The influence of maternal child-rearing attitudes and teaching behaviors on preschoolers' delay of gratification

This study was an exploratory examination of the influence of mothers' teaching behaviors, strategies, and child-rearing attitudes on their children's ability to delay gratification. In an externally imposed delay of gratification situation, 30 mothers from a rural university community taught their children strategies that could help them refrain from touching a brightly wrapped present when the mothers left the room. Results showed that mothers of children who did not delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with a permissive parenting style, whereas mothers of children who did delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with an authoritative parenting style. The results of this study are discussed with respect to the development of children's self-control and self-regulatory abilities.     

The Influence of Maternal Child-Rearing Attitudes and Teaching Behaviors on Preschoolers' Delay of Gratification

This study was an exploratory examination of the influence of mothers' teaching behaviors, strategies, and child-rearing attitudes on their children's ability to delay gratification. In an externally imposed delay of gratification situation, 30 mothers from a rural university community taught their children strategies that could help them refrain from touching a brightly wrapped present when the mothers left the room. Results showed that mothers of children who did not delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with a permissive parenting style, whereas mothers of children who did delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with an authoritative parenting style. The results of this study are discussed with respect to the development of children's self-control and self-regulatory abilities.     

Trust matters: Seeing how an adult treats another person influences preschoolers' willingness to delay gratification

Holding out for a delayed reward in the face of temptation is notoriously difficult, and the ability to do so in childhood predicts diverse indices of life success. Prominent explanations focus on the importance of cognitive control. However, delaying gratification may also require trust in people delivering future rewards as promised. Only limited experimental work has tested this idea, and such studies with children were focused on general reward expectations, so evidence was ambiguous as to whether social trust played a role. The present study provides the first targeted test of a role for social trust in children's willingness to delay gratification. Children observed an adult behave in either a trustworthy or untrustworthy manner toward another adult, then were tested in the classic delay of gratification task by that adult. Children were less likely to wait the full delay period, and waited less time overall, for a reward promised by an untrustworthy adult, relative to children tested by a trustworthy adult. These findings demonstrate that manipulations of social trust influence delaying gratification, and highlight intriguing alternative reasons to test for individual differences in delaying gratification and associated life outcomes.     

SOCIAL ROOTS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TIME PERSPECTIVE

Hypotheses concerning socio-economic conditions related with the development, psychological processes and behavioral sequels of time perspective were tested on 249 students, 19–23 years of age. Three dimensions of time perspective viz. future orientation (FO), future extension and total extension were measured. In study 1, ANOVA revealed significant differences between high, medium and low deprived groups on all three dimensions of time perspective. Deprivation on experiential dimension significantly and adversely influenced FO but physico-economic deprivation did not. Study 2 revealed that future oriented and extended outlook is augmented by a reflective style as measured by MFFT. 2×2 ANOVA on delay of gratification scores revealed significant main effects of reflective-impulsive style, and FO. Significant interaction effect showed that those subjects who had high future orientation as well as a reflective style were better able to tolerate delay of gratification.     

A response to Metz's reply on the end of ubuntu

Thaddeus Metz argues against our position that ubuntu has reached its end. He rejects our recommendation that ubuntu both as a way of life and as an ethical theory must be jettisoned as it is no longer applicable to modern conditions. He thinks that both our recommendations are wrong. Hence he seeks to show that ubuntu is defensible both as an ethical theory and as a way of life. Further, he thinks there is a role to be played by ubuntu in how life could be lived in modern day (South) Africa. He also seeks to offer a defence of the relevance of ubuntu theorists. For these reasons he couches his responding title with the phrase ‘Just the beginning of ubuntu [?…?]’. In this paper I continue the debate by seeking to show that Metz's response poses no threat to our original position. I then endeavour to show that my assessment of his position puts him in an unenviable position of defending the indefensible. I further suggest that Metz's current defence of ubuntu is not philosophical but dogmatic.     

“Converted and always converting”: Transformational spirituality as metanoia

This paper reflects from the local context on the issues of living in creation, and explores to what extent, if at all, our theology of creation leads our ethics and spirituality of creation. It begins by examining the theology of creation that is voiced within the author's church. Then it goes on to explore whether the ethics match that theology. The exploration of the disconnection between our theology and ethics leads a critique of world view illustrated in the graffiti of Banksy. The paper contends that the outlook we need to bring to “earth community” is one of metanoia, a readiness to repent and convert towards a life‐style that brings us into greater communion with the earth. But, grounded in this context, the paper asserts this is not in theology's gift. Only by beginning in a spirituality of companionship can we be helped to make the continuous creative changes needed if we are to convert our life‐style and our theology to treat earth as our neighbour.     

Waiting for a treat. Studying behaviors related to self-regulation in 18- and 24-month-olds

The ability to delay gratification – conceived as an early expression of self-regulation – develops in the second half of the second year of life. We used inductive methodology to identify different behaviors and set of behaviors performed by children while waiting for a treat. We asked which sets are more effective when it comes to successfully delaying gratification and how all observed sets change during toddler age. 130 children were tested twice – at 18 and at 24 months – using a Snack Delay Task. We observed 20 different behaviors and distinguished 4 sets of behaviors. The most important and effective set for delaying gratification in 18 and in 24 month olds was the set called Attention and Movements. We concluded that growth in the ability to delay gratification resulted from increased ability to overcome temptation by using an active strategy mainly based on attention.     

