Differences in terminology

Self-control is a construct often used in the context of social influences, although biological factors have been examined in some research (Beaver et al., 2007). Effortful control and executive functions both include attention and inhibitory control. Effortful control is a broad measure of temperament and is usually measured using parent-reported or self-reported questionnaires. Executive functions are a set of cognitive capacities typically measured with tasks (Zhou et al., 2012). Empirical work has shown that there is a strong overlap between the two constructs (Bridgett, Oddi, Laake, Murdock, & Bachmann, 2013). Executive function and effortful control measures are sometimes used interchangeably with self-regulation but are subservient to it, with self-regulation being the broader construct (Hofmann et al., 2012; Rueda et al., 2005).

In adults, emotion and cognitive control processes are intertwined (Zelazo, Qu, & Kesek, 2010). Emotions help to narrow and prioritize cognitive process options (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). “Top-down” emotional control processes are housed with other cognitive control capacities in the prefrontal lobe (Ochsner & Gross, 2008). For example, the dorsolateral and posterior PFC directs the brain's attention to emotional appraisal stimuli and helps the individual keep reappraisal goals in mind; at the same time it also directs working memory and attention-shifting (Ochsner, Silvers, & Buhle, 2012). The ventrolateral PFC houses inhibitory control. This area of the brain also helps an individual to deliberately select new emotional reappraisal responses (Ochsner et al., 2012). While there is debate in the literature as to whether emotion regulation is an executive function, following in the vein of Blair, Ochsner, and others (Blair, Zelazo, & Greenberg, 2005; Ochsner & Gross, 2008; Ochsner et al., 2012; Schroeder & Kelley, 2010) we have included emotion regulation as part of our overall construct in recognition that emotion regulation and executive functioning intersect in important ways and use similar pathways in the brain (Ochsner et al., 2012). In the parenting literature, it is typical to study either maternal emotion control or other cognitive control components, but not both components in the same study. Results from this review of literature will be instructive as to any differences in association between emotion regulation and parenting and other cognitive control capacities and parenting.

As part of our overview of these capacities, we have also included studies of maternal ADHD because of the strong relationship between ADHD and executive dysfunction (Barkley & Murphy, 2011; Nigg et al., 2005) and emotion dysregulation (Reimherr et al., 2005). For example, adolescents with ADHD perform more poorly on inhibitory control and attention-shifting tasks than healthy controls (Qian, Shuai, Chan, Qian, & Wang, 2013). Among adults, those with ADHD also perform more poorly on general executive functioning tasks than adults without ADHD (Nigg et al., 2005) and this executive dysfunction results in impairment in daily life activities important to parenting including managing time, organizing and problem-solving, self-discipline, and more (Barkley & Murphy, 2011). Multiple studies have linked adult ADHD to emotional dysregulation (Reimherr et al., 2005, 2007; Rösler et al., 2010), with the potential to undermine effective parenting.

There is much discussion regarding the relationship between cognitive control capacities and general intelligence. Emotion and cognitive control capacities are a form of fluid intelligence, but they may actually predict parenting behavior more than general intelligence can because they support parents’ ability to use what they know rather than simply reflecting one's knowledge (Galinsky, 2010). While cognitive control capacities appear to be related to general measures of intelligence (Engle & Kane, 2004; Sanz de Acedo Lizarraga, Sanz de Acedo Baquedano, & Villanueva, 2012), they are not the same – individuals may score high on intelligence tests and low on executive functioning tasks (Cornoldi, Giofrè, Calgaro, & Stupiggia, 2013). However, in order to isolate the effects on parenting of emotion and cognitive control capacities from those of general intelligence, it is important to estimate effects that overlap with and are independent from variance in fluid intelligence.¹

