About this session

Saturday, 12:10 PM - 1:40 PM

Biopsychosocial Predictors of Hot and Cool Executive Functions in Early Childhood

It is widely recognized that executive functions have separable but correlated dimensions elicited in affectively "hot" and cognitively "cool" or affectively neutral situational contexts (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Zelazo & Carlson, 2012). Hot executive functions involve suppression of automatic motivational or affective responses to appetitive cues, whereas cool executive functions involve interference control with relatively abstract and symbolic processes (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Nigg, 2017). Although some studies have found that a unidimensional model better represents executive functions' factor structure (Allan & Lonigan, 2011; Masten et al., 2012), studies that have differentiated hot and cool dimensions have found their distinct rates of growth (Hongwanishkul et al., 2005; O’Toole et al., 2017) and prediction of cognitive, academic, and socioemotional outcomes (Backer-Grøndahl et al., 2019; Brock et al., 2009; Wang & Ji, 2024). Evidence of their distinct antecedents, however, has been mixed, so it is unclear how these executive function skills are promoted in early childhood when self-regulatory skills improve most rapidly (Nigg, 2017). Previous studies, for example, found hot executive functions were negatively related to poverty-related stressors (Duckworth & Steinberg, 2015; Sturge-Apple et al., 2016), whereas other studies found that socioeconomic stressors were only related to cool executive functions (Baker et al., 2021; Finch & Obradovic, 2018). The proposed paper symposium organizes four studies of hot and cool executive functions and their predictors across multiple levels of analysis from socioeconomic to temperamental and neurobiological factors. Identifying predictors of distinct types and dimensions of executive functions in early childhood can clarify their development and malleability to socialization and intervention.

Paper #1
Title	Components of Socioeconomic Status Differentially Predict Development of Cool Versus Hot Executive Function in Children
Presenting author	Zachary Demko, University of Iowa, United States

Paper #2
Title	The Association Between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Executive Function in Childhood: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis
Presenting author	Alexis Hosch, University of Iowa, United States

Paper #3
Title	12-month Predictors of 24-month Executive Function
Presenting author	Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Tech, United States

Paper #4
Title	Socioeconomic and Cardiac Autonomic Predictors of Hot and Cool Executive Functions in Preschoolers
Presenting author	Daniel Ewon Choe, Ph.D., University of California Davis, United States

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Session chairs
Daniel Ewon Choe, Ph.D., University of California Davis, United States; Isaac T. Petersen, Ph.D., , United States

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