Episode 17: Shoelaces to Self-Control

Dr. Morrison is currently Professor of Psychology, Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In recent years, his research has focused on understanding the nature and sources of children’s cognitive, literacy and social development over the school transition period. The work ranges from conducting basic research studies utilizing natural experiments and large-scale longitudinal descriptive studies of children’s developmental trajectories to developing, implementing and evaluating  two major school-based interventions aimed at improving children’s learning during the preschool and early school years. Recently, he has been exploring schooling effects on brain and behavioral measures of children’s self-regulation. He has been recognized for his contributions to development and education, being awarded the Dina Feitelson award for the second time, for the best research article published in 2005 and 2015. He has been continuously funded by federal grating agencies for 25 years. Over that period, he has served on national review panels at NICHD, NSF and IES.  He has mentored approximately 50 graduate student and 8 post-doctoral fellows.

Book

• Improving Literacy in America: Guidelines from Research

Todd Schnick: Alright, welcome back to Full PreFrontal, exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I’m here with our host, Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta, looking forward to the new conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison today. What’s in store for us today?

Sucheta Kamath: I’m very excited to talk to Dr. Morrison. He’s a good friend, as well as his work has had tremendous impact on my understanding of executive functions, and before we get started, I thought I’d share a quick story with our listeners. I started my career working with Aphasia. Aphasia is the loss of ability to understand and express speech caused by a brain damage, and Oliver Sacks, if any of our listeners know, is a very famous neurologist and a writer, has written several books on various topics related to brain and brain damage. One of his particular books was called A Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and I had a wonderful opportunity to be in the audience to hear him and ever since then, I have always admired and followed all his writing. The most recent book of his, Musicophilia, is also very incredible and it was a sad thing for me to see his passing recently.

To me, his approach to writing and his approach to his work is very much what we are going to talk to Fred about. He symbolizes self-awareness and self-regulation. I had recently read about his own process of how he structures his day and his routines in an email response that he had written, and he kind of highlighted his habits, his self-awareness, his effort control, and most importantly, how he gives himself self-direction. For example, he writes in this email that, “Swimming gets me going like nothing else.” He starts his day at 5 a.m. not because he set an alarm but his body clock wakes him up. Another thing he talks about, his habit is, “I keep a notebook next to my bed for thoughts and memories or even dreams that I have,” and then later on, he has a habit of looking them over and kind of processing them, reflecting on them. Another thing he talks about, and I have kind of taken this out as a self-awareness sign that he says, he has seen his analyst for 40 years and he has done that two times a week as early as 6 a.m., so twice a week, he has an appointment with his analyst. In my observation, the people who seek analysts, work with a psychologists for self-improvement have taken great effort in recognizing themselves and finding a path to get the right help or too deepen that understanding. Another thing that he talks about which also, to me, is a very executive process, “I use electric kettle in case I get preoccupied with writing and forget to turn it off,” so he has come to understand that if you – and it’s a simple, simple little example but if I keep up and I have a tendency to get lost in my writing, so what’s the best solution for me? And executive functions allow you to solve problems that you have for yourself so your own journey through your day, whether it’s a writing journey, or whether you’re managing a life journey, becomes better. Oliver Sacks says that, “I often write at a standing desk to spare my back from too much of sitting that I have to do.”

So what I got from Oliver Sacks other than his actual wisdom on paper but his insights about neuropsychology, neurology, and how the mysteries of the brain works, I also got a lot about his executive function, his own ability to guide and direct his own self so he can become the most effective writer that he is, and I hope that today’s conversation with Fred is going to give us that framework regarding what is the connection between executive function and self-regulation, and self-regulation is nothing but self-awareness, effort control, and self-direction. So I can’t wait.

Todd: Yes, I cannot wait either. It’s amazing, the list of successful fascinating brilliant people using standing desks continues to lengthen, and I have recently done that myself, so interesting about Oliver Sacks on that front.

