Delay of gratification in children.

To function effectively, individuals must voluntarily postpone immediate gratification and persist in goal-directed behavior for the sake of later outcomes. The present research program analyzed the nature of this type of future-oriented self-control and the psychological processes that underlie it. Enduring individual differences in self-control were found as early as the preschool years. Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow effective self-regulation early in the course of development. The experimental results, in turn, specified the particular types of preschool delay situations diagnostic for predicting aspects of cognitive and social competence later in life.

A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure.

A theory was proposed to reconcile paradoxical findings on the invariance of personality and the variability of behavior across situations. For this purpose, individuals were assumed to differ in (a) the accessibility of cognitive-affective mediating units (such as encodings, expectancies and beliefs, affects, and goals) and (b) the organization of relationships through which these units interact with each other and with psychological features of situations. The theory accounts for individual differences in predictable patterns of variability across situations (e.g., if A then she X, but if B then she Y), as well as for overall average levels of behavior, as essential expressions or behavioral signatures of the same underlying personality system. Situations, personality dispositions, dynamics, and structure were reconceptualized from this perspective.

A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower.

A 2-system framework is proposed for understanding the processes that enable--and undermine--self-control or "willpower" as exemplified in the delay of gratification paradigm. A cool, cognitive "know" system and a hot, emotional "go" system are postulated. The cool system is cognitive, emotionally neutral, contemplative, flexible, integrated, coherent, spatiotemporal, slow, episodic, and strategic. It is the seat of self-regulation and self-control. The hot system is the basis of emotionality, fears as well as passions--impulsive and reflexive--initially controlled by innate releasing stimuli (and, thus, literally under "stimulus control"): it is fundamental for emotional (classical) conditioning and undermines efforts at self-control. The balance between the hot and cool systems is determined by stress, developmental level, and the individual's self-regulatory dynamics. The interactions between these systems allow explanation of findings on willpower from 3 decades of research.

A conditional approach to dispositional constructs: the local predictability of social behavior.

A conditional approach to dispositions is developed in which dispositional constructs are viewed as clusters of if-then propositions. These propositions summarize contingencies between categories of conditions and categories of behavior rather than generalized response tendencies. A fundamental unit for investigating dispositions is therefore the conditional frequency of acts that are central to a given behavior category in circumscribed situations, not the overall frequency of behaviors. In an empirical application of the model, we examine how people's dispositional judgments are linked to extensive observations of targets' behavior in a range of natural social situations. We identify categories of these social situations in which targets' behavior may be best predicted from observers' dispositional judgements, focusing on the domains of aggression and withdrawal. One such category consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that tax people's performance competencies. As expected, children judged to be aggressive or withdrawn were variable across situations in dispositionally relevant behaviors, but they diverged into relatively predictable aggressive and withdrawn actions in situations that required the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive competencies they lacked. Implications of the conditional approach for personality assessment and person perception research are considered.

Conditional hedges and the intuitive psychology of traits.

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 condition-free appearance, the dispositional constructs used by child and adult observers in their personality descriptions were hedged by modifiers that reflected knowledge of the variability of behavior. Children's descriptions of their aggressive and withdrawn peers included probabilistic hedges that indicated uncertainty about the occurrence of behaviors (person sometimes does x). Adults made dispositional attributions with greater certainty, but more often modified them with conditional statements which identified when dispositionally relevant behaviors might be observed (person does x when y). Content analyses of these conditional statements revealed that adults systematically linked specific categories of conditions (e.g., aversive interpersonal events) to specific categories of social behavior (e.g., aggressive acts). The results help to clarify how people may hedge dispositional terms in ways that reflect their sensitivity to covariation between situations and behaviors.

The personality of familiar and significant people: the lay perceiver as a social-cognitive theorist.

When are perceivers guided more by implicit social-cognitive theories of personality and when more by trait theories? As perceivers become more familiar with a person they infer relatively more psychological mediating variables (e.g., construals, goals) that underlie the person's behavior and relatively fewer broad, uncontextualized traits such as aggressive or friendly (Study 1). The effects of familiarity are moderated by the importance of the target to perceivers (Study 2). Specifically, perceivers make relatively more inferences using mediating variables and fewer inferences with traits as the target becomes more familiar, if and only if the target plays an important role in their lives. The findings indicate that psychological mediating variables play a significant role in lay perceptions of people and specify conditions in which perceiver's function like implicit social-cognitive theorists, namely, when the perceived is familiar and important to the perceiver.

The role of situational demands and cognitive competencies in behavior organization and personality coherence.

Consistency in the natural organization of aggressive and prosocial (constructive) behavior, assessed repeatedly in vivo over a summer in a residential camp for children, was predicted from situational and personal characteristics. Similarity of situations in the types of competencies they demand in part predicted cross-situational consistency in individual differences in aggressive behaviors (Study 1). Study 2 examined the effect of cognitive competence on the discriminative patterning of behavior variation across situations. More cognitively competent Ss showed such discriminative patterning, which was reflected in greater Person X Situation interaction variance in their prosocial behavior.

The nature of adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of gratification.

