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For Peer Review
“Willpower” Over the Life Span: Decomposing Impulse Control
Journal: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Manuscript ID: Draft
Manuscript Type: Original Manuscript
Date Submitted by the Author:
Complete List of Authors: Mischel, Walter; Columbia University, Psychology Ayduk, Ozlem; University of California - Berkeley, Psychology Berman, Marc; University of Michigan, Psychology Casey, B. J.; Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology
Gotlib, Ian; Stanford, Psychology Jonides, John; University of Michigan, Psychology Kross, Ethan; University of Michigan, Psychology Teslovich, Theresa; Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology Wilson, Nicole; University of Washington - Seattle, Psychology Zayas, Vivian; Cornell University, Psychology Shoda, Yuichi; University of Washington - Seattle, Psychology
Keywords: Impulse Control, Delay of Gratification
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FOR SPECIAL ISSUE on AGING for SCAN
“Willpower” Over the Life Span: Decomposing Impulse Control
Walter Mischel
Columbia University
Ozlem Ayduk
University of California, Berkeley
Marc G. Berman
University of Michigan
B. J. Casey
Sackler Institute of Weill Cornell Medical College
Ian Gotlib
Stanford University
John Jonides and Ethan Kross
University of Michigan
Theresa Teslovich
Sackler Institute of Weill Cornell Medical College
Nicole Wilson
University of Washington
Vivian Zayas
Cornell University
Yuichi Shoda
University of Washington
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Abstract
Preschool children at Stanford University’s Bing nursery school 40 years ago
were tested for their ability to delay gratification on the “marshmallow test”.
Longitudinal follow up studies traced the long-term correlates of the observed early life
individual differences, focusing on consequential social, cognitive, and mental health
outcomes in each decade over the developmental course. As they reach mid-life,
individuals from this study consistently high or low in delay ability and impulse control
are being assessed by our inter-disciplinary team with fMRI and a variety of cognitive
information processing measures to try to further identify and decompose the processes
that underlie the phenomena of “willpower” and impulse control. This article reviews
key findings from the longitudinal work, and from earlier experiments on the cognitive
appraisal and attention control strategies that influence the ability to delay gratification.
We also report preliminary findings from the mid-life follow up in progress, and discuss
implications of the research for the prediction and potential enhancement of important
life outcomes in the aging process.
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More than four decades ago, the Bing Longitudinal Study began at Stanford
University’s preschool to try to identify and demystify the processes that underlie the
phenomena of “willpower.” These phenomena include diverse aspects of control over
one’s cognitions, emotions, and actions, particularly the ability to delay immediate
gratification and resist impulsive responding. With that goal, experimental studies and
long-term longitudinal investigations have been examining children’s abilities to delay
immediate gratification. This ability is measured by assessing how long the child could
resist settling for a small, immediately available reward (e.g., one mini marshmallow) in
order to get a larger reward later (e.g., two mini marshmallows), dubbed the
“marshmallow test” by the media (e.g., Mischel, Ebbesen & Zeiss, 1972; Mischel,
Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004).
Attentional Control and Cognitive Reappraisals Enabling Delay: Early Experiments
This research began in the early 1970s with a series of experiments designed to
elucidate the attentional and cognitive mechanisms that enable young children to delay
gratification. These experiments helped to identify the role of attentional control, for
example, by self-distraction to reduce the frustration of continuing to wait (e.g., looking
away from vs. toward the temptations). The studies also documented the importance of
cognitive transformations or reappraisals in which the “hot” (e.g., appetitive,
consummatory) features of the tempting stimuli are “cooled” by changing how they are
mentally represented (e.g., envisioning the marshmallow as clouds). Such reappraisal
processes to “cool” hot stimuli have been shown to be highly effective in enhancing delay
of gratification. The same preschool child who yielded immediately to the temptation by
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focusing on the consummatory features (e.g., its yummy, sweet, chewy taste) could wait
for otherwise unbearable delay periods for the same tempting stimulus by focusing on its
non-consummatory qualities (e.g., its shape). These results have been fully described
elsewhere (see e.g., Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972; Mischel, 1974; Mischel, Shoda, &
Rodriguez, 1989; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004)). Although these experimental demonstrations
have been short-term and confined to brief laboratory situations, they suggest that these
strategies required to successfully self-regulate can be taught.