Negative parenting

In the literature on maternal emotion and cognitive control capacities and parenting, negative parenting is one of the most studied outcomes. Relationships between low maternal emotion/ cognitive control and high scores on negative parenting practices such as harsh and rigid discipline have been found in studies specifically looking at maternal emotion control, effortful control, executive functioning, and inattentive ADHD. Lower maternal emotion/cognitive control is associated with more ineffective discipline strategies (Babinski et al., 2012; Banks, Ninowski, Mash, & Semple, 2008; Chen & Johnston, 2007; Deater-Deckard, Sewell, Petrill, & Thompson, 2010; Deater-Deckard, Wang, Chen, & Bell, 2012; Harvey, Danforth, Eberhardt McGee, Ulaszek, & Friedman, 2003; Lorber, 2012; Lorber & O'Leary, 2005; Mokrova, O'Brien, Calkins, & Keane, 2010; Murray & Johnston, 2006), a more controlling parenting style (Martini, Root, & Jenkins, 2004), negative reactions to children's emotions (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, & Reiser, 2007), more maternal rejection (Sarıtaş, Grusec, & Gençöz, 2013), and general negative parenting (Bridgett, Laake, Gartstein, & Dorn, 2013; Chronis-Tuscano, Raggi, et al., 2008; Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2011). The relationship between low maternal emotion/cognitive control and increased negative parenting held true in studies in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence.

Of interest in this body of studies are two that assessed the impact of treatment (5 weeks of OROS Methylphenidate treatment) on maternal ADHD symptoms and parenting. Chronis-Tuscano, Seymour, et al. (2008) and Chronis-Tuscano et al. (2010) randomly assigned 23 mothers with ADHD of children 6–12 years old to receive treatment or to be in a no-treatment control group. In the 2008 study, treatment effectively reduced ADHD symptoms and mothers who received the treatment also reported using less corporal punishment (d = 0.42) and inconsistent discipline (0.71) at the follow-up compared to baseline. Medium to large medication effects were found for improvements in self-reported positive parenting. However, while the parent's perception of their parenting improved after ADHD treatment in the 2008 study, in the 2010 study which incorporated observational parenting measures, treatment reduced parent ADHD symptoms but was not significantly related to changes in observed parenting behavior.

Child maltreatment, including abuse and neglect, is an extreme form of negative parenting. Low emotion control and overall lower self-control (Henschel, Bruin, & Möhler, 2013) put a woman at greater risk for maltreating her children of all ages. In a study of mothers with children 5–14 years, Skowron, Kozlowski, and Pincus (2010) found that, after controlling for family SES, mothers with poor emotion regulation were at higher risk for engaging in child maltreatment. The reverse was also true; mothers scored low on child maltreatment risk if they had better emotion regulation. Fontaine and Nolin (2012) conducted a study of ‘hot’ executive functioning (operationalized as decision-making and perspective-taking) in parents who had been accused of child abuse or neglect and compared them to a control group of parents. The researchers found that parents who had been accused of child abuse had significantly lower decision-making and perspective-taking scores compared to the control group (Fontaine & Nolin, 2012).

Of the studies that included measures of negative parenting, 10 included both observational and self-report measures of parenting which is ideal for measuring parenting. However, most studies were cross-sectional; when they were longitudinal the follow-up periods provided only a short-term assessment and did not address long-term trends. One-third of these studies did not include sufficient controls (e.g., neither covariates for maternal fluid intelligence or family sociodemographic factors).

Positive parenting

In this section, we include 21 studies on aspects of positive parenting, whether the ultimate results were more positive (e.g. involved parenting) or less positive (e.g. distant or less-involved parenting). Several studies explored aspects of maternal emotion and cognitive control and a range of positive parenting measures. Across the life course of childhood, higher maternal emotion control and cognitive control is associated with supportive responses to child's negative emotion (Hughes & Gullone, 2010; Valiente et al., 2007), increased maternal sensitivity and warmth (Chico, Gonzalez, Ali, Steiner, & Fleming, 2014; Gonzalez, Jenkins, Steiner, & Fleming, 2012), more affectional expression (Wietecha et al., 2012), more time spent on caregiving activities (Bridgett et al., 2011) and a higher sense of parenting confidence (Wietecha et al., 2012). On the other hand, lower maternal emotion and cognitive control is associated with less monitoring (Babinski et al., 2012; Murray & Johnston, 2006), less maternal involvement (Boutwell & Beaver, 2010; Chen & Johnston, 2007; Chronis-Tuscano, Raggi, et al., 2008; Mokrova et al., 2010), less parental satisfaction (Watkins & Mash, 2009), and less generally positive parenting (Chronis-Tuscano, Raggi, et al., 2008; Psychogiou, Daley, Thompson, & Sonuga-Barke, 2007). Of the studies that included positive parenting outcomes, about half of these studies did not include covariates for maternal fluid intelligence nor family sociodemographic factors such as maternal education and household income.