Delay of gratification, assessed in a series of experiments when the subjects were in preschool, was related to parental personality ratings obtained a decade later for 95 of these children in adolescence. Clear and consistent patterns of correlations between self-imposed delay time in preschool and later ratings were found for both sexes over this time span. Delay behavior predicted a set of cognitive and social competencies and stress tolerance consistent with experimental analyses of the process underlying effective delay in the preschool delay situation. Specifically, children who were able to wait longer at age 4 or 5 became adolescents whose parents rated them as more academically and socially competent, verbally fluent, rational, attentive, planful, and able to deal well with frustration and stress. Comparisons with related longitudinal research using other delay situations help to clarify the important features of the situations and person variables involved in different aspects of delay of gratification.

Intraindividual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: incorporating psychological situations into the idiographic analysis of personality.

In nomothetic analyses, the cross-situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior, assessed in vivo in a camp setting, dependent 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 profiles of if ... then ...,situation-behavior relationships that formed "behavioral signatures" of personality (e.g., he aggresses when warned by adults but complies when threatened by peers. Thus, the intraindividual organization of behavior variation across situations was enduring but discriminatively patterned, visible as distinctive profiles of situation-behavior relationships. Implications were examined for an idiographic reconceptualization of personality coherence and its behavioral expressions in relation to the psychological ingredients of situations.

Cognitive person variables in the delay of gratification of older children at risk.

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 intelligence. A positive relationship was demonstrated between concurrent indexes of intelligence, attention deployment, and actual delay time. Moreover, attention deployment, measured as an individual differences variable during the delay process, had a direct, positive effect on delay behavior. Specifically, as the duration of delay and the frustration of the situation increased, children who spent a higher proportion of the time distracting themselves from the tempting elements of the delay situation were able to delay longer. The effect of attention deployment on delay behavior was significant even when age, intelligence, and delay rule knowledge were controlled. Likewise, delay rule knowledge significantly predicted delay time, even when age, attention deployment, and intelligence were controlled.

Intuitive interactionism in person perception: effects of situation--behavior relations on dispositional judgments.

To examine the effects of the relationships between behavior and the situation in which it occurs, we manipulated such relations and exposed subjects to them. Impressions were similar when based on the behaviors presented with situations unspecified (e.g., child hits) or when the situations in which they naturally occurred were specified (e.g., child hits when provoked). However, when situations were specified, subjects' impressions more accurately predicted individual differences in the children's actual levels of overall aggressive behavior. When the veridical situation-behavior relations were increasingly altered, the targets were perceived as being less plausible and increasingly maladjusted and odd, and correlations decreased between the perceived level of the children's aggressiveness and their actual aggressive behavior. Thus, both personality impressions and predictive accuracy were influenced by the relations between the target's behaviors and their situational contexts.

Language and person cognition: effects of communicative set on trait attribution.

People may be especially prone to construe an individual's behavior in terms of global traits when they anticipate verbal communication about that person. In a first experiment, subjects expecting to communicate their impressions of a target person generated a greater number of global trait descriptions and made a greater number of unqualified, mutually consistent trait attributions than did control subjects. Three further experiments tested the hypotheses that (a) the specifically verbal nature of the anticipated communication at least partly accounts for this effect and (b) expecting to receive a verbal communication may suffice to produce the effect as well. Both hypotheses received support: Subjects expecting either to transmit or to receive verbal impressions ascribed more traits to the target person, and were more influenced by their implicit personality theory in rating the target's dispositions, than subjects expecting to transmit impressions nonverbally .

Person X situation interactionism in self-encoding (I am...when...): implications for affect regulation and social information processing.

Although Person X Situation (P X 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 X S interactionism in self-encoding on affect regulation and discriminative social perception. Following failure (Studies 1 and 2) and success (Study 2) ideation, participants were prompted to encode the self either in P X S interactionist terms (I am...when...) or in traitlike unconditional terms (I am...). Interactionist (compared with unconditional) self-encoding led to less affective extremity, suggesting that such encoding may prevent individuals from generalizing specific success and failure experiences to the self as a whole. Study 2 also found that interactionist self-encoding attenuated the endorsement of global stereotypes, suggesting that such encoding may enhance fine-grained social perception as well.

Regulating the interpersonal self: strategic self-regulation for coping with rejection sensitivity.

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 childhood. In Study 1, preschoolers from the Stanford University community who participated in the DG paradigm were assessed 20 years later. Study 2 assessed low-income, minority middle school children on comparable measures. DG ability buffered high-RS people from interpersonal difficulties (aggression, peer rejection) and diminished well-being (e.g., low self-worth, higher drug use). The protective effect of DG ability on high-RS children's self-worth is explained by reduced interpersonal problems. Attentional mechanisms underlying the interaction between RS and strategic self-regulation are discussed.

The role of strategic attention deployment in development of self-regulation: predicting preschoolers' delay of gratification from mother-toddler interactions.

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 the mother were able, at age 5, to delay immediate gratification longer for more valued rewards. Toddlers who explored at a distance from a controlling mother when she tried to engage the child also delayed longer and used more effective delay strategies at age 5, compared with toddlers who did not distance themselves. Toddlers whose mothers were not controlling showed the opposite pattern: Those who did not distance themselves from the mother's bids had longer preschool delay times and more effective strategies. Strategic attention deployment was shown to be an enduring self-regulatory skill visible in early development across domains, measures, and over time.