The findings from these experiments and related research also led Metcalfe and
Mischel (1999) to propose a “Hot/Cool System Analysis of Delay of Gratification” to
explain the dynamics of “willpower.” In that conceptualization, there are two interacting
neurocognitive systems that enable self-control and willpower in the execution of one’s
intentions. A cool system, likely involving the top-down attentional network that includes
the dorsal frontoparietal neural circuit (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002) which underlies
processing that is affectively-neutral, flexible, slow, and strategic. It is the seat of self-
regulation and self-control (Mischel & Ayduk, 2004; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999). The
other (hot) system, likely mediated by the amygdala and other limbic structures, is the
basis of emotionality, fears, and passion; it is impulsive and reflexive, and sometimes it is
initially controlled by innate releasing stimuli (and is thus literally under stimulus
control). The hot system is fundamental for emotional (classical) conditioning, and it
undermines efforts at self-control. The balance between the hot and cool systems is
determined by stress, development, and the individual's self-regulatory dynamics. Recent
work has successfully extended this model to help individuals cope adaptively with
intense negative emotions that require “cooling” in order to facilitate adaptive
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psychological adjustment (e.g., Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel, 2005; Kross & Ayduk, 2008).
Stumbling into Longitudinal Research: The Bing Life-Span Study
To the surprise of the initiators of this research program, what began as a set of
experiments with preschoolers turned into a life-span developmental study. Four decades
later this research is continuing to reveal remarkable patterns of coherence in
consequential psychological, behavioral, health, and economic outcomes from early
childhood to mid-life—the current age of the participants. Given these provocative
findings and the methodological advances now available for probing self-control and
executive functions with increasing depth, this longitudinal sample provides a unique
opportunity for deepening our understanding of the basic neuro-cognitive mechanisms
underlying “willpower”. The present paper reports some of our current efforts to take up
this challenge.
Overview of Past Findings. Participants in the Bing Longitudinal Study come
from a sample of more than 300 participants who were enrolled in Stanford University’s
Bing preschool between 1968 and 1974. Since the original testing, the ability of these
participants to pursue long-term goals in the face of immediate temptation has been
assessed once every decade. Participants have now reached their late 30s and early to mid
40s, and information about their life outcomes, such as their occupational, marital,
physical health, and mental health status are continuing to become available. The findings
have surprised us from the start, and they continue to do so. For example, preschoolers
who delayed longer relative to other participants in the original “marshmallow test”
earned higher SAT scores and exhibited better social-cognitive and emotional coping in
adolescence (Mischel, Shoda, & Peake, 1988; Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). As
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adults, these participants continued to have better cognitive-social functioning, and better
educational and economic life outcomes than did their low-delaying peers (Ayduk et al.,
2000).
The high-delay individuals also were buffered against the development of diverse
mental health problems: they used cocaine less frequently, were less likely to suffer from
low self-esteem and self-worth (Ayduk et al., 2000), and had fewer features of borderline
personality disorder than did matched controls with similar dispositional vulnerabilities
(Ayduk et al., 2008). Parallel findings come from diverse demographic populations,
including middle-school children in the South Bronx, N.Y. (e.g., Ayduk et al., 2000;
Mischel & Ayduk, 2004) and children in a summer residential treatment program for
youths at high risk for problems of aggression/externalization and depression/withdrawal
(e.g., Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Rodriguez et al., 1989). For example, spontaneous use of
self-control strategies in the delay task (e.g., looking away from the rewards and using
self-distraction) predicted lower verbal and physical aggression as directly observed over
six weeks in the summer camp study (e.g., Rodriguez et al., 1989; Wright & Mischel,
1987, 1988).
