Psycology 6

�Willpower� over the life span: decomposing self-regulation Walter Mischel,1 Ozlem Ayduk,2 Marc G. Berman,3 B. J. Casey,4 Ian H. Gotlib,5 John Jonides,3 Ethan Kross,3

Theresa Teslovich,4 Nicole L. Wilson,6 Vivian Zayas,7 and Yuichi Shoda6

1Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 2Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 3Department of

Psychology, University of Michigan, 4Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, 5Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 6Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, and 7Department of

Psychology, Cornell University

In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple �marshmallow test� to measure preschoolers� ability to delay gratifi- cation. In numerous follow-up studies over 40 years, this �test� proved to have surprisingly significant predictive validity for consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. In this article, we review key findings from the longitudinal work and from earlier delay-of-gratification experiments examining the cognitive appraisal and attention control strategies that underlie this ability. Further, we outline a set of hypotheses that emerge from the intersection of these findings with research on �cognitive control� mechanisms and their neural bases. We discuss implications of these hypotheses for decomposing the phenomena of �willpower� and the lifelong individual differences in self-regulatory ability that were identified in the earlier research and that are currently being pursued.

Keywords: self-regulation; delay of gratification

INTRODUCTION Resisting temptation in favor of long-term goals is an

essential component of social and cognitive development

and of societal and economic gain. In the late 1960s,

Mischel and colleagues sought to identify and demystify

the processes that underlie ‘willpower’ or self-control

in the face of temptation in preschoolers. With that

goal, Mischel developed the delay-of-gratification paradigm

(popularized in the media as the ‘marshmallow test’).

This now-classic laboratory situation measures how long

a child can resist settling for a small, immediately avail-

able reward (e.g. one mini-marshmallow) in order to get

a larger reward later (e.g. two mini-marshmallows;

e.g. Mischel et al., 1972; Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel and

Ayduk, 2004).

What began as a set of experiments with preschoolers

turned into a life-span developmental study, providing a

unique behavioral archive for tracing the development and

implications of early self-regulatory ability over the life

course. 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

original preschool participants. Given these provocative

findings and the methodological advances now available

for probing self-control with increasing depth at multiple

levels of analysis, this longitudinal sample provides a

unique opportunity for understanding the basic cognitive

and neural mechanisms underlying ‘willpower’ and enabling

effective self-regulation. In this article, we highlight the im-

portant early findings from this research program, and then

describe a new era in this research currently being pursued

by an interdisciplinary team of investigators working with

samples from the original studies, now focused on the bio-

logical substrates of self-regulation.

To describe our sample briefly, over 500 original partici-

pants, primarily children of faculty and graduate students at

Stanford University during the late 1960s and early 1970s,

completed the delay-of-gratification task at the age of 4 years

at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. The study was not ori-

ginally designed as a longitudinal study; consequently, re-

cords of participants’ addresses were not kept up-to-date.

Nevertheless, over one-third of the participants responded

to follow-up mailings sent to their original addresses and to

addresses identified through an Internet search about a

decade after their initial testing, and once a decade there-

after. The current data collection effort focuses on these

participants, who now reside in a variety of locations

throughout the USA and beyond.

Received 1 October 2009; Accepted 11 August 2010

Advance Access publication 19 September 2010

The Bing Longitudinal Project was supported by a number of grants from NIMH and NSF to Walter Mischel

and Yuichi Shoda, of which the most recent and active are National Institutes of Health Grant MH39349 and

National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0624305. Ayduk, Berman, Casey, Gotlib, 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.

