Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2011 Apr;6(2):252-6. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq081. Epub 2010 Sep 19.
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.
20 世纪 60 年代，米歇尔及其同事开发了一种简单的“棉花糖测试”，用以衡量学前儿童延迟满足的能力。在随后的 40 多年的多项后续研究中，这项“测试”被证明对人生历程中的重要社会、认知和心理健康结果具有惊人的显著预测效度。在本文中，我们回顾了纵向研究和早期延迟满足实验的关键发现，这些实验检验了构成这种能力的认知评价和注意力控制策略。此外，我们还概述了一组假设，这些假设源于这些发现与“认知控制”机制及其神经基础研究的交叉。我们讨论了这些假设对分解早期研究中确定的“意志力”现象以及终生自我调节能力的个体差异的影响，目前正在对此进行研究。
