with children's negative emotionality to a lesser degree. These findings suggest that mother-child relationships are associated with interplay among many factors, such as children's (e.g., combinations of temperamental traits) and mothers' characteristics (e.g., educational attainment). With cautions in mind regarding the correlational findings based on cross-sectional data, the study findings suggest that children possessing two negative temperamental characteristics at the same time who are also raised by low-educated mothers (again, probably educational attainment as an indicator of maternal personality or other traits) may be those most in need of more attention and support. More studies to address these issues with culturally, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse populations would better inform the complex interplay among parenting, child outcomes, parents' and children's characteristics, and cultural context. Given that the current sample consisted of well-educated middle to upper-middle class mothers and harsh authoritarian parenting behaviors were rare among them and that educational attainment was the only characteristics examined as maternal characteristic, further research with samples and information of more diverse socio-economic backgrounds in other cultural context with longitudinal or intervention designs is necessary to confirm the generalizability of the current study findings.