In search of the mechanisms underlying long-term stability in individual differences
in self-control abilities
The early experiments examining delay of gratification showed that mental
representations that are “hot” or appetitive (consummatory) hinder delay and are
ineffective because they make it too difficult to resist the prepotent response of settling
for the immediately available treat. In contrast, representations based on attention to the
“cool,” cognitive, abstract aspects of the situation have the opposite effect. Thus, delay
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ability in this paradigm depends critically on the aspects of the situation to which the
child attends, the mental representations that are activated in working memory during the
waiting period, and the degree of control the child has over his or her response behavior.
It is precisely these three aspects of cognitive control that we have been pursuing in
ongoing work with the Bing sample.
Cognitive control mechanisms. How is cognitive control achieved? The weight of
evidence, presented in a meta-analysis of 41 neuroimaging studies of a variety of tasks
measuring cognitive control, such as the Flanker, Stimulus-response-incompatibility
(SRIC), Go-no/go, Simon, Stop-signal, and Stroop tasks (Nee, Jonides, & Berman, 2007),
does not favor the view that there is a unitary mechanism. The activation peaks in these
tasks are widely dispersed in the brain, suggesting that there are multiple mechanisms of
control. This conclusion is supported by the oft-reported low behavioral correlations
among tasks that allegedly recruit inhibitory mechanisms (Earles et al., 1997; Grant &
Dagenbach, 2000; Kramer et al., 1994; Shilling et al., 2002; Tipper & Baylis, 1987).
Thus, both imaging and behavioral evidence suggest that processes involved in resolving
interference come from a “family of functions” rather than from a “single unitary
construct” (Friedman and Miyake, 2004; Dempster, 1993; Harnishfeger, 1995; Nigg,
2000).
Guided by these analyses, for the first time in the four-decade long Bing
Longitudinal Study we are currently collecting data on both behavioral and cognitive, and
neural functioning (via functional and structural brain imaging) in the participants.
Current data collection. Before examining the brain functioning underlying self-
regulation, we sought to obtain information about the participants’ cognitive control
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abilities using behavioral tasks designed to measure cognitive control. Because the
participants are now widely dispersed across the globe, we mailed laptop computers
preprogrammed with software for tasks designed to assess cognitive control. We focused
on two subsamples of the Bing study: participants who were consistently above average
in their self-regulatory abilities, beginning with their performance on the delay of
gratification task in preschool in the early 1970s, through the three follow-up assessments
conducted in 1984, 1993, and 2003; and those who were consistently below average
thorough the first four decades of their life. Our rationale for focusing on these
participants is that if individual differences in self-control reflect differences in the basic
operation of the brain, these may be most clearly seen by comparing individuals with life-
long trajectories of stably high, or stably low, self-control. Indeed, these individuals have
a four-decade long “track record” of high vs. low self-control.
One hundred and seventeen individuals met the criterion of being either
consistently above average or consistently below average in self-control in their original
delay of gratification performance as well as in their self-control ability in subsequent
follow-ups. In these follow-up assessments, self-regulation was assessed using items
from the California Child Q-set (CCQ) in 1984 (when the participants were in their late
teens), in 1993 (when they were in their late twenties), and in 2003 (when they were in
their late thirties). These 117 individuals were invited to participate in the current follow-
up (we did not include their 1984 score in this requirement because of the relatively small
sample size in 1984). Of those who were invited, 57 agreed to participate, were sent
laptop computers, completed the tasks, and returned them. Of the 57, 31 were from the
“consistently high self-regulation” group, and 26 were from the “consistently low self-
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regulation” group. Figure 1 shows the self-control trajectories across these three waves of
follow-up assessments for these 57 consistently high and consistently low participants.