Alright, well, this promises to be a fascinating conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison. Let’s get right to it. Here is Sucheta and Dr. Fred Morrison.

Sucheta: Joining us today on the show is a personal friend and an esteemed colleague, Dr. Fred Morrison. He is a Professor of Psychology, Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, and research professor in The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research has focused on understanding children’s cognitive literacy and social development over the school transition period. Recently, he has been exploring schooling effects on the brain and behavior measures of children’s self-regulation.

Dr. Morrison is a co-investigator on the NICHD study of Early Child Care and Development. This national study has been following over a thousand children since birth in 10 different sites around the nation, focusing on the impact of different context including family, child care, school on children’s psychological growth. Dr. Morrison has been recognized for his contributions to development and education, being awarded the Dina Feitelson award for the second time for the Best Research Article published in 2005 and in 2015. He has been continuously funded by federal granting agencies for the last 25 years and has mentored approximately 50 graduate students and eight postdoctoral fellows.

Welcome to the show, Fred. It’s such an honor to have you and seeing your work, seeing you in action, and then having had lot of conversations with you. I am so excited to dive deep today. So welcome.

Dr. Fred Morrison: Well, thank you, Sucheta, and I’m delighted to be with you. It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about a very important aspect in child’s life that we’ve learned a lot about in the last 10 or 15 years, so I’m delighted to be here.

Sucheta: Terrific. So let me dive in with my first question that I have been asking experts like you, if you were in a coffee shop and somebody asks you, “What is executive functions?” how would you describe it to a layman?

Dr. Morrison: I think the way that I typically do it with parents groups or with teachers is actually to start by calling it self-regulation, and I think that there is a difference between executive function and self-regulation but I think most people understand it as a skill, a very complex skill or a complex set of skills whereby children regulate their attention, their memory, and their behavior, and executive function has come to be a more formal, or if you will, technical term that applies to all aspects of self-regulation: a child’s cognitive regulation, emotion regulation, and social or interpersonal regulation, so I think if people think about it as self-regulation, it’s a little bit easier to sort of get a handle on it, and as I often tell my students, when I’m talking with teachers, I will often just call it self-control because that’s mostly what teachers talk about when they talk about children who are having trouble with it and sort of being in control of yourself.