A functional imaging (fMRI) study of mothers’ emotion/cognitive control and sensitivity to their toddlers demonstrates that different brain regions are activated in mothers who were coded as intrusive or sensitive to their infants’ behaviors. Among mothers coded as sensitive, regions of the brain associated with emotion regulation, inhibitory control, and decision-making were activated in response to one's own infant's cry. Conversely, in mothers coded as intrusive, regions of the brain were activated that are associated with emotion recognition and empathy for others when witnessing pain. The authors concluded that the areas of brain activation indicate that sensitive mothers are more able to regulate their response to their children's cues while intrusive mothers are more reactive to their child's distress, leading to their over-involvement. Maternal depression was controlled for, but sociodemographic factors and fluid intelligence were not accounted for in this study (Musser, Kaiser-Laurent, & Ablow, 2012).

In summary, across the various components of maternal emotion and cognitive control capacity, the link with positive and negative parenting outcomes is similar. Mothers who have better emotion regulation and executive functioning are more likely to engage in positive parenting and less likely to engage in harsh parenting compared to mothers with poor emotion regulation and executive function deficits. See Fig. 1 for a summary of studies stratified by positive and negative parenting with MQS ranges.

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Fig. 1

At-a-glance: studies of maternal emotion and cognitive control capacity and parenting.

Development of emotion and cognitive control capacities

The development of emotion and cognitive control capacities is complex and the timing of development varies between components. These capacities are primarily housed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which develops over the first three decades of life (Niendam et al., 2012). Emotion and cognitive control in childhood is predictive of adult emotion and cognitive control (Mandell & Ward, 2011; Murray et al., 2006). Higher order cognitive processes build on lower level processes (Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, & Shonkoff, 2006). If brain circuits for lower level processes do not fully develop during sensitive periods, then the development of higher order brain circuits will be compromised (Knudsen et al., 2006). As the child develops, brain circuits are more difficult to modify and improvement becomes increasingly difficult in adulthood (Knudsen et al., 2006).

Brain imaging studies have mapped out a superordinate cognitive control network that includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex, supporting all of the emotion and cognitive control capacities (Niendam et al., 2012). Neural communication between the different parts of the network may be as or more important to optimal emotion and cognitive control performance as the functioning and structure of the individual brain areas (Barbey et al., 2012; Niendam et al., 2012).

Genetics, the social environment, environmental toxins, brain injury and disease all influence emotion and cognitive control development. The PFC is an area of the brain that shows strong genetic influence on structure and function (Friedman et al., 2008; Thompson et al., 2001), and emotion and cognitive control capacities have been found to be among the most heritable of cognitive processes (Beaver et al., 2007; Friedman et al., 2008; Thompson et al., 2001). Individuals who are genetically at risk for poor cognitive control outcomes and who also are exposed to environmental stressors like harsh parenting, family chaos, and low SES are especially vulnerable for poor cognitive control functioning (Berry, Deater-Deckard, McCartney, Wang, & Petrill, 2013; Deater-Deckard, 2014; Hughes, 2011). Importantly, while emotion and cognitive control capacities are highly heritable, they are modifiable and there is increasing evidence of neural plasticity and neurogenesis in the frontal lobe of middle-age and older adults and even improvements in response to experience (Carlson et al., 2009; Dahlin, Nyberg, Backman, & Neely, 2008).