The vertical axis represents the self-regulation indices, standardized within each
assessment period. The horizontal axis represents the year in which the self-regulation
data were collected, including the initial preschool assessment that took place between
1968 and 1973. The two lines represent the average developmental trajectories for those
participants whose preschool delay time was consistently above mean (shown in blue),
and those who were consistently below mean (shown in red).
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Insert Figure 1 about here
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The figure illustrates that the two subgroups we targeted in our current data
collection clearly differ from each other at every assessment during the past four decades.
While this is not surprising because they were chosen on the basis of being above or
below across the follow-up waves, the fact that many of the participants fell in either of
these groups, and that their means at each data point were many standard errors apart,
reflects the overall stability of individual differences in self-regulation.
Preliminary Findings: Behavioral Indices of Cognitive Control
Are life-long patterns of high vs. low self-regulation related to behavioral indices
of cognitive control? Specifically, we examined the following three aspects of cognitive
control: (1) blocking the entry of unwanted information (e.g., shutting out information by
paying attention to something else); (2) suppressing unwanted thoughts (e.g., by thinking
about something else); and (3) stopping themselves from acting upon salient cues (e.g.,
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inhibiting a response or impulse). In order to assess them, we used a set of laboratory
procedures designed to measure each process, as described below.
Evaluating the ability to block the entry of unwanted information with the Ignore
Task. We used a version of Sternberg’s (1966) item-recognition task to assess the first
two of the three aspects of cognitive control described above (Jonides, Smith, et al., 1998,
Jonides, Marshuetz, et al., 2000; D’Esposito et al., 1999; Thompson-Schill et al., 2002;
Nelson et al., 2003; Nee et al., 2007). Specifically, we modified this task to allow us to
study interference-resolution in perception and working memory (Nee & Jonides, 2008,
2009).
Participants were presented with a set of 4 words for .5 seconds, half of which
were printed in teal and half in blue. Prior to each trial, participants were give a cue (the
word “teal” or the word “blue”) telling them which 2 of the words in the upcoming
display were relevant on that trial. Immediately after seeing the display, participants were
given a probe word and had to decide whether it matched one of words in the relevant
color. If the probe did not match one of the words in the relevant color, it might have
been a word originally presented in the other color. As a control, the probe might have
been a word that had not been presented on the current trial or on any of the three
previous trials. A comparison between these two types of non-matching probes reveals
how successfully participants were able to “ignore” (hence the name of the task) the
irrelevant information.
This paradigm serves as the basis for our examination of whether adults who
could or could not delay gratification as children differ in their effectiveness in resolving
interference at the time of original perception of information (encoding).
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Evaluating the ability to control unwanted information with the Suppress Task.
We also designed a task that assessed how effectively participants could “suppress”
information that already entered working memory. The design was similar to that of the
Ignore task. For the Suppress task, participants were presented with 4 words, two in teal
and two in blue. After the display was encoded, a cue appeared telling subjects which
two of the words (either both teal words or both blue words) to forget. After that, a probe
appeared. Again, if the probe did not match the relevant words, it could be one of the
words that was to be forgotten or some control word that had not appeared recently in the
experiment. By comparing these non-matching trials, this task provides an opportunity to
assess how well participants can suppress irrelevant information that has already entered
working memory but is no longer relevant. Figure 2 shows the train of events on a
typical trial.
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Insert Figure 2 about here
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The data collection is still on-going. So far, however, in a sample of 57 Bing
participants, we found no clear association between preschool delay time and
participants’ performance on the Ignore task. As for their ability to control contents of
working memory, we found a trend of low-delay participants making a greater number of
errors on the Suppress task (figure 3). Recall that the participants were selected on the
basis of their either consistently high, or consistently low, self-regulation trajectory over
the last four decades. Thus, those with above average preschool delay time in this sample
are a subsample of such participants who also maintained above average self-regulation
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indices during the subsequent decades; similarly, those with below average preschool
delay time in this sample are a subsample who also remained below average self-
regulation so far in their lives.
