Temperament and attention in the self-regulation of 7-year-old children

The present work assessed the implications of the posterior orienting and the anterior executive attentional networks on self-regulation abilities in children through studying the relations of 7-year-old children’s temperament characteristics to different forms of attentional control. Children were classified in terms of their temperament traits measured through the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire. Children carried out two Stroop tasks, with and without distracting stimuli, and flanker and Stroop interference effects were calculated as measures of the orienting and the executive attentional networks, respectively. Results indicated that children scoring high in Anger, Discomfort, Sadness (only girls) and Approach-Anticipation (only girls) showed a stronger flanker interference effect, exhibiting greater difficulty to filter out the non relevant information than children scoring low did. On the other hand, children scoring high in Activity Level and Impulsivity (only girls), and low in Inhibitory Control, showed a stronger Stroop interference effect, indicating less ability to suppress prepotent behaviors under instructions. Also, patterns of interactions between some pairs of scales revealed that negative emotionality and self-regulatory aspects of temperament predicted both Stroop and flanker interference performance