Psychology 2550A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Toilet Training, Stimulus Control, Extraversion And Introversion
14 Dec 2016
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Chapter 17 6/27/2014 4:58:00 PM
Introduction
Children who at age 4 were able to wait longer for a desired but delayed
outcome tended to get higher SAT scores at age 16 and had fewer drug and
interpersonal problems at age 32
What is “willpower” psychologically, and what makes it possible?
Self-Regulatory Processes in Goal pursuit
Life tasks are projects to which individuals commit themselves during
particular periods in their lives
Goals are organized hierarchically into superordinate and subordinate goals
People assess their own progress towards goals using their own standards to
self-evaluate
Why Self-Regulate?
Most of what people do in their goal pursuit is virtually automatic
But while these automatic mental-emotional processes are adaptive for most
life functions, they are not always
Self-regulation requires both motivation and competence
Self-regulatory competencies refer to the cognitive and attentional
mechanisms that help us execute goal-directed behavior
The biological level: Effortful control
Researchers have described the anterior attentional system that regulates
the pathways involved in executive functions throughout the cortex
This brain system enables effortful control, or willpower, in goal pursuit by
allowing people to regulate their attention, control thoughts flexibility, focus
attention in perception & switch attention between tasks
The trait-dispositional level
Self-report measures of attention control are related positively to
extraversion and negatively to anxiety and impulsivity
Ego control refers to the degree of impulse control in such functions as
inhibition of aggression and the ability to plan
Ego resilience refers to the individual’s ability to adapt to environmental
demands by appropriately modifying his or her habitual level of ego control
Together these two constructs represent core qualities for adaptive
functioning
Block & Martin rated children’s level of ego control and observed their
behavior in experimental delay of gratification situations
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They exposed the children to a frustrating situation in which a barrier
separated the child from desired and expected toys
The undercontrolling children reacted more violently to the frustrating
barrier than did overcontrolling, inhibited children
The undercontrolling youngsters also became less constructive in their play
Toddlers who were rated as secure and competent also scored higher on
measures of ego resiliency when they reached the age of 4-5 years
Ego-resilient children at age 3 are also viewed as more popular, competent,
secure and attractive at later ages
Ego resilience is also related to delay of immediate gratification for the sake
of more valued but delayed outcomes
Pyschodynamic-motivational level
Showed the importance of insight to overcome unconscious defensive and
self-defeating distortions and irrationality
Behavioral-conditioning level
Showed the importance of automatic processes and the power of stimulus
control
The social cognitive and phenomenological-humanistic levels
Examined how mental activities during goal pursuit influence the ability to
persist and reach the goal when there are strong approach-avoidance
conflicts
Showed that how one construes and interprets the situation, and deploys
attention while attempting effortful control, predictably influences effortful
control ability
Through exploration of constructive alternatives, individuals can overcome
perceptions
Delay of gratification
The ability to voluntarily delay immediate gratification, to tolerate self-
imposed delays of reward, is at the core of most concepts of willpower, ego
strength and ego resilience
It’s essential for:
The achievement of long-term goals
Toilet training
Ego development
A useful method for the study of willpower is the preschool delay of
gratification paradigm, also called the marshmallow test
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This method has been used extensively to study self-regulatory processes at
early periods in development
Measuring delay of gratification ability
The experimenter creates a dilemma in which a young child (typically 4 y.o)
is shown some desired treats (2 oreo cookies, marshmallows)
The child faces a conflict: wait until the experimenter returns and get two of
the desired treats, or, ring a bell, and the experimenter will come back
immediately- but then the child gets only one treat
After the child chooses to wait for the larger outcome, the delay soon
becomes very difficult and frustration grows quickly
Group one: children waited with both immediate (less preferred) and
delayed facing them
Group two: neither reward was visible
Groups 3 & 4: only immediate or delayed reward was visible, respectively
Contradicting earlier predictions, Mischel and colleagues found that children
could wait longer when the rewards were not available for attention
Cooling strategies
Children seemed to manage to wait for the preferred reward for long periods
apparently by converting the aversive waiting situation into a more pleasant,
nonwaiting one
They used elaborate self-distraction techniques: they talked to themselves,
sang little songs, invented games
Effective self-control is helped by mentally transforming the difficult into the
interesting, while still maintaining the activity on which the ultimate reward
depends
Hot and cool construal. The outcomes or rewards in this type of situation
may be construed in terms of their “hot” consummatory properties or in
terms of the “cool” informative properties
If young children focus spontaneously on these hot, arousing qualities of the
reward (eg. Sweet taste of the cookie), they increase their own frustration
and arousal, making it more difficult to continue to wait
In contrast, a psychologically distant or cool representation of the rewards
(e.g round shape of cookie) has the opposite effect on self-regulation,
enhancing goal-directed waiting.
Flexible attention. Adaptive self-regulation often requires shifting attention
flexibility between hot and cool representations of the reward
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