Correspondence should be addressed to Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, Columbia University,

New York, NY, USA. E-mail: [email protected] or Yuichi Shoda, Dept. of Psychology, University of

Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Email [email protected]

doi:10.1093/scan/nsq081 SCAN (2011) 6, 252^256

� The Author (2010). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF DELAY OF GRATIFICATION: THE LONGITUDINAL STUDIES The significance and predictive validity of delay ability in

preschoolers for social, cognitive and mental health out-

comes in later life have been demonstrated in a variety of

domains. For example, the number of seconds preschoolers

waited to obtain a preferred but delayed treat in this diag-

nostic laboratory situation predicted significantly higher

SAT scores and better social cognitive and emotional

coping in adolescence (Mischel et al., 1988; Shoda et al.,

1990). In follow-up studies, preschool delay ability contin-

ued to predict later outcomes in adulthood including higher

educational achievement, higher sense of self-worth, better

ability to cope with stress and less cocaine/crack use particu-

larly in individuals vulnerable to psychosocial maladjust-

ment (Ayduk et al., 2000). Such findings are consistent

with prospective, longitudinal studies in separate samples

using different assessments of ‘willpower’. For instance,

Kubzansky et al. (2008) found that ratings of the ability to

stay focused on a task and persistence in problem solving at

the age of 7 years by a trained psychologist predicted physical

health 30 years later, even when controlling for childhood

social environment and child health. Another study found

that preschoolers who, after initially deciding to wait for a

more desirable delayed reward, settled for an immediately

available but less desirable reward, were 30% more likely to

be overweight at the age of 11 years than those who contin-

ued to wait for the delayed reward (Seeyave et al., 2009; see

also Francis and Susman, 2009 for a similar finding).

Especially exciting, early delay ability seems to buffer

against the development of a variety of dispositional vulner-

abilities later in life, such as features of borderline personality

disorder (Ayduk et al., 2008). Parallel findings have been

reported with diverse demographic populations, including

middle school children in the South Bronx, NY (Ayduk

et al., 2000), and children in a summer residential treatment

program for youths at high risk for problems of aggression/

externalization and depression/withdrawal (e.g. Rodriguez

et al., 1989). For example, delay ability predicted less physical

and verbal aggression, less bullying behavior and higher

self-worth and self-esteem. These findings underline the im-

portance of uncovering strategies that children can use to

self-regulate and overcome immediate temptations. These

strategies may ultimately help them later in life to overcome

increasingly demanding contexts that require exertion of

‘willpower’.

EXPERIMENTS ON COGNITIVE TRANSFORMATIONS/ REAPPRAISAL: STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE DELAY A series of early experiments revealed a number of strategies

that enable delay of gratification, allowing individuals to

resist temptation in favor of long-term goals. Broadly speak-

ing, these strategies involve redirection of attentional focus

or altering the cognitive representation of the object of

temptation. For example, self-distraction by looking away

from the temptation can be an effective strategy to reduce

the frustration of continuing to wait; this is observed in

successful preschool delayers compared with those who

cannot delay (Mischel et al., 1972, 1989; Mischel 1974).

Another strategy is reappraisal or reframing of a situation

away from the ‘hot’, appetitive or consummatory features of

the tempting stimuli toward ‘cooler’ representations. For ex-

ample, in an effort to resist the temptation to get the one

marshmallow available immediately, rather than continuing

to wait for two marshmallows, an effective strategy is to

envision the marshmallow as a cloud or a little cotton ball,

rather than as a sweet, delectable treat. Such reappraisal

processes have been shown to be highly effective in enhan-

cing delay of gratification. The same preschool child who

yielded immediately to the temptation by representing the

rewards focusing on consummatory features (e.g. its yummy,

sweet, chewy taste) could wait for long periods of delay

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 et al., 1972;

Mischel, 1974; Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel and Ayduk,

2004). Although these experimental demonstrations have

been short term and confined to brief laboratory situations,

they suggest that the strategies required to successfully self-

regulate can be taught.

In sum, the early experiments examining delay of gratifi-

cation showed that mental representations that are ‘hot’ or

appetitive (consummatory) hinder delay because they make

it too difficult to resist the prepotent response of reaching for

the immediately available treat. In contrast, representations

based on attention to the ‘cool’, cognitive, abstract aspects of

the situation have the opposite effect (Metcalfe and Mischel,

1999; Mischel and Ayduk, 2004). Thus, it follows that delay

of gratification in this paradigm depends on the ability to

control the aspects of the situation to which one attends and

on the ability to control how it is mentally represented.