Intra-individual variability of emotion and cognitive control capacity

Various factors are associated with fluctuation in an individual's emotion and cognitive control capacities. Individuals may appear to have deficits when they are suffering from extreme stress (Luethi, Meier, & Sandi, 2009; Lupien et al., 2009), sadness or loneliness (Engle & Kane, 2004; Kanske & Kotz, 2012), fatigue and sleep deprivation (Engle & Kane, 2004; Horne, 2012), or when they are not physically or nutritionally fit (Blanton, Green, & Kretsch, 2013; Francis & Stevenson, 2013). Adele Diamond noted that the “prefrontal cortex is the first to suffer, and suffer disproportionately, if something is not right in your life” (Diamond, 2013, p. 153).

Fatigue is linked to impaired attention control (Engle & Kane, 2004; Horne, 2012). Stress is also a factor in emotion and cognitive control performance. Adults with normal to high cognitive control are better at coping with stress (Bakker, Ormel, Verhulst, & Oldehinkel, 2011). But when stress does arise, it has been shown to increase distractibility and reduce working memory and attention control (Luethi et al., 2009; Lupien et al., 2009). Adolescents’ prefrontal cortex functions may be especially sensitive to the effects of stress (Lupien et al., 2009), putting adolescent parents at particular risk for impaired cognitive and emotional control functioning in high-stress situations (see Chico et al., 2014).

Can adult emotion and cognitive control capacity be modified?

Currently, we know little about the plasticity of emotion and cognitive control in adults other than that they are mutable to a degree. There is some evidence that cognitive behavioral training and possibly mindfulness training improve adult cognitive control (Diamond, 2013; Melby-Lervag & Hulme, 2013; Ochsner & Gross, 2008; Shipstead et al., 2012; Sibinga et al., 2011), but retraining neural systems is effortful and highly domain specific. Initial training gains often do not hold up in the long-term (Melby-Lervag & Hulme, 2013), and even with success in retraining one domain, it is difficult to generalize these gains to other domains and situations.

For adults with ADHD, treating the symptoms with medication has been shown to improve performance on executive functioning tasks (Faraone et al., 2005). However, improved parenting skills may not necessarily immediately follow improved cognitive control due to habits that have been developed over time or poor parenting knowledge (Chronis-Tuscano, Seymour, et al., 2008; Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2010). Parent skills training or other interventions may be necessary to improve parenting and ultimately child outcomes, but as suggested earlier, the failure of parenting programs to attend to underlying emotional and cognitive control capacities may contribute to their uneven effectiveness.

Based on the literature available at this time, intervention strategies that are most likely to succeed in parents with emotion regulation or executive function deficits are those that focus on reducing factors that negatively impact the day-to-day functioning of emotion and cognitive control combined with parent skills training that incorporates cognitive behavioral training.

Gaps in the literature and future directions

There are several gaps in the existing literature that are necessary to address in future research in order to move the study of parental emotion and cognitive control forward and to enhance strategies for improving parenting. At the forefront of the discussion are measurement and methodological issues in existing studies, consensus on definitions between and across constructs, and the contexts in which studies have been conducted up to this point. Below we discuss each of these issues in more detail.