Sucheta: That makes so much sense, so if I phrased it this way: it is one’s ability to guide, direct, and regulate one’s self so that one has better control on their attention, better control on their behaviors, better control on their emotions so that they can get outcome that they want for themselves, is that a fair way to describe that?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, I think that’s a perfect way to describe it, I think, and it’s important to talk about control across a lot of different aspects of your life, so controlling your thoughts, controlling your emotions, but also controlling your social interactions. They are all in a sense, separate aspects of what you have to learn as a child, but they’re all interconnected, and the foundational connection really is this executive function, and as you know, basically, there are three fundamental components to self-regulation, all of which interact with each other, and so it’s hard to sort of separate them out in a typical everyday behavior, but the first is Attentional Control which is essentially the ability to sort of focus on relevant information and filter out irrelevant information, but also to sustain attention over a significant period of time. That’s a really critical element of self-regulation which is really persistence and being able to control your attention so that you don’t get distracted along the way. Second component is referred to as Working Memory. Essentially, that is the ability to both hold something in memory while you’re thinking about something else, so it’s the ability to coordinate something you’re actually thinking about with something that you’re holding in memory, so the typical example that I give students is, if you’re upstairs and you decide you want to go downstairs and get a glass of milk in the refrigerator, well, you walk down the stairs and you go to the refrigerator, and you open the refrigerator, and you can’t remember while you’re there. That’s a failure of working memory: you are processing what you’re supposed to be doing, walking down the stairs but you’ve forgotten the recent that you went to the refrigerator in the first place. That turns out to be really a critical element of navigating, as you talked about it, the control management and coordination of your behavior in order to attain desired ends, and the final component is typically referred to as a Response Inhibition, and so it’s really the ability to inhibit an inappropriate or what’s sometimes called a very powerful prepotent response and to learn to engage in a more adaptive response, and the prime example, I think for young kids is, in a preschool or a kindergarten setting, being able to learn to put up your hand when you want to ask a question or say something in a group setting. Often, kids will just blurt things out and the teacher is constantly trying to tell them, “Yes, I want to hear what you have to say but please, put up your hands,” so they have to inhibit that exciting prepotent desire to blurt something out and wait for their turn by holding up their hand. So those are three foundational aspects of what we call executive function. They are really involved in all aspects of cognitive control, emotional control, and behavior control, so that’s why they’re so fundamental to trying to understand what executive function is and how it develops.
Sucheta: Yes, and for our listeners, I would like to make this connection that there is that cognitive, emotional, and behavioral control in the moment. It could be in an hour, it could be in a day, it could be a week, and then there’s a long-term prediction that comes from these kinds of skills which is, how do I, like you said, there’s the attention filter, working memory, and response inhibition which is again, self-restraint, for example, and research shows, Tony Moffits, for example, work has shown that it has implications for higher health, higher wealth outcomes and low criminality. Can you comment that long-term impact of – so it’s not just simply not raising your hands but it also has a continuum to it at that means not speaking what it’s not your turn or not excluding friends, or not responding to Facebook in an aggravating way, so when you control the impulse throughout your life and throughout your behaviors, it can have greater friendships and deeper, meaningful life. Can you connect that for our listeners?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, well, one of the things that we’ve learned is that this thing called executive function, or if you will, self-regulation, variability or individual differences across children emerge very early, at least by about three years of age, and certainly by the time children get to kindergarten, and so some children are much more well-regulated than others, and we might want to get into it but boys are a particular risk relative to girls, although it is much more complicated than that, but what we found is that variability, those differences that exist early in life actually can predict a lot about future self-regulation, future academic achievement, and even future life success, so as you were referring to, Tony Moffits and others have found that early differences in self-regulation or executive function actually predict health, wealth, and criminality 30 years later, and so that sort of alerted scientists as well as clinicians and practitioners that this is a really critical skill and ironically, one that really is not part of our formal educational system. I think that’s something that really is worth people realizing, that when we tend to focus on what is it that we care about, what we think about literacy and numeracy, and social studies, and science, but one of the things that really is not part of the formal curriculum is self-regulation or executive function, so that’s something we really need to realize, and in a sense, worry about because we recognize that it is a very domain-general skill that pervades all aspects of a child’s life and surprisingly, we haven’t given it as much attention as read and write, and arithmetic.

Sucheta: Yes, and thank you for kind of connecting the dots about that, and I think it’s kind of alarming for us to know that 30 years later, this has shown some long-term outcomes and such a crucial matter that we need to have some specific process put in place so we can promote it. This brings me to ask this question that, your research focuses on nature and sources of literacy acquisition and children to transition to school, particularly during the preschool at elementary years. Help our listeners understand what literacy skills are and because I want to try that functions to the literacy skills, but a lot of early development, particularly through elementary, is focused on learning to read and reading to learn, so can you help us understand that a little bit?

