I artiklen gennemgås resultaterne fra Mischels ‘marshmallow test’, der vurderer børns evne til at udsætte behov. Undersøgelser viser, at denne evne har en betydelig indflydelse på sociale og mentale sundhedsresultater gennem livet. Forfatterne skitserer hypoteser om de kognitive mekanismer bag viljestyrke og forskelle i selvregulering, som stadig undersøges.
Titel på undersøgelse:
Willpower Over the Life Span: Decomposing Self-Regulation.
| |
Hele abstrakt på originalsprog:
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, 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.