Effortful Control Development In The Face Of Harshness and Unpredictability

Abstract

Through the life history theory perspective, this paper seeks to demonstrate how early adversity shapes the development of effortful control in ways that aim to best match the individual to the proximal environment toward ultimate goals despite trade-offs related to social, academic, and later health outcomes. Investigation linking early life harshness (i.e., cues of extrinsic morbidity-mortality; Ellis et al., 2009) and unpredictability (i.e., stochastic changes in environmental conditions; Ellis et al., 2009) to the development of self-regulation could facilitate a more nuanced understanding of early environmental effects on development. The current study investigates early environmental harshness and unpredictability as unique predictors for a self-regulation construct, effortful control. It was hypothesized that early life harshness and unpredictability would uniquely and negatively predict effortful control among preschoolers. While there was no evidence that cues of unpredictability predicted effortful control, cues of harshness, specifically neighborhood harshness, did statistically significantly predict effortful control in the direction expected. This appears to be the first study to explicitly investigate effortful control development in early childhood within the harshness and unpredictability framework.