Browsing by Subject "tahdonalainen itsesäätely"

Objectives. One of the key factors responsible for one’s self-regulatory skills are considered to be temperament-based effortful control (EC) and higher-order executive functions (EFs). These have been shown to share some mutual neural networks and brain regions, but little is known about the connections between them. In particular, there is a lack of longer-term follow-up studies. This study examined the association between parental-assessed EC in childhood and test performance based EFs in early adolescence. In addition, the aim was to investigate the connections between sub-features of EC and EFs, and whether gender affects the relationship between them. Methods. This study consisted of 183 children and adolescents who had participated at the age of 5,5 and 12 years in the follow-up phases of the cohort study, which began in 1998. EC was assessed by The Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) and EFs were evaluated with subtests from Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment for Children II (NEPSY-II), Trail Making Test (TMT), Conners’ Continuous Performance Test II (CPT) and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Results and conclusions. Higher parental-rated EC at 5,5 years of age was associated EFs at age 12, especially in tasks measuring linguistic and non-linguistic fluency and inhibitory skills (verbal and design fluency subtests from NEPSY-II). Looking at the individual subfactors of EC, the ability to maintain attentional focus (attentional focusing), the tendency to enjoy low intensity stimuli (low intensity pleasure), and the ability to suppress inappropriate responses (inhibitory control) were found to be associated with higher EFs (better performance in verbal and design fluency subtests from NEPSY-II, less perseveration errors in WCST and lower response time in CPT). In addition, some gender specific connections were found: boys’ ability to shift attention was associated with higher stimulus resolution (higher D Prime score in CPT). The results suggest that childhood temperament could be used to identify potential challenges in EFs later in early adolescence.