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Insert Figure 3 about here
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Cognitive control of prepotent reaction to “hot” stimuli. The go/no-go task
(Luria, 1961) is a measure of cognitive control that requires over-riding a prepotent
response. This task is computer-administered and requires participants to press a button
whenever a target (go) stimulus is present, but not to respond to an infrequently presented
nontarget (no-go) stimulus. We included this task because of our interest in determining
the extent to which the ability to delay gratification involves the ability to stop oneself
from acting (Eigsti et al, 2006). That is, performing well on this task requires not only
pressing a button in response to the go stimulus, but also withholding a response to the
no-go stimulus. Therefore, performance on the no-go trials was of particular interest.
We administered an adapted version of the traditional go/no-go task (Hare et al
2005) in which emotional facial expressions were used as stimuli (i.e., emotional go/nogo
task). Specifically, stimuli were digital photographs of happy and fearful expressions
from eight individuals (four female and four male) obtained from the NimStim set
(available at www.macbrain.org; identities of the faces used were: 8, 10, 14, 16, 27, 36,
39, and 45). Hare et al. (2005) suggested that participants have a more difficult time
withholding a response when the no-go (nontarget) stimulus is a happy expression
because happy faces are positive approach-related stimuli, while fearful faces are
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negative and alarming stimuli. Thus, while we were interested in the no-go trials in
general, we were particularly interested in performance on the happy no-go trials as these
trials were hypothesized to require greater self-control in order to successfully inhibit an
approach response.
Figure 4 is a schematic representation of a block of trials in which fearful
expressions were the go stimuli and happy expressions were the no-go stimuli.
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Insert Figure 4 about here
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Participants were instructed to respond to the target facial expression (fearful or
happy) by pressing the space bar on a keyboard. Stimuli were presented for 500ms with
an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 1000ms, during which a fixation cross was presented on
the screen. Therefore, trial length was 1500ms. Two 160-trial runs comprised the task. In
one run, the go stimulus (target) was happy expressions. The go stimulus (target) was
fearful expressions in the other run.
Thus far, we have collected data on this task from a sample of 57 Bing
participants, and data collection is still on-going. Preliminary results suggest that the
accuracy on trials in which the happy expressions were the no-go stimuli is significantly
related to self-regulatory abilities over the first four decades of their lives, starting in
preschool, as shown in Figure 5. Among the 56 participants with valid go/no-go data (one
participant’s data were not used because of extremely long latencies), the correlation was
r =.27 (p < .05). Delay of gratification at age four did not appear to be related to accuracy
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on trials in which fearful expressions were the no-go stimulus or to reaction times
associated with any trial types.
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Insert Figure 5 about here
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In addition, we also administered the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11), a
widely used measure of impulsivity consisting of 30 items assessing attentional, motor,
and nonplanning impulsiveness. As shown in Figure 6, participants, accuracy in happy
no-go trials was negatively and significantly correlated with this measure of impulsivity
(r = -.37, p < .01). The correlation between standardized delay and BIS-11 scores was -
.58, p < .001 (N = 56).
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Insert Figure 6 about here
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Exploring brain functions and structure underlying life-long patterns of self-
regulation
Ultimately our goal is to specify the neural correlates of these processes using
magnetic resonance imaging studies that are underway, although we are still in an early
stage of data collection. Prior research has elucidated areas of the brain that become
differentially activated when people engage in the three processes described above
(blocking unwanted information, suppressing unwanted thoughts, and inhibiting
responses), as well as the connections among areas of the brain that seem to play a key
role in these tasks. We are currently assessing these functional and anatomical features to
examine whether they are related to these three aspects of effective self-control.
Specifically, resolution of interference between goal irrelevant (but alluring) and relevant
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(and long-term goal-specific) information. There is by now a well-specified set of brain
regions that have been discovered in previous research that can be associated with the
ability to resolve interference between relevant and irrelevant information at the time of
encoding, at the time information is in working memory, and at the time when one is
producing a response. For example, the right inferior frontal gyrus has been well-
documented as a critical region in resolving interference in the go/no-go task which
involves response interference (e.g., Casey et al., 2002; Aron & Poldrack, 2006).
