Delayed gratification
Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, is the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in favor of a more valuable and long-lasting reward later. It involves forgoing a smaller, immediate pleasure to achieve a larger or more enduring benefit in the future. A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.
A person's ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills such as patience, impulse control, self-control and willpower, all of which are involved in self-regulation. Broadly, self-regulation encompasses a person's capacity to adapt the self as necessary to meet demands of the environment. Delaying gratification is the reverse of delay discounting, which is "the preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger but delayed rewards" and refers to the "fact that the subjective value of reward decreases with increasing delay to its receipt". It is theorized that the ability to choose delayed rewards is under the control of the cognitive-affective personality system.
Several factors can affect a person's ability to delay gratification. Cognitive strategies, such as the use of distracting or "cool" thoughts, can increase delay ability, as can neurological factors, such as strength of connections in the frontal-striatal pathway. Behavioral researchers have focused on the contingencies that govern choices to delay reinforcement, and have studied how to manipulate those contingencies in order to lengthen delay. Age plays a role too; children under five years old demonstrate a marked lack of delayed gratification ability and most commonly seek immediate gratification. A very small difference between males and females suggest that females may be better at delaying rewards. The inability to choose to wait rather than seek immediate reinforcement is related to avoidance-related behaviors such as procrastination, and to other clinical diagnoses such as anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, discussed the ego's role in balancing the immediate pleasure-driven desires of the id with the morality-driven choices of the superego. Funder and Block expanded psychoanalytic research on the topic, and found that impulsivity, or a lack of ego-control, has a stronger effect on one's ability to choose delayed rewards if a reward is more desirable. Finally, environmental and social factors play a role; for example, delay is affected by the self-imposed or external nature of a reward contingency, by the degree of task engagement required during the delay, by early mother-child relationship characteristics, by a person's previous experiences with unreliable promises of rewards, and by contemporary sociocultural expectations and paradigms. Research on animals comprises another body of literature describing delayed gratification characteristics that are not as easily tested in human samples, such as ecological factors affecting the skill.
Background
Cognitive-affective processing system
One well-supported theory of self-regulation, called the Cognitive-affective personality system, suggests that delaying gratification results from an ability to use "cool" regulatory strategies over "hot regulatory strategies, when faced with provocation. In "hot" processing, a person thinks intently about the object causing temptation, and especially about its most appealing elements, and is subsequently less able to resist the immediate reward. The use of cool strategies can translate to more control over behavior. Effective "cool" strategies involve distraction and restructuring the perception of the tempting stimulus to make it seem less appealing. For example, in one study of pre-adolescent boys with behavioral problems, the boys showed a reduction in verbal and physical aggression when they used "cool" strategies, such as looking away or distracting themselves. The most effective type of distraction seems to be imagining another desirable reward, which takes attention away from the immediate temptations.Stanford marshmallow experiment
The seminal research on delayed gratification – the now-famous "marshmallow experiment" – was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s and 1970s at Stanford University. Mischel and his colleagues were interested in strategies that preschool children used to resist temptation. They presented four-year-olds with a marshmallow and told the children that they had two options: ring a bell at any point to summon the experimenter and eat the marshmallow, or wait until the experimenter returned, and earn two marshmallows. The message was: "small reward now, bigger reward later." Some children broke down and ate the marshmallow, whereas others were able to delay gratification and earn the coveted two marshmallows. In follow-up experiments, Mischel found that children were able to wait longer if they used certain "cool" distraction techniques, or if they changed the way they thought about the marshmallow.The children who waited longer, when re-evaluated as teenagers and adults, demonstrated a striking array of advantages over their peers. As teenagers, they had higher SAT scores, social competence, self-assuredness and self-worth, and were rated by their parents as more mature, better able to cope with stress, more likely to plan ahead, and more likely to use reason. They were less likely to have conduct disorders or high levels of impulsivity, aggressiveness and hyperactivity. As adults, the high delayers were less likely to have drug problems or other addictive behaviors, get divorced, or be overweight. Each minute that a preschooler was able to delay gratification translated on average to a reduction of 0.2 points of the Body Mass Index 30 years later.
Each of these positive outcomes requires some ability to forgo short-term reward in favor of a higher payoff in the future. The ability to delay gratification also appears to be a buffer against rejection sensitivity. In a 20-year follow-up of the marshmallow experiment, individuals with vulnerability to high rejection sensitivity who had shown strong delay of gratification abilities as preschoolers had higher self-esteem and self-worth and more adaptive coping skills, in comparison to the individuals who had high rejection sensitivity but low delay of gratification as four-year-olds. These compelling longitudinal findings converge with other studies showing a similar pattern: The ability to resist temptation early in life translates to persistent benefits across settings.
Forty years after the first marshmallow test studies, neuroimaging data has shed light on the neural correlates of delayed gratification. A team led by B. J. Casey, of Cornell University, recruited 59 of the original participants – who are now in their mid-40s – and gave them a delayed gratification task. Instead of resisting marshmallows, these adults were instructed to suppress responses to images of happy faces, but not to neutral or fearful faces. Those who had been high delayers as pre-schoolers were more successful at controlling their impulses in response to the emotional faces, suggesting that the high delayers continued to show better ability to dampen or resist impulses. Casey and colleagues also scanned the brains of 26 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging as they completed the task. The researchers hypothesized that high delayers would be more likely to use "cool" regulation strategies to control their responses, which would manifest as activation of the right prefrontal cortex, whereas low delayers would use "hot" strategies, which would activate the ventral striatum, an area also linked to addiction. Indeed, results showed this differential brain activity. This mirrors other fMRI research of delayed gratification conducted by Noah Shamosh and Jeremy Gray, of Yale University, demonstrating that individuals who chose larger delayed rewards over smaller immediate rewards showed greater brain activation in the anterior prefrontal cortex.
Factors affecting one's ability
Neurocognitive factors
The way that a person frames a situation heavily influences a decision's outcome. Research on "hot" and "cool" strategies suggests that when children cognitively represent what they are waiting for as a real reward by focusing on the reward's arousing, "hot" qualities their self-control and delay of gratification decreases, while directing attention to a symbol of the reward by focusing on its abstract, "cool" qualities, can enhance self-control and increase the delay. Optimal self-control and the longest delay to gratification can be achieved by directing attention to a competing item, especially the arousing, "hot" qualities of a competing item. For example, delays are increased when thinking about the taste and smell of popcorn while waiting to eat candy. This illustrates an individual's ability to manipulate their cognitive representation of external stimuli for goal-directed purposes.Delaying gratification is the same as controlling the impulse for immediate gratification, which requires cognitive control. The ventral striatum, located in the midbrain, is the part of the limbic system that is the reward center as well as a pleasure center. The limbic system will always react to the potential for instant pleasure. To override this instinct, the prefrontal cortex, which is also associated with reasoning and rational thought, must be active. The prefrontal cortex is also the part of the brain that determines the focus of a person's attention, which enables a better framing that facilitates delayed gratification. During adolescence and early adulthood, the prefrontal cortex develops and matures to become more complicated and connected with the rest of the brain. Older children and adults find the deferment-of-gratification tasks easier than do young children for this reason. However, the relative ability to defer gratification remains stable throughout development. Children who can better control impulses grow up to be adults who also have better control. Practicing deferred gratification is quite beneficial to cognitive abilities throughout life.