Tracy Spinrad

• Ph.D.
• Arizona State University

Research and theory on the role of top-down self-regulation (TDSR) in children’s developmental outcomes has received considerable attention in the last few decades. In this review, we distinguish TDSR (and overlapping self-regulatory processes) from bottom-up regulation. With a particular focus on Eisenberg et al.’s body of work, we review evidence...

The field of developmental psychopathology tends to focus on the negative aspects of functioning. However, prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding – positive aspects of functioning– might relate to some aspects of psychopathology in meaningful ways. In this article, we review research on the relations of three types of developmental psych...

Emotion Regulation and Parenting provides a state-of-the-art account of research conducted on emotion regulation in parenting. After describing the conceptual foundations of parenthood and emotion regulation, the book reviews the influence of parents' emotion regulation on parenting, how and to what extent emotion regulation influences child develo...

Despite broad interest in how children and youth cope with stress and how others can support their coping, this is the first Handbook to consolidate the many theories and large bodies of research that contribute to the study of the development of coping. The Handbook's goal is field building - it brings together theory and research from across the...

White children's effortful control (EC), parents' implicit racial attitudes, and their interaction were examined as predictors of children's prosocial behavior toward White versus Black recipients. Data were collected from 171 White children (55% male, Mage = 7.13 years, SD = 0.92) and their parent in 2017. Prosocial behavior toward White peers was...

Objective We examined the associations among parenting, children's moral emotions, and children's prosocial behaviors toward Black peers and White peers. Background Parenting practices inform children's prosocial behaviors; however, the contextual and individual factors that predict children's differentiated prosocial behaviors have been understud...

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of young children's goal-directed behaviors in challenging settings––an important behavioral component of mastery motivation – and to examine the relations of maternal warmth and control to its trajectory from toddlerhood to preschool age. A behavioral component of mastery motivation was obs...

We examined the relation of White parents’ color-blind racial attitudes (a global composite score and its subscales) and their implicit racial attitudes to their young children’s race-based sympathy toward Black and White victims. One hundred and nighty non-Hispanic White children (54% boys, Mage = 7.13 years, SD = 0.92) reported their sympathy in...

Although there is interest in the role of peers in children's schooling experiences, few researchers have examined associations and related underlying processes between peers’ emotionality, an aspect of temperament, and children's academic achievement. This study evaluated whether target children's (N = 260) own self‐regulation, assessed with two b...

Informed by attachment theory and self-determination theory, the goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that behavioral engagement mediates the longitudinal associations between teacher–child relationship quality and academic achievement. In addition, in an exploratory manner, we expected to identify some additional transactional relations a...

This study investigated developmental trajectories of observationally coded engagement across the early elementary years and whether these trajectories were associated with children's academic achievement. Furthermore, we evaluated if these relations varied as a function of children's family socio-economic status and early reading and math skills....

Although scholars are increasingly building empirical evidence that helps us understand racism, they have conducted surprisingly little research on White children’s prosocial behavior towards historically marginalized people. 190 White, non-Hispanic children (M = 7.09 years, 54.2% boys) participated in the study. We examined whether both parents’ r...

Relations among White (non-Latinx) children's empathy-related responding, prosocial behaviors, and racial attitudes toward White and Black peers were examined. In 2017, 190 (54% boys) White 5- to 9-year-old children (M = 7.09 years, SD = 0.94) watched a series of videos that depicted social rejection of either a White or Black child. Empathy-relate...

Emotional self-regulation is a highly popular and influential topic amongst researchers, educators, and practitioners. In the fields of developmental, education or learning, and affective sciences, some confusion and disagreement remain as to how to define and measure emotional self-regulation. For example, the terms self-control, effortful control...

Promoting prosocial behavior toward those who are dissimilar from oneself is an urgent contemporary issue. Because children spend much time in same-gender relationships, promoting other-gender prosociality could help them develop more inclusive relationships. Our goal in the present research was to better understand the extent to which elementary-s...

Prosocial behavior refers to voluntary behavior that benefits others (Eisenberg et al., 2015). Although there has been increasing empirical attention to understanding racism, there has been surprisingly less focus on children’s positive social behaviors toward “the other.” In this study, We examined the prediction of children’s differential prosoci...

In this article, we identify approaches for understanding more thoroughly the academic and social experiences of homeschooled students. The growth of the homeschooling movement in the United States, questions about the need for additional regulation, and the importance of high‐quality education for children motivate this scholarly effort. We begin...

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental...