Likewise, the left inferior frontal gyrus region has been implicated when interference
occurs after information has entered working memory (e.g., Jonides & Nee, 2006). And
the dorsolateral prefrontal and posterior parietal regions appear critical to resolving
interference at the time of encoding (e.g., Casey et al., 2000; Nee & Jonides, 2008).
These tasks share a key feature with the delay-of-gratification task used in our
longitudinal studies: in all these cases, prepotent information interferes with other goal-
specific information, thus requiring processes of cognitive control to resolve the
interference. Specifically, we predict that participants with low levels of self-control,
compared with their high-control counterparts, will be characterized by less activity and
less refined connectivity (e.g., less myelination and orientation regularity) in
frontostriatal (Liston et al., 2006; Casey et al., 2007) and frontoparietal circuitry (Nagy,
Westerberg, & Klingberg, 2004) during performance of the cognitive control tasks. We
are testing this prediction by performing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional
MRI. Participants in this study have been invited to the Lucas Center for Imaging at
Stanford University and only a few have been scanned to date.
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Finally, the participants are reaching middle adulthood and the most productive
years of their lives. Therefore, we are continuing to assess consequential outcomes,
including occupational and marital status, social, cognitive, and emotional functioning, as
well as mental and physical health and behavior patterns relevant to mental and physical
health and economic and social well-being.
Implications and next challenges: Advancing NIA goals
Work by our team and other investigators shows that willpower (adaptive self-
regulation) in young children and adolescents is facilitated by a set of specific cognitive
and affective strategies that allow them to control their attention strategically and to
transform their thoughts, all in the service of effectively resisting impulsive responding
and delaying immediate gratification for the sake of later, more valued, future goals.
These cognitive-affective strategies serve to “cool” and thus reduce the emotion-eliciting
power of the impulse-triggering temptations and frustrations that otherwise undermine
even people’s best intentions to control their own impulsive behavior in light of delay
consequences.
Overall, decades of research on delay of gratification suggest an emerging view of
“willpower” and impulse control (e.g., Mischel et al.,1989; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004;
Kross, Mischel & Shoda, in press). Considered collectively, the results of the laboratory
experiments, conducted when the Bing study participants were in preschool, suggest that
the concept of willpower can be decomposed into at least two general classes of
neurocognitive processes: (1) attentional and inhibitory processes, often referred to as
cognitive-control processes; and (2) reappraisal processes, that control the mental
representation in working memory, transforming a tempting representation into another
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(e.g., a 5-year-old might succeed in delaying gratification by transforming his/her
perceptual representation of a single marshmallow into a representation of a pictured
marshmallow).
We suggest that the pre-schoolers who were high-delayers made more use of certain
inhibitory processes than did those who were low-delayers, and it is this difference in
inhibitory ability that persisted into adulthood and led to the sequelae of being able to
delay gratification and the advantageous health-protective outcomes and adaptive social-
cognitive development that followed. The relation we propose between cognitive control
and willpower, as manifested in the delay-of-gratification studies and their resulting
sequelae, is this: Willpower requires skill in overcoming tempting immediate rewards,
distractions, and frustrations in favor of greater but delayed rewards. This skill, in turn,
requires encoding only information from the environment that is relevant, keeping
wanted information active in working memory and suppressing unwanted information,
and selecting desired responses while withholding responses that are not optimal.
Findings so far are encouraging but still tentative: with further follow-up assessments we
hope to test these hypotheses with greater precision.
