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Chapter 1 introduces the challenges of trusting public cooperation without monitoring and coercion, considers current research on the relationship between concepts such as cooperation and honesty, and examines the effectiveness of voluntary compliance.
Economic hardship is known to shape children’s self-regulation, yet little is understood about how fluctuations in hardship unfold over time and whether different patterns of unpredictability carry unique developmental consequences. Using a socioeconomically diverse sample, we tracked families’ subjective economic hardship across 15–36 monthly assessments and applied an environmental statistics framework to quantify four indices of unpredictability: changepoints in mean, changepoints in variance, coefficient of variation, and noise. PCA identified two distinct forms of economic unpredictability: one marked by frequent, unpredictable hardship, and another by infrequent but abrupt hardship. Economic unpredictability was disproportionately experienced by racially minoritized and lower-income families in our sample, reinforcing structural inequities in economic resources. Relations between these indices and caregiver-reported measures of family routines and day-to-day unpredictability were weak, suggesting wide heterogeneity in the ways families adapt to economic unpredictability. Leveraging propensity score methods, we isolated the effects of unpredictability from hardship severity, finding that both were associated with greater self-regulation challenges in early childhood, with the strongest effects for hardship severity. These findings underscore the importance of capturing economic hardship as a dynamic and multidimensional experience, with implications for policy efforts aimed at promoting stability in families’ access to resources over time.
Sensory Over-Responsivity Disorder (SORD) is characterized by extreme sensitivity to everyday sensory input, which can interfere with children’s emotional, behavioral and social development. Despite growing interest, limited research has explored its developmental effects in the absence of other psychiatric diagnoses. This study investigated self-regulation and related clinical features in preschool children with SORD who did not meet diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or obsessive-compulsive disorder. The sample included 15 children with SORD and 15 typically developing controls, matched by age and gender. Diagnoses were made using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment, and comorbidities were excluded using Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood: Revised Edition criteria. Self-regulation was assessed through the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders-Revised task. While no significant differences were found in autistic traits, repetitive behaviors or executive functioning, children with SORD demonstrated significantly poorer self-regulation (p < .001). Poorer self-regulation was strongly associated with greater SORD severity, elevated ADHD symptoms, lower social interaction and increased emotional and sensory reactivity. These findings suggest that self-regulation difficulties are a core feature of SORD, even in the absence of comorbid psychiatric disorders. Early identification and interventions targeting self-regulation may help improve long-term outcomes for children affected by SORD.
The virtues whose function is to regulate impulses, emotions, thoughts, and habits in the interest of larger purposes, including ethical ones, are courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. They have a different grammar from the virtues of caring. Because they are not concerns, they are not defined by the motives or reasons for action or emotion that such concerns supply. Instead, they are differentiated by the kind of impulses that they manage. The situations they address are not outward, like the ones to which the virtues of caring respond, but are states of the self. Thus, self-control is the paradigm. They contribute to our integrity, our self-possession, and our freedom as authors of our character. They don’t in themselves have moral worth, are often used for non-moral purposes, and may even be used for evil. But in the context of good character they function in support of the virtues of caring.
There is an unresolved debate about whether the ways of being currently identified by the DSM-5-TR as Cluster B personality disorders (henceforth PDs) should be considered genuine mental disorders or normal (if often serious) problems of living. This issue is a microcosm of a larger debate about whether psychiatry is overextending itself and overmedicalizing many of life’s hardships. We show that the resolution of the first debate can inform the second, larger, question. To this end, we examine Louis Charland’s influential arguments that Cluster B PDs are moral, not medical, conditions. Although Charland’s arguments fail to support this conclusion, Charland’s focus on mental healing to inform what ways of being are properly considered “mental disorders” is promising. We argue that skilled metacognitive self-regulation is necessary for mental healing and show that a focus on the role played by self-regulation in healing partially vindicates Charland’s argument: Cluster B PDs are not necessarily “moral conditions,” although some instantiations will be. We also show that current definitions of PDs are both overly inclusive and overly exclusive, allowing moral judgments to drive diagnosis. We conclude by showing that a focus on self-regulatory skill can help distinguish between mental disorders and normal problems of living.