Context-appropriate infant physiological functioning may support emotion regulation and mother-infant emotion coregulation. Among a sample of 210 low-income Mexican-origin mothers and their 24-week-old infants, dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) was used to examine whether within-infant vagal functioning accounted for between-dyad differen...

In this short-term longitudinal study, we tested if peers' temperament in the fall of second grade predicted target children's (N = 241) student–teacher conflict and closeness in the spring of second grade and whether target children's self-regulation moderated these associations. Based on regression analyses, peers' negative emotionality was negat...

The main goal of this study was to more closely understand the direction of relations between maternal behavior and young children's defiance and committed compliance. We examined 256 mother–child dyads to explore developmental transactional relations between maternal assertive control, children's committed compliance, and children's defiance at 18...

This study tested whether the relations between parental warmth and children’s problem behaviors vary as a function of the quality of the teacher-student relationship while controlling for prior levels of the outcomes. When children (N = 301, M age = 5.48, 52% girls) were in kindergarten, teachers reported on the quality of the teacher-student rela...

This study tested whether the relations between parental warmth and children’s problem behaviors vary as a function of the quality of the teacher-student relationship while controlling for prior levels of the outcomes. When children (N = 301, M age = 5.48, 52% girls) were in kindergarten, teachers reported on the quality of the teacher-student rela...

Objective Despite concerns about the inaccuracy of parents’ reports of children’s sleep, it remains unclear whether the bias of parents’ reports varies across racial/ethnic groups. To address this limitation, the current study systematically investigated the concordance among parent-reported sleep questionnaires, sleep diaries, and actigraphy-based...

Studies with extensive observations of real-life emotions at school are rare but might be especially useful for predicting school-related outcomes. This study evaluated observations of negative emotion expressivity in lunch and recreation settings across kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (N = 301), kindergarten teachers' reports of childr...

The goal of this study was to investigate the relations between White parents’ implicit racial attitudes and their children’s racially-based bias in empathic concern towards White and Black victims of injustice, as well as the moderating role of children’s age in this relation. Five to 9-year-old children (N = 190; 103 boys) reported how sorry (i.e...

Objectives Parents’ own emotion dysregulation and their socialization of emotions have been found to predict offspring’s emotion dysregulation, but little is known about how these factors interact to predict young adults’ emotion dysregulation. Thus, we aimed to examine whether each of three forms of parental responses to their offspring’s negative...

Over 20 years ago, Eisenberg and colleagues (1998a, 1998b) published a landmark article focusing on the socialization of children's emotion and self-regulation, including emotion regulation. In this Special Issue, our goal was to compile current evidence delineating the impact of emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) on children's emotion...

Previous research has shown that children’s home environment plays an important role in children’s early language skills. Yet, few researchers have examined the unique role of family-level factors (SES, household chaos) on children’s learning, or focused on the longitudinal processes that might explain their relations to children’s early language s...

Empathy has been a key focus of social, developmental, and affective neuroscience for some time. However, research using neural measures to study empathy in response to social victimization is sparse, particularly for young children. In the present study, 58 children’s (White, non-Hispanic; five to nine years old) mu suppression was measured using...

Without a doubt, parents play a critical role in socializing moral development in their children. This handbook provides a collection of state-of-the-art theories and research on the important role that parents play in moral development. The contributors take a comprehensive, yet nuanced approach to considering the links between parenting and diffe...

The structure of executive function (EF), as it pertains to distinct “hot” (affectively salient) and “cool” (affectively neutral) dimensions, in early childhood is not well understood. Given that the neural circuitry underlying EF may become increasingly differentiated with development and enriched experiences, EF may become more dissociable into h...

The goal of this study was to understand the role young children's sleep plays in the association between their family environment and academic achievement (AA) by examining sleep as a moderator between home chaos (chaos) and children's AA. We examined this question in a sample of 103 kindergarteners and 1st graders. In the fall, parents reported o...

Objective Children's effortful control and impulsivity are important predictors of the personality trait, ego‐resiliency (i.e., resiliency). Most researchers have not considered the fact that effortful control and impulsivity share substantial conceptual and empirical overlap, yet they also have been shown to be distinct. We tested a bifactor model...

Generally, research on children's anger and prosocial outcomes has been inconsistent, perhaps because researchers have overlooked nuances in children's anger, such as whether the emotion is situational versus dispositional or is in response to blocked goals versus violations of moral principles (e.g., unfairness). Additionally, mixed findings may b...

The associations between children's (N = 301) observed expression of positive and negative emotion in school and symptoms of psychological maladjustment (i.e., depressive and externalizing symptoms) were examined from kindergarten to first grade. Positive and negative emotional expressivity levels were observed in school settings, and teachers repo...