From preschool impulse control to social and economic behaviors in aging. With
NIA goals in mind, we are also including genetics in this project, as well as gathering
other types of aging-relevant data from our participants now, ranging from brain imaging
data to information about such economic behaviors as savings, retirement planning,
health care planning/protection, and mental and physical health. By obtaining such
information on our unique longitudinal sample, we are laying the groundwork for
extending the study into the coming decades to identify factors that underlie lifespan
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longitudinal trajectories of self-regulation and consequent behavioral outcomes. Of
particular interest for understanding economic behavior over the life span, we are
including standard measures of temporal discounting, thus enabling systematic
comparison of such measures with the predictive and explanatory value of our behavioral
measures of delay of gratification and self-control. We are now well-positioned to
conduct such assessments over the life span, obtaining comprehensive data that are
relevant for our original Bing participants now at mid-life, their young children, and their
parents (in many cases still surviving) now in their 70s, thus spanning three generations.
Concluding remarks. Taken collectively, findings over many decades from the Bing
study converge with those from many other studies of “willpower” and executive
functions at the social-cognitive (e.g., Mischel & Ayduk, 2004), and brain (Casey et al.,
1997; Hare et al., 2005)levels point to a clear, albeit still tentative, set of conclusions. The
skills and motivations that enable the phenomenon of “willpower”, and particularly the
ability to inhibit prepotent “hot” responses and impulses in the service of future
consequences, appear to be important early life markers for long-term adaptive mental
and physical development. They predict a wide variety of consequential life outcomes,
including social and economic well-being and higher educational and achievement levels.
Further, these skills seem to have long-term protective effects that may importantly
influence how a variety of hugely problematic dispositional vulnerabilities develop and
play out (e.g., high delay ability early in life predicts fewer features of borderline
personality, less substance use). Ultimately it may be possible to target and harness the
underlying mechanisms into readily teachable interventions for sustained and
consequential behavior change. Our research currently seeks to identify, develop and test
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the tool kit of basic cognitive skills that enable willpower. Most encouraging, the
cognitive and affective strategies that underlie this aptitude may be fairly easy to teach
and learn (e.g., Bandura & Mischel, 1965; Mischel, et al., 1989; Mischel & Ayduk,
2004).
Relevant to NIA goals, the Bing cohort and the data it has already yielded
provides a unique basis for future studies of the ageing process as these participants move
into the next phase of the life cycle. The possibility that the self-regulatory competencies
reflected in the ability to delay gratification exert benign and protective influences on the
ageing process seems a particularly exciting prospect for further investigation. Such work
is certain to benefit from inter-disciplinary teams working at multiple levels of analysis
from the social cognitive and behavioral, to the neural, to the genetic.
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Author Notes
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Walter Mischel
([email protected]) or Yuichi Shoda ([email protected]). The Bing
Longitudinal Project was supported by a number of grants from NIMH and NSF to
Walter Mischel, of which the most recent and active is MH39349. Ayduk, Berman,
Gotlib, Casey, Jonides, Kross, Teslovich, Wilson and Zayas are listed alphabetically.
Shoda served as the overall PI, funded by NSF, for the most recent wave of data
collection from the Bing longitudinal study that yielded the new data reported here.
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Figure 1
Life-long trajectories of high vs. low self-regulation groups
-1.5
-1
-0.5
0
0.5
1
1.5
1968-1974 1984 1993 2003
Year
High self-regulators Low self-regulators
Se
lf-r
eg
ula
tio
n i
nd
ex
(Z
)
Note: Bars around the mean are standard errors
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Figure 2
A schematic of the "Suppress" task showing the timeline of events on three typical trials.
A memory set in two colors is presented, followed by a cue to forget half the items in the
indicated color. Then one of three sorts of probes ensues: a probe that matches an item
in memory, a probe that never appeared on that trial, or a probe that was one of the items
to be forgotten.
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Figure 3
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Figure 4
Figure 4. Temporal layout of the emotional go/nogo task for the condition in which happy expressions
were the nontargets.
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Figure 5
Plot of correlation between nogo performance for happy expressions in adulthood and
same participants standardized delay score at age 4 years.
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Figure 6
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