Dr. Morrison: I mean, again, that’s another thing that we’ve learned a lot about over the past, I guess, two or three decades, that literacy, it means a lot of different things and essentially, what we’re talking about in this context of children between the ages of three and say, third grade, we’re talking about learning to read, but what we’ve discovered is that there are a lot of individual component skills that make up reading or literacy, and language is probably one of the biggest, and basically, there are a lot of individual language skills, like vocabulary, understanding of grammar, understanding of the meanings of words, children’s oral language – the ability to put together coherent sentences in communicating with other people, their world knowledge is also another aspect that’s related to language but also to their world experience. So there’s a whole raft, if you will, of language skills, and then in addition to that, there’s a whole set of what we call literacy skills or reading skills, so even as preschoolers, children are learning the letters of the alphabet and the sounds of the letters of the alphabet, but one of the most important, and it turns out sort of mysterious skills that children learn is to understand the units of language, the phonological units: the syllables, the sub syllables, and the phonings that make up the words that are coming out of my mouth right now, and being able to hear and understand those units takes some time but it’s critical to linking those sound units to the letters so that you can begin to, as they say, crack the code and read the letters correctly with their appropriate sounds and names. So literacy really is – the growth of literacy involves growth of all of those individual components skills, but as a colleague of mine, Hollis Scarborough has talked about, really what happens over time and it starts in preschool and it’s usually not finished but tightly organized by about third grade that there is kind of a braiding process whereby like a braid in hair, those components skills become intertwined with each other, and so you have comprehension skills which are driving the – we are decoding skills which are driving your phonological skills which then feed back into your comprehension skills to help you really to do the real task of reading which is understand what’s on the page. So it turns out that we’ve discovered a lot about early reading and it is quite complicated but once it becomes braided or unified, it seems like the simplest thing in the world but it’s not, and what we’re really discovering is a lot of those different components can go awry or go wrong in individual children and prevent them from developing that braid accurately. Just to tie it together, essentially, we’ve also found out that self-regulation or executive function is intimately tied with the literacy components and the braid, and also intimately tied with math and intimately tied with science. So the inside step we take is –

Sucheta: complex.

Dr. Morrison: Yes, yes, exactly. It is complicated but when you see it in the proficient adult, it looks very straightforward and simple. It’s really not when you’re five years of age.

Sucheta: So how would you respond to the statement or how would you complete it, academic performance in 21st century schools is dependent on what, what would you say?

Dr. Morrison: Academic success, if you will? Well, that gets us into potentially another realm. I’m not sure whether you want of the whole picture but I think one of the things –

Sucheta: Yes, I would love the whole picture.

Dr. Morrison: Well, one of the things that we’ve discovered about academic performance or academic success is that it is a complex function of a lot of different sources of influence in the child in the home, in the school, and in the larger sociocultural context. So all of those facets of a child’s life have independent and interactive effects on their success in becoming literate or their success in school, and that makes the task of understanding and improving literacy all the more challenging.

So we just talked about all of the factors in the child and there’s still more. Besides the literacy and numeracy, and self-regulation, you have motivational skills which are actually separate from self-regulation. You have factors in the home and in parenting, and that’s something that really, we haven’t looked at in enough detail, namely what parents are doing to promote self-regulation, to promote literacy and numeracy from a very early age, then certainly, what goes on in school and the variability that we see in children’s schooling experiences, but then the larger sociocultural context and by that, I mean things like socioeconomic status: poverty, stress, single parenting, all of the broader socio-cultural factors that impinge the ability of a parent to provide the kind of literacy experience that they need at home, on their ability to find good schools in good neighborhoods, and therefore, get the schooling. So all of these things independently influence literacy but they all interact in very complicated ways. So a successful academic experience requires, or at least should have, most of the elements of positive experiences, socio-culturally, in the home and in the school at a minimum. So one of the things I think we’ve realized or at least that I would argue is that it’s not really easy to just say go into a school. That’s really struggling and get kids to where we want them to be in a short period of time.

Sucheta: You just laid out this wonderful path for our listeners to understand that one, it’s a complex process but two, if there’s any interruption in any of these factors, the picture may not appear to be complete.

In closing, I wanted to just see if you have any thoughts about, I see that the culture needs to shift its mindset and itself flexibly about learning in general, and academic success in particular. Can you maybe point out some of the limitations in the way we view education in the classroom and we expect a lot of this to emerge simply by placing a kid in the class, right?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that it has been the case up until very recently that we have regarded executive function or self-regulation, if you will, as under pretty strong maturational control, that there’s some variability, it gets better with time and hopefully, everybody kind of develops a functionally adaptive version of it as they get older but recognizing that is not the case, but the prevailing view about what I call this maturationalism has meant that we don’t really think about doing anything formally in school to promote self-regulation. It is just assumed that it will happen naturally for most kids and that, or then the normal course of interaction in school, most kids will develop it, but I think we’re recognizing looking at kids who suffer and why they fail, that it is failure to develop functional aspects of self-regulation, that’s the real problem. So I think we should in some sense try to incorporate into the school day. Now, having said that, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to do because schools are already burdened with having to do a lot, and so I think it’s not easy to interject the kinds of experiences that would lead to improved self-regulation, because one of the things that we’re discovering is that improving self-regulation is not the same as improving early reading. It takes much more and much longer to get a lot of kids to develop the self-regulation skills they need to succeed, than it does say, the beginning reading skills to begin to learn to read words or sentences.