Recently there has been an increasing appreciation of the role of emotion and its regulation in children's socioemotional functioning. Investigators have varied in their definitions of emotion regulation and related constructs. Different conceptualizations of emotion‐related regulation are discussed, and the usefulness of examining top‐down self‐re...

This study evaluated the association between children’s (N = 301) self-regulation and math and reading achievement in kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using the Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders (HTKS) task (involving control of gross body movements) and a computerized continuous performance task (CPT; assessi...

The goal of the study was to examine whether target children’s temperamental negative emotional expressivity (NEE) and effortful control in the fall of kindergarten predicted academic adjustment in the spring and whether a classmate’s NEE and effortful control moderated these relations. Target children’s NEE and effortful control were measured in t...

Using data from a study of 140 preschool children (39% female), we examined the relations between direct assessments of emotion knowledge and naturalistic observations of behavior during free‐play periods, and tested parent‐ and teacher‐reported effortful control as a moderator of these relations. Basic emotion recognition was unrelated to social p...

Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) may confer infant susceptibility to the postpartum environment. Among infants with higher RSA, there may be a positive relation between depressive symptoms across the first 6 months postpartum (PPD) and later behavior problems, and toddlers’ dysregulation during mother–child interactions may partially expl...

The potential mediating roles of parental warmth and inductive discipline on the relations of parental emotion regulation strategies to children’s prosocial behavior were examined in this study. Sixty-four parents of preschoolers (50% females) completed questionnaires assessing their own regulation practices (i.e., Cognitive Reappraisal, Expressive...

The purpose of the present study was to predict young children’s shyness from both internal/biological (i.e., resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) and external (i.e., neighborhood quality) factors. Participants were 180 children at 42 (Time 1; T1), 72 (T2), and 84 (T3) months of age. RSA data were obtained at T1 during a neutral film in the l...

We examined individual trajectories, across four time points, of children’s (N = 301) expression of negative emotion in classroom settings and whether these trajectories predicted their observed school engagement, teacher-reported academic skills, and passage comprehension assessed with a standardized measure in first grade. In latent growth curve...

Research Findings: The primary goal of this study was to determine whether sleep duration moderates the relations of 2 dimensions of children’s temperament—shyness and negative emotion—to academic achievement. In the autumn, parents and teachers reported on kindergartners’ and 1st graders’ (N = 103) shyness and negative emotion and research assista...

Objective: We examined the relations of children's (N = 301) observed expression of negative and positive emotion in classes or non-classroom school contexts (i.e., lunch and recess) to school adjustment from kindergarten to first grade. Method: Naturalistic observations of children's emotional expressivity were collected, as were teachers' repo...

Guided by the person by environment framework, the primary goal of this study was to determine whether classroom chaos moderated the relation between effortful control and kindergarteners' school adjustment. Classroom observers reported on children's (N = 301) effortful control in the fall. In the spring, teachers reported on classroom chaos and sc...

In this two-wave longitudinal study, concurrent and longitudinal relations among teacher-reported shyness, peer acceptance, and academic achievement were examined (Ns = 162 and 155; and Msage = 6.09 and 7.07 years). Concurrently, at both times, shyness was negatively related to peer acceptance and academic achievement, and peer acceptance was posit...

This study evaluated the association between effortful control in kindergarten and academic achievement one year later (N = 301), and whether teacher–student closeness and conflict in kindergarten mediated the association. Parents, teachers, and observers reported on children’s effortful control, and teachers reported on their perceived levels of c...

Research findings: Higher positive expressivity during lunch/recess compared to positive expressivity in the classroom was associated with lower teacher-student conflict, externalizing behaviors, and depressive symptoms. In addition, overall positive emotional expressivity predicted lower externalizing behaviors as well as lower depressive and anx...

The current study examined whether an important temperamental characteristic, effortful control (EC), moderates the associations between dispositional anger and sadness, attention biases, and social functioning in a group of preschool-aged children (N = 77). Preschoolers' attentional biases toward angry and sad facial expressions were assessed usin...

The aim of the current study was to address the potential moderating roles of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; baseline and suppression) and participant sex in the relation between parents' marital conflict and young adults' internet addiction. Participants included 105 (65 men) Chinese young adults who reported on their internet addiction and th...

There is increasing interest in understanding ways to foster young children's prosocial behavior (i.e., voluntary acts to benefit another). We begin this review by differentiating between types of prosocial behavior, empathy, and sympathy. We argue that sympathy and some types of prosocial behaviors are most likely intrinsically motivated, whereas...

