Walter Mischel

• Columbia University

How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income,...

How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967-1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income,...

In the United States over one-third of the population, including children and adolescents, are overweight or obese. Despite the prevalence of obesity, few studies have examined how food cravings and the ability to regulate them change throughout development. Here, we addressed this gap in knowledge by examining structural brain and behavioral chang...

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 perf...

Understanding how and why affective responses change with age is central to characterizing typical and atypical emotional development. Prior work has emphasized the role of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC), which show age-related changes in function and connectivity. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to un...

Emotion regulation is a critical life skill that develops throughout childhood and adolescence. Despite this development in emotional processes, little is known about how the underlying brain systems develop with age. This study examined emotion regulation in 112 individuals (aged 6–23 years) as they viewed aversive and neutral images using a reapp...

On a daily basis, we place our lives in the hands of strangers. From dentists to pilots, we make inferences about their competence to perform their jobs and consequently to keep us from harm. Here we explore whether the perceived competence of others can alter one's anticipation of pain. In two studies, participants (Receivers) believed their chanc...

Although one third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese, developmental changes in food craving and the ability to regulate craving remain poorly understood. We addressed this knowledge gap by examining behavioral and neural responses to images of appetizing unhealthy foods in individuals ages 6 through 23 years. On close trials (asse...

The 2014 Tanner Symposium features a panel of speakers discussing current research in the areas of volition and self-control and the effects of that research for issues of public policy.

A central focus of psychological and behavioral sciences is to identify the fac­tors that enable and hinder delay of gratification. In this chapter, we review findings from the original preschool delay of gratification work that identify key attentional–cognitive control strategies that enable (vs. hinder) delay. We also describe recent behavioral...

The ability to delay gratification in childhood has been linked to positive outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Here we examine a subsample of participants from a seminal longitudinal study of self-control throughout a subject's life span. Self-control, first studied in children at age 4 years, is now re-examined 40 years later, on a task that r...

Objective: To assess whether preschoolers' performance on a delay of gratification task would predict their body mass index (BMI) 30 years later. Study design: In the late 1960s/early 1970s, 4-year-olds from a university-affiliated preschool completed the classic delay of gratification task. As part of a longitudinal study, a subset (n = 164; 57...

We examined the neural basis of self-regulation in individuals from a cohort of preschoolers who performed the delay-of-gratification task 4 decades ago. Nearly 60 individuals, now in their mid-forties, were tested on "hot" and "cool" versions of a go/nogo task to assess whether delay of gratification in childhood predicts impulse control abilities...

Although children and adolescents vary in their chronic tendencies to adaptively versus maladaptively reflect over negative feelings, the psychological mechanisms underlying these different types of self-reflection among youngsters are unknown. We addressed this issue in the present research by examining the role that self-distancing plays in disti...

In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple 'marshmallow test' to measure preschoolers' ability to delay gratification. 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,...

How similar are the experiences of social rejection and physical pain? Extant research suggests that a network of brain regions that support the affective but not the sensory components of physical pain underlie both experiences. Here we demonstrate that when rejection is powerfully elicited--by having people who recently experienced an unwanted br...

The ability to control craving for substances that offer immediate rewards but whose long-term consumption may pose serious risks lies at the root of substance use disorders and is critical for mental and physical health. Despite its importance, the neural systems supporting this ability remain unclear. Here, we investigated this issue using functi...

Reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict were analyzed using the Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) model. Content analyses of participants' open-ended reactions to the verdict revealed that differences in the accessibility of cognitive-affective units and their subsequent activation pathways characterized respondents' reactions, but partic...

Self-control is fundamental to human survival and success in the modern world. Consequently, a critical challenge is to understand the processes that underlie it. The main goal of this chapter is to address this issue to demystify the self-control construct. The chapter begins with the assumption that to make sense of the psychological processes th...

Cigarette craving is an important contributor to cigarette smoking, and clinical approaches that focus on regulation of craving are effective in reducing rates of relapse. However, a laboratory model that targets the use of cognitive strategies to regulate craving is lacking. To develop such a model, twenty heavy cigarette smokers (>12/day), twenty...

The original CAPS formulation focused on the role of the individual's CAPS system in relation to situations, formalizing a person-situation framework. Subsequent research and theorizing on the culturally embedded CAPS system (C-CAPS) began to spell out how culture, context, and group-level processes intersect with both persons and situations. The c...

Little is known about neural responses in the early automatic-stage processing of rejection cues from a partner. Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer a window to study processes that may be difficult to detect via behavioral methods. We focused on the N400 ERP component, which reflects the amount of semantic processing prompted by a target. When p...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that rejection sensitivity (RS) and executive control (EC) jointly predict borderline personality (BP) features. We expected high RS to be related to increased vulnerability for BP features specifically in people who also had difficulties in executive control (EC). Study 1 tested this hypothesis using a sample of c...

Psychologists and nonpsychologists alike assume that people have distinct, enduring personalities. Ample evidence exists that individuals do differ reliably in what they do and think and feel in any given situation (e.g., Mischel, Shoda, & Ayduk, 2008). But, historically, it has remained surprisingly difficult to demonstrate the consistency of suc...

Two studies examined the interactive effect of receptive verbal intelligence measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and self-regulatory competencies measured in the delay of gratification paradigm on boys’ aggression. Study 1 participants (N=98) were middle school, low-income boys primarily ethnic minority. Participants for Study 2 (N=59)...

In this longitudinal study, the proportion of time preschoolers directed their attention away from rewarding stimuli during a delay-of-gratification task was positively associated with efficiency (greater speed without reduced accuracy) at responding to targets in a go/no-go task more than 10 years later. The overall findings suggest that preschool...