Measurement

Measurement of cognitive control capacities presents a challenge for interpreting studies. Correlations between tasks and self-report instruments, or between different tasks purportedly measuring the same construct, are generally modest (Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2012; Decker, Hill, & Dean, 2007; see Wostmann et al., 2013 for an exception to this in the measurement of inhibitory control and Belendiuk, Clarke, Chronis, & Raggi, 2007 for a discussion of correlation in measurement of adult ADHD). For example, self-report instruments can be problematic because those with higher executive dys-function may be less attuned to their own emotion and cognitive control capacity and they may self-rate their emotion and cognitive control capacity as high but perform poorly on neuropsychological tasks (Sølsnes, Skranes, Brubakk, & Løhaugen, 2014). Thus, the use of self-report alone may mask the true impact of emotion and cognitive control capacities on parenting and other outcomes. On the other hand, most tasks used to measure cognitive control capacities are not ecologically-based and may not reflect “real world” functioning (Barkley & Murphy, 2011; Torralva, Gleichgerrcht, Lischinsky, Roca, & Manes, 2013). As an example, some studies of ADHD patients have indicated that the subjects perform within the normal range on classic executive functioning tasks but have real-life difficulty with emotion and cognitive control (Torralva et al., 2013). This may be partly because the very nature of classic executive functioning tasks may take some of the executive functioning itself out of the task due to the very regulated way the tasks are administered (i.e. the assessor provides the structure, organization, and guidance for how to complete the task; Daniels, Toth, & Jacoby, 2006). There is also a lack of clarity about what is actually being measured by a given instrument (Decker et al., 2007) as most tasks measure multiple components (Barkley & Murphy, 2011; Best & Miller, 2010).

Methodological issues

Beyond the measurement issues there are also several methodological shortcomings in the current literature base. Most studies have been cross-sectional; longitudinal studies are necessary to establish temporal order and to improve our understanding of possible changes over time. Sampling is another issue in most maternal cognition and parenting studies. The majority of studies currently available use a convenience sampling approach. Randomization may not be possible or appropriate in many studies, but stratifying on such factors as family SES, neighborhood and household factors, and other sociodemographic factors may be useful when randomization is not realistic.

Consensus on the definition

Another current gap in the literature concerns the definition of emotion and cognitive control capacities. We have chosen in this review to use a broad definition that encompasses several constructs, but there are nuanced differences that may be important to research and intervention science. The lack of consensus on the definition both within and between fields creates chaos in the literature and unnecessary redundancy when research is being conducted across fields but using different names for essentially the same constructs. Further research is needed such as the work by Bridgett, Oddi, et al. (2013) that characterized the association and overlap between executive functioning and effortful control. Additionally, research is necessary to more fully answer the question as to whether emotion and cognitive control capacities are a unified construct or a set of independent components (Best & Miller, 2010).

Context

Most studies in this review were conducted in low to moderate risk communities. As SES appears to intersect with maternal emotion and cognitive control and parenting, conducting research in high-risk communities should be a priority. While it is likely that some aspects of the relationship between maternal emotion and cognitive control and parenting are invariant across cultures and socioeconomic contexts, other aspects may be influenced by the context.

An unexplored area of research involves investigating family and community-level characteristics that mediate or moderate the relationship between maternal emotion and cognitive regulation and parenting. Positive environments may help to compensate for lower maternal emotion/cognitive control and help a mother engage in better parenting than she otherwise would. Some potential mediators include social support, couple relationship quality, family connectedness, and family routines. Not only may these variables serve as mediators, but they may have an important impact on the development and intergenerational transmission of emotion and cognitive control. It is also important to understand the interplay between emotion/cognitive control, attitudes, and behaviors; the role of stress and allostatic load on cognition and parenting behavior; and how cognitions, emotions, and behaviors relate.

An additional need for theoretical development and research is to better ‘situate’ emotion regulation and cognitive control capacities in the overall processes and skills that comprise effective parenting and household management. Efforts to promote effective parenting can be advanced by understanding how to address emotion and cognitive control capacities in parenting education and interventions, but they are only one aspect of the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and support needed for mothers to effectively parent their children. In the studies that were assessed in this review, the majority attempted to address the complexities of parenting by controlling for family SES and maternal and child psychopathology; significant associations between cognitive capacities and parenting were found both with and without these controls. However, additional analyses are necessary to understand how these factors intersect with maternal cognition and parenting.

Funding for Crandall's initial doctoral training: T232MH019545 NIMH Child Mental Health Services and Service System Research. Deater-Deckard was supported by NIMH grant number MH 99437. We express our appreciation to Tamar Mendelson for her comments on a draft of this manuscript.