MOOCs for language learning offer opportunities for communication to help develop learners’ productive skills in the target language, but these environments can also be challenging for learners, which may result in a disconnect between promise and reality. The chapter introduces MOOCs and language MOOCs (LMOOCs), considering their purposes and the reasons why learners enrol in LMOOCs. Communication opportunities and challenges in LMOOCs are reviewed, and relevant findings from research and practice are identified. Special consideration is given to the provision of feedback to learners. Fostering speaking among learners has generally been a challenge, due to the scale and openness of LMOOCs. The chapter offers recommendations for research and practice relating to the educator’s role, learners’ autonomy, affordances of communication technology, integration of LMOOCs into classroom practice, and cultural issues in communication. It is also recommended that MOOC providers should work together with educators to provide learners with adequate and innovative technological tools to facilitate their productive skills practice. Future directions are identified, emphasizing scalable methods of analysing learner activity and taking advantage of developments in artificial intelligence, including ways of supporting learners through interactions with conversational agents.
COVID-19 saw many career health officials retire early and seasoned health practitioners simply quit due to burnout. This chapter explores various qualities that leaders can utilize to provide and receive support when faced with stressors and challenges in both their work and personal lives. Personal assessments like Myers–Briggs, DISC, the Gallup Strengths Finder, and the Enneagram offer practical tools for members of leadership to identify their strengths and areas for growth. Identifying stressors and engaging in self-regulation ensure public health leaders can mitigate burnout. Leadership qualities are outlined and described. By cultivating leadership qualities, crisis leaders can stay focused and grounded during health emergencies. Transformation leadership theory is described. A student case study uses the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication framework to analyze former Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern’s communication during the COVID-19 outbreak. End-of-chapter reflection questions and activities are included.
This chapter explores the powerful role of music in regulating emotions and enhancing well-being. It delves into the science of how music affects our mood, highlighting its ability to evoke specific emotions and induce physiological changes. The author provides practical strategies for utilizing music as ’emotional first aid’, helping individuals cope with stress, anxiety, and negative emotions. The chapter also discusses the importance of self-regulation and offers guidance on using music to interrupt negative emotional spirals. It emphasizes the significance of creating personalized playlists tailored to specific emotional needs, promoting a proactive approach to emotional well-being through music. Additionally, the chapter explores the concept of ’mood repair’, showcasing how music can shift our emotional state from negative to positive. It provides insights into the diverse ways individuals can harness the power of music to cultivate joy, resilience, and overall emotional balance.
Detrimental impacts of early ecological adversity on children’s development are known, but our understanding of their mechanisms and factors contributing to multifinality of developmental trajectories triggered by adversity is incomplete. We examined longitudinal pathways from ecological adversity parents experienced when children were infants, measured as a cumulative index of fine-grained scores on several ecological risks, to children’s future self-regulation (SR) in 200 U.S. Midwestern community families (96 girls). Parents’ observed power-assertive styles were modeled as mediators, and their negative internal working models (IWMs) of the child, coded from interviews – as moderators. Both were assessed twice, at 16 months and at 3 years, to inform our understanding of their developmental timing. Children’s SR was reported by parents and observed at 4.5 years. Path analyses revealed moderated mediation in mother-child relationships: A path from higher early ecological adversity to elevated power assertion to children’s poorer SR was significant only for mothers with highly negative IWMs of the child. Maternal negative IWMs assessed early, at 16 months, moderated the link between ecological adversity and power assertion. Once elevated, maternal power assertion was stable through age 3 and not moderated by IWM at age 3. There were no significant effects in father-child relationships.
