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Temperament Predicts Processing Speed in Low Socioeconomic Status Rural Preschoolers
Author(s) -
Hermida Maria Julia,
Segretin Maria Soledad,
Shalom Diego Edgar,
LopezRosenfeld Matías,
Abril Marcelo Claudio,
Lipina Sebastián Javier,
Sigman Mariano
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
mind, brain, and education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.624
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1751-228X
pISSN - 1751-2271
DOI - 10.1111/mbe.12216
Subject(s) - temperament , socioeconomic status , psychology , psychological intervention , poverty , developmental psychology , cognition , task (project management) , social psychology , environmental health , medicine , population , engineering , political science , systems engineering , personality , neuroscience , psychiatry , law
Extreme poverty all over the world is concentrated in rural settings. However, studies about cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part conducted in urban populations. This paper investigates, in a poor rural sample, what are the individual and socioenvironmental variables that make the difference in performance in a processing speed task. Forty four 5‐year‐old children were evaluated with a processing speed task; individual and socioenvironmental information was obtained from parents' interviews. Higher scores in the effortful control dimension of temperament were associated with higher performance in the processing speed task. No other individual or socioenvironmental variable predicted the performance. These results showed that effortful control is important in processing speed and suggest that in low SES rural contexts, low effortful control children would require stronger interventions.