Affect and facilitative self-control: Influence of ecological setting, cognition, and social agent.

Three components of a situation--the ecological setting, the child's cognition, and the social agent--were imbued with positive, neutral, or negative affect to determine if they were functionally related to the continued maintenance of performance at a motor task by 108 1st and 2nd graders. Maintenance of performance is discussed in terms of facilitative self-control, and theoretical linkages to cognitive self-reinforcement and distractibility-frustrative nonreward theories are proposed. The most powerful effects occurred when the affect of the ecological setting was changed: Ss who experienced a happy room (happy pictures and faces) persisted longer than those in the sad or neutral room. Also, Ss who thought about happy things persisted longer than Ss who thought about sad or neutral things, but only when the E acted happy and recently had told the S a happy story. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)