7–10 years (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). Nonetheless, perhaps as children move from childhood into early adolescence, an increase in problems in attentional control signals a susceptibility to the depressive symptoms (e.g., Hankin et al., 1998) and heightened negative emotionality (Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002) that are more common in adolescence than in childhood. Such negative emotionality often may be due to problems with rumination and attentional self-regulation more generally, including the appropriate use of coping strategies such as cognitive distraction. In addition, older children generally are better able than young children to use attention to cognitively control their behavior and emotion (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Guthrie, 1997); thus, a deficit in this capacity may become a more salient predictor of internalizing problems with age (see Lengua, 2006).
