Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 65, December 2014, Pages 236-246
Neuropsychologia

New perspectives on self-control development: Highlighting the role of intentional inhibition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.08.022Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Intentional inhibition forms an important component of self-control.

  • In a neutral context intentional inhibition has an early development.

  • Future research should examine intentional inhibition in hot contexts.

  • Understanding intentional inhibition has implications for disorders of impulsivity.

Abstract

The ability to exert self-control over one׳s thoughts and actions is crucial for successful functioning in daily life. To date, self-control development has been primarily studied from the perspective of externally driven inhibition. In this review, we introduce a new perspective on the development of self-control by highlighting the importance of intentional inhibition. First, we will review the existing behavioral and neuroscientific literature on the development of self-control from the perspective of externally driven inhibition. Next, we will introduce a new framework for studying the development of self-control from the perspective of intentional inhibition. We will discuss several recent studies in this domain, showing that intentional inhibition within cold contexts has an early development, but continues to develop through adolescence in motivational contexts. We conclude that understanding the developmental trajectory of intentional inhibition in cold and motivationally relevant contexts and its underlying mechanisms is an important direction for future research, which has important implications for our understanding of developmental disorders associated with problems in self-control, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Introduction

Self-control can be defined as the ability to exercise control over one’s action, thoughts and emotions (Casey & Caudle, 2013). Self-control abilities are crucial for successful functioning in all aspects of human life (e.g. social situations, educational and work environments). The development of self-control is an important aspect of cognitive development through childhood and adolescence (Diamond, 2013), and has far-reaching implications during this important developmental period. That is, self-control is important for learning (e.g. concentrating on the task at hand and not getting distracted by the environment), for making optimal decisions (e.g. healthy food-related or financial decisions), for keeping friendships (e.g. not reacting impulsively and hitting someone, when being teased), and for social skill development (e.g. inhibit the impulse to cut in line) (Diamond, 2013).

At the core of self-control lies the ability to intentionally inhibit one’s actions. Intentional inhibition has been defined as a late ‘veto’ mechanism (Filevich et al., 2012, Haggard, 2008). By means of this late ‘veto’ mechanism, one can cancel action execution of an already initiated action at the last possible moment, as given in by an internal thought process (Filevich et al., 2012, Haggard, 2008). Thus, intentional inhibition differs from stimulus- or externally driven inhibition in that it is driven by an internally generated process, rather than an external stimulus which tells you to stop your behavior. To date self-control development has been primarily studied from the perspective of externally driven inhibition (for a review, see Diamond (2013)), yet, intentional inhibition is clearly present in many aspects of children’s life, such as when inhibiting the tendency to get up of their chair and walk around in the classroom based on internally set goals, or when trying to finish a tedious task without supervision. In addition, given that intentional inhibition lies at the core of self-control, that is to say, most of our action control is driven by internal motives, problems in intentional inhibition have wide-ranging implications, such as for childhood psychological and psychiatric disorders, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (Moffitt et al., 2011) or conduct disorder (Fergusson, Boden, & Horwood, 2013).

Therefore, the goal of this review is to describe a new perspective on the development of self-control by highlighting the importance of intentional inhibition and the new advances in studying this domain. As such, we will first review the existing behavioral and neuroscientific literature on the development of self-control, with a focus on what is currently known about externally guided inhibition. Next, we will describe the distinction between externally and internally guided self-control and introduce a new framework for studying the development of internally guided self-control, drawing on behavioral, psychophysiological and neuroscientific findings. Several recent studies in this domain will be presented. Finally, we will discuss the implications of this new framework for developmental disorders.

Section snippets

The development of self-control: externally guided inhibition

The ability to control one’s actions and stop actions when the environment requires one to do so, also referred to as inhibition, is one of the most studied components of self-control development (Diamond, 2013, Zelazo et al., 2003). There are marked improvements in inhibition in infancy (Diamond, 2013), early childhood (Zelazo et al., 2003) and school-aged children (van der Molen, 2000), which has been interpreted as reflecting the protracted development of executive control functions.

The development of self-control: intentionally guided inhibition

Many of our daily activities involve stopping actions based on internally generated (i.e., intentional) stop signals, rather than explicit external stimuli telling us to stop our actions. Despite the clear importance of the intentional component of inhibition, intentional inhibition has not been often addressed in developmental psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience. Since intentional inhibition is not preceded by an external stimulus or cue, and does not result in any behavioral

The development of self-control: inhibition in order to maximize future rewards

As outlined above, exerting self-control, and especially intentional inhibition, rarely happens in affectively neutral contexts in daily life. It has been shown that both relevant and irrelevant affective contexts influence stimulus-driven inhibition (Cohen-Gilbert and Thomas, 2013, Somerville et al., 2011, Tottenham et al., 2011), but an irrelevant affective context does not appear to influence intentional inhibition decisions (Schel & Crone, 2013). However, the mere presence of an affective

Implications for developmental disorders

There are several childhood/adolescence disorders, which are associated with difficulties with self-control, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (Willcutt, Doyle, Nigg, Faraone, & Pennington, 2005), oppositional defiant disorder/conduct disorder (ODD/CD) (Nigg, 2003), and substance abuse (Wills & Stoolmiller, 2002). Traditionally, these disorders have been examined from a self-control perspective using externally driven inhibition tasks, with mixed results. For example,

Conclusion

To conclude, intentional inhibition is an important component of self-control, which should be examined from a developmental perspective. Within a cold context, intentional inhibition appears to mature early (in childhood), even though underlying neural correlates hint towards activation differences in the inhibition network between children and adults (Schel et al., 2014, Schel et al., 2013). However, when stimuli are motivationally relevant, developmental differences become more prevalent,

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