IN SEARCH OF UNDERLYING COGNITIVE MECHANISMS: CURRENT DIRECTIONS The ability to resist temptation in favor of long-term goals,

as observed in the delay-of-gratification task, has been sug-

gested to be a form of cognitive control (Eigsti et al., 2006).

A key component of cognitive control processes is the ability

to suppress or override competing attentional and behavioral

responses (Kahneman et al., 1983; Allport, 1987; Cohen and

Servan-Schreiber, 1992, Casey et al., 2000, 2002; Jonides and

Nee, 2006). This process has been included in a number of

theories of attention and memory (Baddeley, 1986; Shallice,

1988; Cohen et al., 1992; Desimone and Duncan, 1995) and

referred to using a variety of terms (e.g. ‘central executive’,

‘attentional bias’, ‘cognitive control’). The terminology sug-

gests a mechanism that is required to direct or guide appro-

priate actions (Miller and Cohen, 2001). For example,

Shallice (1988) proposed a ‘supervisory attention system’

as a system for inhibiting or replacing routine, reflexive

‘Willpower’over the life span: decomposing self-regulation SCAN (2011) 253

behaviors with more appropriate behaviors. Desimone and

Duncan (1995) describe top-down biasing signals as import-

ant in attending to relevant information by virtue of mutual

inhibition or suppression of irrelevant information (see also

Jonides and Nee, 2006).

Although the description of cognitive control suggests a

unitary process, the neural mechanisms underlying control

may differ as a function of the type of information being

suppressed and the stage of processing at which control must

be exerted (Casey et al., 2000; Casey 2005). A recent

meta-analysis of over 40 neuroimaging studies of a variety

of tasks measuring cognitive control supports this notion

(Nee et al., 2007). Nee et al. (2007) showed non-overlapping

patterns of brain activation across a number of cognitive

control tasks including Stroop, Go/Nogo and Flanker tasks.

This conclusion is supported by the lack of (or low) behav-

ioral correlations among diverse tasks that all allegedly

recruit cognitive control (Tipper and Baylis, 1987; Kramer

et al., 1994; Earles et al., 1997; Grant and Dagenbach, 2000;

Shilling et al., 2002). Thus, both imaging and behavioral

evidence suggests that processes involved in resolving inter-

ference come from a ‘family of functions’ rather than from a

‘single unitary construct’ (Dempster, 1993; Harnishfeger,

1995; Nigg, 2000; Nelson et al., 2003; Friedman and

Miyake, 2004; Nee et al., 2007; Nee and Jonides, 2008,

2009), and that these distinct functions can be linked to

distinct underlying neurobiology.

From a behavioral perspective, the critical component of

the delay task is to resolve the conflict between taking one

treat now vs waiting for two treats later. However, the spe-

cific cognitive information processes that enable delay of

gratification have not been well characterized. Is delay

achieved by: (i) blocking the entry of unwanted information

(e.g. shutting out information by paying attention to some-

thing else); (ii) suppressing unwanted thoughts (e.g. by

thinking about something else) or (iii) stopping an action

in favor of an alternative one (e.g. suppressing a response or

impulse)? We are using a set of laboratory procedures de-

signed to measure each of these possible cognitive processes

to further delineate the basic mechanisms underlying delay.

EXPLORING BRAIN FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURES UNDERLYING DELAY OF GRATIFICATION Ultimately, our goal is to delineate the neural correlates of

these processes using magnetic resonance imaging. These

studies are underway, although we are still in the early

stages of data collection. Prior research has identified areas

of the brain that become differentially activated when people

engage in the three processes described above (blocking un-

wanted information, suppressing unwanted thoughts and

inhibiting responses), as well as connections among areas

of the brain that seem to play a key role in these tasks. We

are currently assessing these functional and anatomical fea-

tures to examine whether they are related to these three

aspects of effective self-control.