Children's prosocial behavior and personal distress are likely affected by children's temperament as well as parenting quality. In this study, we examined bidirectional relations from age 30 to 42 months between children's (N = 218) prosocial or self-focused (presumably distressed) reactions to a relative stranger's distress and both supportive emo...

Moral emotions and behavior are thought to play an important role in individuals’ well-being. We begin this chapter by defining moral behavior and differentiating between the empathy-related responses of empathy, sympathy, and personal distress. Next, we discuss associations between individuals’ emotions and empathy-related responding (a broad term...

Chapter 2 investigates the relation between self-regulation and both internalizing and externalizing problems in children and adolescents. Although the association between children’s self-regulation and externalizing and internalizing symptoms has been established, research on co-morbidity is scarce; moreover, causal models delineating underlying r...

This article looks closely at two types of errors children have been shown to make with universal quantification—Exhaustive Pairing (EP) errors and Underexhaustive errors—and asks whether they reflect the same underlying phenomenon. In a large-scale, longitudinal study, 140 children were tested 4 times from ages 4 to 7 on sentences involving the un...

This study was presented at SRCD 2017. Mediation paths were not examined at that time.

This study evaluated whether positive and anger emotional frequency (the proportion of instances an emotion was observed) and intensity (the strength of an emotion when it was observed) uniquely predicted social relationships among kindergarteners (N = 301). Emotions were observed as naturally occurring at school in the fall term and multiple repor...

Previous research suggests that mothers’ and fathers’ parenting may be differentially influenced by marital and child factors within the family. Some research indicates that marital stress is more influential in fathers’ than mothers’ parenting, whereas other research shows that children's difficult behavior preferentially affects mothers’ parentin...

The purpose of the study was to evaluate bidirectional associations between peer acceptance and both emotion and effortful control during kindergarten (N = 301). In both the fall and spring semesters, we obtained peer nominations of acceptance, measures of positive and negative emotion based on naturalistic observations in school (i.e., classroom,...

"Providing an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers, this book investigates positive psychology and relationships theory and research across a range of settings and life stages—intimate, work, educational, senior/retirement, and in the context of diversity. Nearly universally, relationships are a key source of what we all seek in life: h...

Because motivations for prosocial actions typically are unclear, sometimes even to actors but especially for observers, it is difficult to study prosocial motivation. This article reviews research that provides evidence regarding children's motives for prosocial behaviors. First, we present a heuristic model to classify motives on the dimension of...

Research has demonstrated that emotions expressed in parent-child relationships are associated with children’s school success. Yet the types of emotional expressions, and the mechanisms by which emotional expressions are linked with children’s success in school, are unclear. In the present article, we focused on negative emotion reciprocity in pare...

The goal of this work was to examine the complex interrelation of mothers’ early gentle control and sensitivity in predicting children’s effortful control (EC) and academic functioning. Maternal gentle control, maternal sensitivity, and children’s EC were measured when children were 18, 30, and 42 months of age (T1, T2, and T3, respectively), and m...

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations of children’s emotion knowledge (and its components) and socially appropriate behavior to peer likability in a sample of Italian preschool children at two time-points. At both Time 1 (T1; n = 46 boys, 42 girls) and a year later at Time 2 (T2; n = 26 boys, 22 girls), children’s emotion kn...

Poor sleep is thought to interfere with children’s learning and academic achievement (AA). However, existing research and theory indicate there are factors that may mitigate the academic risk associated with poor sleep. The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating role of children’s effortful control (EC) on the relation between sleep an...

This study evaluated direct relations of both kindergarteners' (N = 301) naturalistically observed emotion in 2 different school contexts and early kindergarten verbal competence to academic adjustment (i.e., standardized measures of academic achievement, teacher-reported academic skills, teacher-reported and observed school engagement) and if thes...

We contribute to the literature on the relations of temperament to externalizing and internalizing problems by considering parental emotional expressivity and child gender as moderators of such relations and examining prediction of pure and co-occurring problem behaviors during early to middle adolescence using bifactor models (which provide unique...

The goal of the current study was to examine relations from temperamental approach reactivity (i.e., impulsivity, frustration, and positive affect) and effortful control (EC; 42 and 54 months) to teachers’ reports of academic achievement and popularity (72 and 84 months). Frustration was positively related to achievement and negatively related to p...

