Effects of parental sensitivity in different contexts on children's hot and cool effortful control

To thrive as an individual and within society, children need to develop the ability to control their behavior. Using a twin design, we estimated the relative influence of genetic, shared, and unique environmental factors on hot and cool effortful control (EC). Furthermore, we investigated whether parental sensitivity in a play, task, or discipline context when the children were on average 3.78 years old, was differentially related to children's hot and cool EC 1 year later (M_age 4.77 years). We included 476 children from 238 twin pairs (48% boys, 58% monozygotic) and their primary parent. Hot EC (delay of gratification) was measured with the marshmallow test and cool EC (response inhibition) was measured with a stop-signal task. The behavioral genetics analyses showed that individual differences in hot and cool EC were mostly explained by unique environmental factors, whereas their association was mostly explained by shared environmental factors. Controlling for sensitivity in the other contexts, task sensitivity contributed to the prediction of cool EC, and sensitive discipline contributed to both cool and hot EC. Play sensitivity did not contribute to the prediction of hot or cool EC over and above parental sensitivity in the other contexts. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the unique and shared antecedents of hot and cool EC, suggesting parental sensitive discipline as a focus for preventive interventions targeting both hot and cool EC. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).