婴幼儿自我调节的发展机制

婴幼儿自我调节的概念结构与发展机制至今无统一定论。本文作者在回顾关于婴幼儿自我调节的文献时发现该领域出现过两次不同研究取向的整合：第一次整合是包含气质-行为领域的整合以及纳入生理调节与情绪调节的整合, 第二次整合是行为-气质研究与认知领域研究的整合。本文总结两次研究取向的整合后提出了以生理-情绪-注意调节为基础、认知-气质-行为调节为核心的新的婴幼儿自我调节发展模型, 为该领域的研究方向提供了理论基础。

The developmental mechanisms of self-regulation in young children

Self-regulation is important for young children considering its profound relations with later mental health and social and cognitive competence. Although psychologists pay much attention to self-regulation for more than 100 years with the aim to investigate individual’s optimal development, the structure of self-regulation and its developmental mechanisms in early ages are still unclear. Following the chronological sequence of the literature, this review shows that the different research perspectives on self-regulation in young children have integrated twice: (1) From 2000 to 2010, researchers attempted to integrate several mainstream perspectives of self-regulation in last century. For example, Kochanska’s model (2006) focused on combining the viewpoints of temperamental and behavioral self-regulation; Calkins’s model (2002) focused on combining the viewpoints of physiological, attentional and emotional self-regulation; and Feldman (2009) constructed a multilevel interdisciplinary model of self-regulation from infancy to preschool ages. (2) In the latest decade, psychologists started to call for the fusion of two research directions and investigate young children’s self-regulation comprehensively. Those two directions are temperamental mechanism of self-regulation—effortful control and “higher-ordered” cognitive mechanism of self-regulation—executive function. After summarizing the previous representative models, the current study further presents a developmental hierarchical-integrative perspective of self-regulation in young children: a physiology-emotion-attention-based and temperament-behavior-cognition-modulated model.