Specifically, we predict that participants with consistently

low levels of self-control, compared with their consistently

high-control counterparts, will be characterized by less

refined connectivity (e.g. less myelination and orientation

regularity) in frontostriatal (Liston et al., 2006; Casey

et al., 2007) and frontoparietal circuitry (Jonides et al.,

1998, 2000; Nagy et al., 2004), which are critical for effective

cognitive control, but elevated activity in this circuitry when

correctly performing cognitive control tasks, especially those

that require control in the face of incentives. We are testing

this prediction by conducting diffusion tensor imaging

(DTI) and functional MRI. Participants in this study have

been invited to come to the Lucas Center for Imaging at

Stanford University; several individuals have now been

scanned.

Finally, because the participants are reaching middle

adulthood and the most productive years of their lives, we

are assessing consequential outcomes such as occupational

and marital status, social, cognitive and emotional function-

ing as well as mental and physical health and behavior pat-

terns relevant to mental and physical health and economic

and social well-being.

IMPLICATIONS AND NEXT CHALLENGES In our ongoing interdisciplinary project, we suggest that the

preschoolers who were able to delay gratification made more

use of certain inhibitory processes than did those who were

low-delayers, and that it is this difference in inhibitory ability

that persisted into adulthood and led to the sequelae of their

ability to delay gratification in preschool, such as advanta-

geous health-protective outcomes and adaptive social cogni-

tive development. The relation we propose between

cognitive control and willpower, as manifested in the

delay-of-gratification studies and their resulting sequelae, is

as follows: willpower requires skill in overcoming tempting

immediate rewards, distractions and frustrations in favor of

greater but delayed rewards. This skill, in turn, requires that

individuals encode only information from the environment

that is relevant, keeping wanted information active in work-

ing memory and suppressing unwanted information and se-

lecting 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.

Concluding remarks Taken collectively, findings from the Bing study over many

decades converge with those from other studies of ‘will-

power’ and executive functions at the social cognitive (e.g.

Mischel and Ayduk, 2004) and brain levels of analysis (Casey

et al., 1997, 2000; Ainslie and Monterosso, 2004; McClure

et al., 2004; Hare et al., 2005; Aron and Poldrack, 2006; Nee

and Jonides, 2008; Somerville et al., in press). They lead to a

clear, albeit still tentative, set of hypotheses about the

254 SCAN (2011) W.Mischel et al.

underlying cognitive mechanisms, as discussed above, that

we are currently testing.

Ultimately, it may be possible to target and harness the

underlying mechanisms into readily teachable interventions

to achieve sustained and consequential behavior change. The

early experimental studies of the cognitive strategies that

enable delay of gratification demonstrated that at least in

laboratory situations, it is possible to dramatically enhance

this ability through the use of relatively simple attention

control and cognitive re-appraisal manipulations (Mischel

et al., 1989; Mischel and Ayduk, 2004).

To recapitulate, 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 devel-

opment. The health protective and other adaptive conse-

quential life outcomes predicted by delay of gratification

ability early in life, as reviewed at the start of this article,

document the importance of this ability for well-being from

childhood into mid-life.

For those who are interested in the skills, behavior pat-

terns, cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying adaptive

and healthy aging, the Bing Longitudinal cohort provides a

truly unique opportunity. As these participants move into

the next phase of the lives, the possibility that the

self-regulatory competencies reflected in the ability to delay

gratification exert adaptive and protective influences on the

aging process is a particularly exciting prospect for further

investigation. Such work is certain to benefit from interdis-

ciplinary teams working at multiple levels of analysis from

the social cognitive and behavioral, to the neural and genetic.

This work will also permit a close examination of individual

differences and psychobiological processes that underlie im-

portant outcomes, ranging from physical and mental health

and well-being to economic, social and educational achieve-

ment over the life course.

Conflict of Interest None declared.

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