In contrast to traditional theories of personality, the CAPS perspective is a meta-theory that is deliberately “content-free”. The generalisability of the theory depends on how widely its basic, common principles and methods can be applied to identify the constructs (e.g. situation-specific encodings, beliefs, values, etc.) relevant to a given doma...

Two experiments examined the psychological operations that enable individuals to process negative emotions and experiences without increasing negative affect. In Study 1, type of self-perspective (self-immersed vs. self-distanced) and type of emotional focus (what vs. why) were experimentally manipulated following the recall of an anger-eliciting i...

Three studies investigated conditions in which perceivers view dispositions and situations as interactive, rather than independent, causal forces when making judgments about another's personality. Study 1 showed that perceivers associated 5 common trait terms (e.g., friendly and shy) with characteristic if...then... (if situation a, then the person...

A prospective study examined the effects of maternal unresponsivity and of toddlers’ own negative affect on the child's subsequent ability to use effective attentional control strategies in preschool. Maternal and child behaviors were measured in situations that varied in the level of stress to test the hypothesis that behaviors in high stress situ...

To build a science of the person, the most basic question was, and remains, how can one identify and understand the psychological invariance that distinctively characterizes an individual and that underlies the variations in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that occur across contexts and over time? This question proved particularly difficult bec...

The implications of conceptualizing personality as a cognitive-affective processing system that functions as a parallel constraint satisfaction network are explored. Computer simulations show that from dynamic interactions among the units in such a network, a set of stable attractor states and functionally equivalent groups of situations emerge, su...

Drawing on the hot-cool systems analysis of self-regulation, we examined whether attentionalfocus mediates the negativity of cognitive-affective reactions to interpersonal rejection. The hypothesis was that whereas a hot, arousing focus to representing rejection experiences should increase anger-hostility, accessing the cool system through distract...

The highly valued goals of the self too often turn into failed good intentions. Even when the goals are important and motivation is high, they easily become difficult to achieve in the face of temptations, frustrations and obstacles. The model and research discussed here address how people can exert willpower even when the situational pull to give...

Traditional approaches have long considered situations as “noise” or “error” that obscures the consistency of personality and its invariance. Therefore, it has been customary to average the individual's behavior on any given dimension (e.g., conscientiousness) across different situations. Contradicting this assumption and practice, recent studies h...

Two studies examined whether the detrimental effects of attention to rewards on delay of gratification in waiting situations holds—or reverses—in working situations. In Study 1, preschoolers waited or worked for desired delayed rewards. Delay times increased when children worked in the presence of rewards but, as predicted, this increase was due to...

Although Person × Situation (P × S) interactionism is central in current social-cognitive conceptions of personality organization, its implications for the encoding of the self remain unexplored. Two studies examined the causal role of P × S interactionism in self-encoding on affect regulation and discriminative social perception. Following failure...

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...

Toddlers' use of effective attention deployment strategies to cope with separation from the mother and with maternal behavior predicted the use of effective delay-of-gratification strategies at age 5, even though the contexts, measures, and manifest behaviors were different. Toddlers who used distraction strategies during a brief separation from th...

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...

A core assumption of personality is that individuals are characterized by qualities that are relatively invariant across situations and over time. Historically, this led to a search for evidence of high consistency in a person's behaviour across diverse situations. Empirical studies have shown, however, that, at least for behaviours of interest to...

Argues that what is needed now and for the future in personality psychology is a broad, coherent working framework within which to conceptualize and conduct research to understand the intra-individual dynamics of personality and their expression, as well as to describe the important ways in which people are different. The authors believe that what...

In its commitment to eschewing internal causes, the teleological behavioristic analysis endeavors to explain self-control through the temporal patterning of behavior, but it leaves unanswered the most challenging questions. It fails to account convincingly for experimental findings in which self-control behavior was predictably changed by verbal in...

Discriminative facility is conceptualized as an aspect of social intelligence and information processing that refers to sensitivity to subtle cues about the psychological meaning of the situation (e.g., about the expectations and motivations of the people in it and the scripts required). Two studies explored the relationship between discriminative...

In nomothetic analyses, the cross-situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior, assessed in vivo in a camp setting, depended on the similarity in the psychological features of situations. As predicted by the social–cognitive theory of personality, idiographic analyses revealed that individuals were characterized by stable pr...

Research on personality judgment traditionally has assumed that the perceiver is guided intuitively by an implicit theory of global situation-free dispositions. In contrast, the cognitive social model of personality hypothesizes more contextualized person variables (e.g., how the individual encodes the situation, and the relevant expectancies it ac...

The components of self-regulation were analyzed, extending the self-imposed delay of gratification paradigm to older children with social adjustment problems. Delay behavior was related to a network of conceptually relevant cognitive person variables, consisting of attention deployment strategies during delay, knowledge of delay rules, and intellig...

The view that the intuitive psychologist exaggerates the consistency of personality implies that dispositional constructs are condition-free summary statements about generalized behavioral tendencies. This article considers the alternative view that dispositional constructs summarize specific condition—behavior contingencies. Despite their conditio...

Four experiments tested whether people are prone to construe an individual's behavior in terms of global traits when they anticipate verbal communication about that person. In Exp I, 24 undergraduates who expected to communicate their impressions of a target person generated a greater number of global trait descriptions and made a greater number of...

This paper deals with one view of cognitive social learning and its applications to the psychological analysis of moral competence and moral conduct. The concept of cognitive and behavioral construction competencies is explained and cognitive competencies are said to be among the very best predictors of "honesty" in conduct. Moral competence includ...

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