At approximately 30, 42, and 54 months of age ( N = 231), the relations among children's externalizing symptoms, intrusive maternal parenting, and children's effortful control (EC) were examined. Both intrusive parenting and low EC have been related to psychopathology, but children's externalizing problems and low EC might affect the quality of par...

The current study examined the role of naturally-occurring negative and positive emotion expressivity in kindergarten and children's effortful control (EC) on their relationships with teachers, academic engagement, and problems behaviors in school. Further, the potential moderating role of EC on these important school outcomes was assessed. Emotion...

The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating role of internalising negative emotionality (i.e., anxious, concerned, and embarrassed displays) in the association between children's self-regulation and social adjustment. Seventy-four Italian children (44 girls, 30 boys; M age = 35.05 months, SD = 3.57) were assessed using two self-regulati...

Effortful control is associated with fewer aggressive-antisocial behaviors (AAB) and depressive symptoms (DEP), but impulsivity may moderate these relations. However, few researchers have considered the effects of AAB-DEP co-occurrence. A multi-informant, multimethod approach assessed 5- to 10-year-olds' effortful control and impulsivity and, 5-6 y...

Relations between children’s (n = 213) mother-reported effortful control components (attention focusing, attention shifting, inhibitory control at 42 months; activational control at 72 months) and mother-reported shyness trajectories across 42, 54, 72, and 84 months of age were examined. In growth models, shyness decreased. Inhibitory control and a...

The purpose of this study was to assess whether observed emotional frequency (the proportion of instances an emotion was observed) and intensity (the strength of an emotion when it was observed) uniquely predicted kindergartners' (N = 301) internalizing and externalizing problems. Analyses were tested in a structural equation modeling (SEM) framewo...

The mediating and moderating roles of self-regulation in the associations of dispositional anger and fear to later conduct and anxiety symptoms were tested. Mothers and teachers rated children's anger and fear at 54 months (N = 191), and mothers reported on children's symptoms of anxiety and conduct disorders at 72 and 84 months (Ns = 169 and 144)....

Effortful control, defined as the ability to voluntary inhibit a dominant response and to activate a subdominant response, is believed to play an important role in children's development. In this essay, we distinguish between effortful control and aspects of control that are involuntary (i.e., reactive). The development of effortful control is summ...

Children's observed effortful control (EC) at 30, 42, and 54 months ( n = 145) was predicted from the interaction between mothers' observed parenting with their 30-month-olds and three variants of the solute carrier family C6, member 3 ( SLC6A3 ) dopamine transporter gene (single nucleotide polymorphisms in intron8 and intron13, and a 40 base pair...

We tested whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity in response to each of three self-regulation tasks (bird and dragon; knock-tap; and gift wrap) would predict self-regulation performance in a sample of 101 preschool-age children (M age = 4.49, SD = .64). While controlling for baseline RSA, decreases in RSA from bird and dragon to knoc...

This study examined longitudinal associations between specific parenting factors and delay inhibition in socioeconomically disadvantaged preschoolers. At Time 1, parents and 2- to 4-year-old children (mean age = 3.21 years; N = 247) participated in a videotaped parent–child free play session, and children completed delay inhibition tasks (gift dela...

Although conflict is a normative part of parent–adolescent relationships, conflicts that are long or highly negative are likely to be detrimental to these relationships and to youths’ development. In the present article, sequential analyses of data from 138 parent–adolescent dyads (adolescents’ mean age was 13.44, SD = 1.16; 52 % girls, 79 % non-Hi...

The goal of this study was to examine physiological and environmental predictors of children's sympathy (an emotional response consisting of feelings of concern or sorrow for others who are distressed or in need) and whether temperamental effortful control mediated these relations. Specifically, in a study of 192 children (23% Hispanic; 54% male),...

We used sex, observed parenting quality at 18 months, and three variants of the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (Val158Met [rs4680], intron1 [rs737865], and 3'-untranslated region [rs165599]) to predict mothers' reports of inhibitory and attentional control (assessed at 42, 54, 72, and 84 months) and internalizing symptoms (assessed at 24, 30, 42...

The goal of this study was to examine various forms of coping across the transition to adolescence, with a focus on interindividual (correlational) consistency of coping and mean-level changes in coping. Adolescents’ emotional coping, problem solving, positive cognitive restructuring, avoidance, and support seeking in response to everyday stressors...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether dispositional sadness predicted children's prosocial behavior and if sympathy mediated this relation. Constructs were measured when children (n = 256 at time 1) were 18, 30, and 42 months old. Mothers and non-parental caregivers rated children's sadness; mothers, caregivers, and fathers rated childre...