So we’ve got a real challenge and that may be part of the reason that it is a part of the school curriculum. The other element that I think that should come into this is that if there is any way to try to impress upon parents that they can do a lot from the beginning of their child’s life but certainly starting around three years of age to really get kids’ self-regulation skills up to a level of school readiness, that will really help teachers so that they won’t really have the kind of variability that we see at the beginning of kindergarten, and you can see, when you essentially go into middle-class homes, the amounts of time that parents are spending trying to get their kids to be self-regulating is enormous, and so failure to do that I think is just really holding a lot of kids back.

Sucheta: Terrific. What a conversation, Fred. Thank you so much, and I encourage listeners to listen to the part 2 of Fred’s interview to understand how to manage these complex issues that he’s addressing.

Once again, Fred, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and helping our listeners understand the complexity of the matter, and I think what I really loved about your conversation is you are helping kind of bust some of the myths about conventional wisdom, what we have understood about learning and developing of skills through education, and our understanding has changed in the last 10 years and it’s probably going to take another 5, 10 years for it to become a formal curriculum-based change. So I can’t wait to talk more about it and once again, thank you so much. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or find out more about your work, what do you recommend they should do?

Dr. Morrison: The best thing is to just email me at FJMorris@UMich.edu.

Sucheta: Terrific. Thank you so much, Fred and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Morrison: Thank you, Sucheta, my pleasure.

Todd: Alright, again, that was Dr. Fred Morrison and our host, Sucheta. Our first conversation with Dr. Morrison, a great conversation. Sucheta, thinking about it, as a researcher, obviously with positions in Psychology and Education, Dr. Morrison uses a very broad lens on the term executive functions and what are your thoughts about that?

Sucheta: I really liked what Fred was saying that we need to think outside the box about executive functions and self-regulation. We need to get out of our silos. Professions like education, psychology, neuroscience, learning disability experts, and even speaking language pathologists are caught up in disciplinary isolation, and what that can do is, we have one day a layman looks at executive function and challenges. For example, we call them work skills. In the context of young children, we call them effort control. Behaviorists or educational psychologists call it self-regulation while psychologists in neuroscience calls it executive function, and at fields where executive functions are noted in mentioned, and reported but are never referred to as executive function then creates a general chaos, and my thought about this is these conversations that I’ve started through this podcast, Full PreFrontal, will really encourage everyone to start thinking about the broader scope.

Todd: Yes, I would agree with you on that. Absolutely. So an awful lot to digest from this conversation with Dr. Morrison. What are some things we should be taking away from this detailed conversation that you had?

Sucheta: So my first takeaway for our listeners is, there’s a broader way of thinking about executive function. It is self-directed control and it just has application across the spectrum of life. So there are three fundamental skills that every expert that has come on the show talks about. One is response inhibition or self-restraint, working memory, the space in your brain where you hold onto information while you are using it, and third is, flexible thinking, but if you look at their roles, they all act as a filter. So the best way to think about executive function is, what filter we use to control ourselves, guide ourselves, direct ourselves to yield better outcomes for yourself? And in younger years, I see that present itself as a need for habit and in middle school to high school, they come up more as a development of self and understanding of need of self – what do I want? What do I want to achieve? How am I doing? Am I doing well? And then, as you get older, you start thinking about much broader lives which is, what are my life goals? What do I want to achieve? What do I want to become? What’s the purpose of my life? So that’s kind of a thought process that one needs to tie together when we think about executive function and self-regulation.

