Philip K. Peake

Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification : identifying diagnostic conditions

Variations of the self-imposed delay-of-gratification situation in preschool were compared to determine when individual differences in this situation may predict aspects of cognitive and self-regulatory competence and coping in adolescence.

The nature of adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of gratification.

Delay of gratification, assessed in a series of experiments when the subjects were in preschool, was related to parental personality ratings obtained a decade later for 95 of these children in adolescence. Clear and consistent patterns of correlations between self-imposed delay time in preschool and later ratings were found for both sexes over this time span. Delay behavior predicted a set of cognitive and social competencies and stress tolerance consistent with experimental analyses of the process underlying effective delay in the preschool delay situation. Specifically, children who were able to wait longer at age 4 or 5 became adolescents whose parents rated them as more academically and socially competent, verbally fluent, rational, attentive, planful, and able to deal well with frustration and stress. Comparisons with related longitudinal research using other delay situations help to clarify the important features of the situations and person variables involved in different aspects of delay of gratification.

Regulating the Interpersonal Self: Strategic Self-Regulation for Coping With Rejection Sensitivity

People high in rejection sensitivity (RS) anxiously expect rejection and are at risk for interpersonal and personal distress. Two studies examined the role of self-regulation through strategic attention deployment in moderating the link between RS and maladaptive outcomes. Self-regulation was assessed by the delay of gratification (DG) paradigm in childhood. In Study 1, preschoolers from the Stanford University community who participated in the DG paradigm were assessed 20 years later. Study 2 assessed low-income, minority middle school children on comparable measures. DG ability buffered high-RS people from interpersonal difficulties (aggression, peer rejection) and diminished well-being (e.g., low self-worth, higher drug use). The protective effect of DG ability on high-RS childrens self-worth is explained by reduced interpersonal problems. Attentional mechanisms underlying the interaction between RS and strategic self-regulation are discussed.

Delay of Gratification: Explorations of How and Why Children Wait and Its Linkages to Outcomes Over the Life Course

The inability to delay of gratification is frequently offered as a behavioral marker of “impulsivity” or the lack of “willpower.” This paper presents an historical review of the “Marshmallow Test,” the highly popular paradigm for examining children’s ability to wait. Early experimental investigations demonstrated that children’s ability to wait is powerfully impacted by the physical presence of rewards, but that this challenge is readily overcome by instructions that modify if and how children attend to the rewards. These investigations also show that in the absence of instructions to do otherwise, preschoolers typically focus attention on rewards, making waiting difficult. Longitudinal follow-ups that now span nearly 40 years show patterns of direct relations indicative of more adaptive functioning over the life course by those children who waited during preschool. Most importantly, these relations are only found for children who were tested in experimental settings where rewards were present and children were left to their own coping strategies. Preschool waiting also moderates potentially maladaptive relations in adults, suggesting that self-control can be a protective buffer for other vulnerabilities. Finally, recent work documents connections between lifelong patterns of self-control and neural processing related to both cognitive control and the efficiency of working memory. Collectively, these findings suggest that children’s ability to wait as preschoolers derives in large part from deliberate strategies deployed by children to deal with the challenge they face. This interpretation raises important questions about the role of impulsivity in children’s waiting as well as the types of psychological processes that might be central to demonstrations of willpower.

Cohort effects in children’s delay of gratification.

In the 1960s at Stanford University’s Bing Preschool, children were given the option of taking an immediate, smaller reward or receiving a delayed, larger reward by waiting until the experimenter returned. Since then, the “Marshmallow Test” has been used in numerous studies to assess delay of gratification. Yet, no prior study has compared the performance of children across the decades. Common wisdom suggests children today would wait less long, preferring immediate gratification. Study 1 confirmed this intuition in a survey of adults in the United States (N = 354; Mdn age = 34 years). To test the validity of this prediction, Study 2 analyzed the original data for average delay-of-gratification times (out of 10 min) of 840 typically developing U.S. children in three birth cohorts from similar middle-high socioeconomic backgrounds in the late 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s, matched on age (3 to 5 years) at the time of testing. In contrast to popular belief, results revealed a linear increase in delay over time (p < .0001, &b.eta;2p = .047), such that children in the 2000s waited on average 2 min longer than children in the 1960s, and 1 min longer than children in the 1980s. This pattern was robust with respect to age, sex, geography and sampling effects. We posit that increases in symbolic thought, technology, preschool education, and public attention to executive function skills have contributed to this finding, but caution that more research in diverse populations is needed to examine the generality of the findings and to identify causal factors.

Theoretical Divergences in the Person-Situation Debate

Over the last two decades, personality psychology has struggled with a set of issues that lie at the very core of the discipline. These issues, and I wish to emphasize that the issues are many, have fallen under the general rubric of the person-situation debate. In his article, Hyland argues that the debate is primarily a methodological rather than a theoretical one, that the main contributions of the debate are limited to increased attentiveness to situational influences and the size of the class of behaviors being explained, and that the term interaction is repeatedly used in a fashion that is quite misleading. As with so many other discussions of this topic, I find myself less concerned with the specifics of Hyland’s commentary than with his reading of the debate from which they derive. Hence, in the present discussion, I will deal with but a few of Hyland’s more important points in the context of an alternative perspective of the history, sources, and nature of the person-situation debate.