Oscar Barbarin has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, and North Carolina as well as Tulane University. His scholarship examines social context, ethnicity and child development, particularly the impact of racism and material hardship on socioemotional development. He has studied the development of children with life-threatening illness, urbanization in South Africa, and quality of early childhood settings. His research has centered on boys of color and the identified auspicious conditions that promote their mental health, social competence and emotional resilience. These conditions include (a) systems of caring, (b) structures supporting their self-regulation of behavior and emotions, and (c) interpretive frameworks by which affirming familial relations, culture and spiritual values provide boys of color a sense of connection, purpose, and an understanding of their place in the world. He has proposed that paradoxical attributions are a key cognitive strategy in maintaining emotional balance by affirming personal agency.
Differences in social behaviours are common in young people with neurodevelopmental conditions (NDCs). Recent research challenges the long-standing hypothesis that difficulties in social cognition explain social behaviour differences.
Aims
We examined how difficulties regulating one's behaviour, emotions and thoughts to adapt to environmental demands (i.e. dysregulation), alongside social cognition, explain social behaviours across neurodiverse young people.
Method
We analysed cross-sectional behavioural and cognitive data of 646 6- to 18-year-old typically developing young people and those with NDCs from the Province of Ontario Neurodevelopmental Network. Social behaviours and dysregulation were measured by the caregiver-reported Adaptive Behavior Assessment System Social domain and Child Behavior Checklist Dysregulation Profile, respectively. Social cognition was assessed by the Neuropsychological Assessment Affect-Recognition and Theory-of-Mind, Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, and Sandbox continuous false-belief task scores. We split the sample into training (n = 324) and test (n = 322) sets. We investigated how social cognition and dysregulation explained social behaviours through principal component regression and hierarchical regression in the training set. We tested social cognition-by-dysregulation interactions, and whether dysregulation mediated the social cognition–social behaviours association. We assessed model fits in the test set.
Results
Two social cognition components adequately explained social behaviours (13.88%). Lower dysregulation further explained better social behaviours (β = −0.163, 95% CI −0.191 to −0.134). Social cognition-by-dysregulation interaction was non-significant (β = −0.001, 95% CI −0.023 to 0.021). Dysregulation partially mediated the social cognition–social behaviours association (total effect: 0.544, 95% CI 0.370–0.695). Findings were replicated in the test set.
Conclusions
Self-regulation, beyond social cognition, substantially explains social behaviours across neurodiverse young people.
This chapter investigates the logic of regulation that animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. The chapter begins by examining the new laws on security vetting and archival background checks. Reviewing the conduct of the OHAL Commission tasked to decide on applications by purged citizens for reversal of their refusal or civic death status, the chapter reveals how ambiguities in the new law allow for the extensive use of informal rule of law based on extra-legal practices. By focusing on several denunciation cases, the chapter’s theoretical and empirical strands come together in an analysis of the impact this new securitisation logic of regulation has both on those targeted and on society as a whole. I argue that the new regulatory technologies of citizen-informants and the perfusion of distrust throughout society an ‘atmosfear of terror’, inducing the population as a whole to self-regulate, perform, and participate in their own securitisation.
In the digital age, the landscape of information dissemination has undergone a profound transformation. The traditional boundaries between information and news have become increasingly blurred as technology allows anyone to create and share content online. The once-exclusive realm of authoritative media outlets and professional journalists has given way to a decentralized public square, where individuals can voice their opinions and reach vast audiences regardless of mainstream coverage. The evolution of the digital age has dismantled the conventional notions of journalism and reshaped how news is obtained and interpreted. This shift has paved the way for the proliferation of fake news and online disinformation. The ease with which false information can be fabricated, packaged convincingly and rapidly disseminated to a wide audience has contributed to the rise of fake news. This phenomenon gained global attention during the 2016 US presidential election, prompting nations worldwide to seek strategies for tackling this issue.
The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.