Todd: Well, Dr. Morrison talks about how executive functions development can be misunderstood. Walk us through some thoughts there.

Sucheta: Yes, that’s my second takeaway for our listeners, that generally, the point of reference that we have in our culture or our own understanding, whether it’s parents, educators, or professionals, there’s a common misconception that it’s under maturation control, and Fred very clearly talked about that. What that means is people operate with the belief that it will get better with time and that’s something we need to really, really understand, that there is enormous variability in the development of executive function and self-regulation which means there’s individual differences, and as these individual differences emerge, they do predict very heavily about life success for that individual, and so these individual differences need to be reconciled as we try to educate these young people as well as guide these youth and then eventually, see these young adults hold a job or be married and stay productive. That all needs to be not part through just the lens of maturation control. That means when you get older, you will be more masterful. Some people are going to have a lifelong disadvantage of executive function. They will get better with time but they may not have the finesse or sharpness that some of their peers might have.

Todd: Well, you asked Dr. Morrison about literacy and education. Can you summarize his comments of there?

Sucheta: Oh, that was such a complicated aspect and I do want to summarize that under third takeaway, that important part of learning education is the literacy skills, and so one can think about two important set of skills: the broader literacy skills which include these foundational skills such as vocabulary, grammar, phonology, the sound system, the sound symbol relationship that goes into writing, then it combines itself with world knowledge and experience which allows a young learner to understand meaning and this kind of becomes a foundation skill for inferential skills or higher order problem solving skills, reading comprehension skills, and then there are the second set of skills with just executive function and self-regulation. So literacy skills are learning to learn to read and eventually, read for meaning, and then read for meaning and then write with weaning in mind, and that’s what he was referring to in that third takeaway.

Todd: Well, as you well know, Sucheta, our listeners are very keen to understand and know how to treat or manage executive function problems. Any takeaways there from this conversation that we should be aware of?

Sucheta: Well, Fred, I’m assuming will be talking a lot more in his second interview about intervention specifically, but the fourth takeaway that I have gotten from this conversation, that executive functions or self-regulation can be learned with special help, or can be taught with special approach, but the caveat here is, it takes longer to see that happen. It’s harder to teach, and currently, executive functions or self-regulation is not part of formal or daily teaching, and it needs to become formal, an integral part of educational system but we are not there yet.

Todd: So let me ask you this, Sucheta: obviously, I think culture and society play a very important role here, right? Any comments on that?

Sucheta: And this is the last take away. There is a larger cultural context and developing executive functions and self-regulation, and time and again, I’m hoping to tie that together for our listeners to understand that executive functions become more finessed when the cultural hold is present for that young learner or for that young adult. Child’s experience and world knowledge has a great impact on his own process of self-regulation, and there is a bigger context of what are the values? What are the habits? What systems that prevail in your life? What kind of expectations the family where you’re growing up has of you, as well as what kind of expectations as a culture that you belong to has from you? Is there consistency? Is there a method to the way you are raised? So it’s their culture of hard work and effort is considered an important virtue.

So those are the kinds of questions that I think Fred is referring to, and I would say, a very important conclusion here is, there is a definite difference between eastern and western culture. As more and more individualistic society encourages development of the goals of an individual, it moves that individual away from having to regulate himself through the lens of society or culture, and somehow, we have come to understand that individual needs trump societal needs and if that happens, then you are going to take decisions that are very one-sided and that can create a big discrepancy or difficulty in getting cooperation of individuals or so to speak, in Norwegian culture, it’s called “Hygge” which means that process where you bond together by understanding yourself to be a small part of the larger, big picture, and you are humble and you are accommodating, and you are also living a life where comfort, collaboration, cooperation is central to your existence, and I think that can bring a beautiful harmony in the way we are behaving, the way we are relating to our world.

Todd: Yes, indeed. Sucheta, it was a very impactful conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison.

Alright, all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.