This study investigates whether lower self-regulation (SR) facets are risk factors for internalizing symptoms (vulnerability models), consequences of these symptoms (scar models), or develop along the same continuum and thus share common causes (spectrum models) during middle childhood. To analyze these models simultaneously, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was estimated using Mplus. Data were assessed at three measurement time points in a community-based sample of N = 1657 (52.2% female) children in Germany, aged 6–13. Internalizing symptoms were measured via parent report by the emotional problems scale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Seven SR facets were assessed behaviorally, via parent report and teacher report. At the within-person level, internalizing symptoms were concurrently associated with emotional reactivity at all measurement time points, while no cross-lagged paths reached significance. At the between-person level, internalizing symptoms were associated with working memory updating (r = −.29, p < .001), inhibitory control (r = −.29, p < .001), planning behavior (r = −.49, p < .001), and emotional reactivity (r = .59, p < .001). As internalizing symptoms and SR facets were primarily associated at the between-person level, the results lend support to spectrum models suggesting common causes of internalizing symptoms and impaired SR.
The development of inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM) in preschool is linked to a multitude of cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes, including elementary school adjustment. Furthermore, there are both cognitive and socioemotional domains of IC and it is unclear if both are related to these outcomes in the same manner. Using a family study design, the present investigation examined preschoolers’ IC, WM and externalizing behavior problems, maternal depression and anxiety measured when the children were in preschool, and elementary school externalizing behaviors and child and family functioning. Families with two children between 2.5 and 5.5 years of age (n = 198; mean age = 3.88, SD = 1.04) completed online surveys and laboratory visits, as well as another online survey after the children entered elementary school. Both cognitive and emotional domains of preschool IC significantly predicted the externalizing and functioning aspects of adjustment in elementary school (but WM did not predict either). In addition, child age predicted functioning in elementary school, and maternal depression predicted externalizing in elementary school. These longitudinal results indicate that supporting both cognitive and emotional aspects of preschool IC can benefit adjustment in elementary school.
Empirical evidence has shown that people with better self-control to a greater extent have the self-regulatory ability to act in line with their long-term goals. In this pre-registered study, the relationship between self-control and self-regulatory behavior was investigated both directly and indirectly, i.e., through affective forecasting ability. This is of great interest as it is necessary to be able to forecast one's emotional response to future events in order to make choices that maximize one's happiness. However, in a laboratory experiment with undergraduate students, I found no evidence of self-control being associated with affective forecasting ability, or that people with better self-control more often acted in a way that maximized their expected happiness.
Private speech is a tool through which children self-regulate. The regulatory content of children’s overt private speech is associated with response to task difficulty and task performance. Parenting is proposed to play a role in the development of private speech as co-regulatory interactions become represented by the child as private speech to regulate thinking and behaviour. This study investigated the relationship between maternal parenting style and the spontaneous regulatory content of private speech in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 70) during a problem-solving Duplo construction task. Sixty-six children used intelligible private speech which was coded according to its functional self-regulatory content (i.e., forethought, performance, and self-reflective). Mothers completed the Australian version of the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire. Results revealed a significant positive association between maternal authoritative parenting and the frequency and proportion of children’s forethought type (i.e., planning and self-motivational) utterances during the construction task. There were no significant associations between maternal parenting style and other private speech content subtypes.
There are many different types of regulatory instruments and tools. Chapter 6 classifies and examines regulatory tools according to their underlying technique or ‘modality’ of control or source of influence, examining five such modalities in turn: command, competition, communication, consensus and code (or ‘architecture’). This chapter also considers algorithmic regulation and the role of reputation as a form of regulation.
Moving prevention for college students out of the mental health clinic and into the classroom changes the campus environment. A curricular approach to enhancing student resilience is described through an exemplar of a one-credit general education course focused on adaptive responses to stress, Changing Minds, Changing Lives (CMCL). The experiential, strength-based curriculum is designed to meet basic psychological needs, buffer predictable stress, and boost adaptive resilience. Based on a social–ecological model of resilience, the CMCL program functions as a campus opportunity structure teaching self-regulation skills, facilitating greater connectedness, and strengthening resilience capacities. The model operationalizes the resilience response as a set of concrete actions that facilitate adaptive reorientation and reorganization in the face of challenge, mobilize relevant assets and resources, and leverage social connections to navigate adversity. Evidence-based applications of strength-based pedagogy, mindfulness practices, expressive writing, and inclusive group process in the course structure are described, and empirical validation of model efficacy is reviewed.