The Gist of Delay of Gratification: Understanding and Predicting Problem Behaviors

Delay of gratification captures elements of temptation and self‐denial that characterize real‐life problems with money and other problem behaviors such as unhealthy risk taking. According to fuzzy‐trace theory, decision makers mentally represent social values such as delay of gratification in a coarse but meaningful form of memory called “gist.” Applying this theory, we developed a gist measure of delay of gratification that does not involve quantitative trade‐offs (as delay discounting does) and hypothesize that this construct explains unique variance beyond sensation seeking and inhibition in accounting for problem behaviors. Across four studies, we examine this Delay‐of‐gratification Gist Scale by using principal components analyses and evaluating convergent and divergent validity with other potentially related scales such as Future Orientation, Propensity to Plan, Time Perspectives Inventory, Spendthrift‐Tightwad, Sensation Seeking, Cognitive Reflection, Barratt Impulsiveness, and the Monetary Choice Questionnaire (delay discounting). The new 12‐item measure captured a single dimension of delay of gratification, correlated as predicted with other scales, but accounted for unique variance in predicting such outcomes as overdrawing bank accounts, substance abuse, and overall subjective well‐being. Results support a theoretical distinction between reward‐related approach motivation, including sensation seeking, and inhibitory faculties, including cognitive reflection. However, individuals' agreement with the qualitative gist of delay of gratification, as expressed in many cultural traditions, could not be reduced to such dualist distinctions nor to quantitative conceptions of delay discounting, shedding light on mechanisms of self‐control and risk taking. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Multiple Roles of South Korean Married Women Professors: Role Changes and the Factors Which Influence Potential Role Gratification and Strain

In this paper, we examine role gratification and role strain of married middle-class South Korean women by comparing a sample of women professors and a sample of housewives whose husbands are professors and researchers. The results show that the married women professors, compared with the housewives, experienced both greater gratification and greater strain. The findings also show that sociodemographic factors are not strongly related to role gratification and strain. It was found that married women professors have more nontraditional gender-role attitudes as compared with housewives. In addition, the research indicates that transnational resocialization from overseas experiences in a Western society has positive effects on role gratification among the married women professors.     

License to sin: Self‐licensing as a mechanism underlying hedonic consumption

Hedonic overconsumption is often considered to be caused by impulsive factors. The current paper investigates whether self‐licensing, relying on reasons to justify subsequent gratification, can also be included as a significant contributor to hedonic consumption. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether self‐licensing can account for an increase in hedonic consumption while ruling out impulsive factors such as resource depletion, negative affect, and visceral state as alternative explanations. A pilot study indicated that perceiving oneself as having invested greater effort and thus having a self‐licensing cue did not lead to a decline in self‐control capacity compared with not having a self‐licensing cue. The main study employed the same procedure and established that having a licensing cue did lead to increased snack intake while controlling for impulsive factors. Together, these studies support the notion that self‐licensing is a separate mechanism leading to hedonic gratification independent of impulsive factors. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Overcoming modern-postmodern dichotomies: Some possible benefits for the counselling profession

The rhetorical/discursive turn, in its multiple disciplinary masks, is here to stay. Even psychology is giving in to its charm. The Sophists can smile again, the agora is back and the solipsistic self is in retreat. Dialogical, narrative and cultural psychologies, as well as the counselling profession, triumph the return of the social, the contextual, and the historical to the conceptual realm of the autonomous individual. Though we encourage and enjoy critical views of modern perspectives, such as that supported by poststructuralist and postmodern perspectives, we wonder whether orthodoxies might not be more inclined towards relocation than to eviction. Based on our conviction that a positivist/relativist dichotomy is a poor exchange for older modern dichotomies (self/other), the paper critically reviews the poststructuralist turn in therapy and counselling, and discusses the implications for counselling theory and counsellors' work.     

愿望采择发展水平对幼儿情感决策的影响

选取148名4岁儿童, 运用实验法考察了幼儿的愿望采择发展水平对其情感决策的影响。结果表明: (1) 幼儿的愿望采择水平对其情感决策具有显著影响。情境中他人愿望信息充足时, 幼儿会采择他人愿望并以此为线索为他人决策, 但对线索的利用程度受其愿望采择水平的制约。(2) 在无关于他人愿望信息提示的条件下, 4岁儿童为他人与为自己的情感决策不存在显著差异。(3) 4岁儿童能够采择他人的单一愿望, 但其冲突愿望采择能力还不成熟。     

The Enlightenment That Won't Go Away: Modernity's Crux

The Critical Process unleashed by the Enlightenment and endlessly resharpening itself to this day has mortally wounded the God of Deism, maybe also of theism, even of Christianity. A temptation of Christian theology is to retreat in denial into an updated version of Deism, seemingly granting full license to modern science but only so long as it does not impugn God's love. The alternative here proposed is to ride out The Critical Process, in fact to encourage it, all the way into modernity's crux: How can a design that is not benign still be divine? The Christian reply is: through a real death of God and of ourselves as well, and through resurrections beginning now, thus freeing The Critical Process from the illusion of insuring our survival and, instead, for the honest Enlightenment task of merely telling the truth.     

Age and outstanding occupational achievement: Lehman revisited

The findings of H. C. Lehman's (1953, Age and achievement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press) study of age and outstanding occupational achievement were reviewed along with the explanations which have been put forth to account for the finding that major contributions are most likely to occur in young adulthood. Subsequently, an alternative explanation was proposed based on the central developmental tasks facing individuals in young adulthood and middle age. More specifically, it is argued, in accordance with N. Haan (1981, in R. M. Lerner & N. A. Busch-Rossnagel (Eds.), Individuals as producers of their own development: A life span perspective, New York, Academic Press), that young adults employ an accommodating adaptive style, and that the cognitive and behavioral concomitants of this style may increase the likelihood of major contributions. It is also noted that the realistic, controlling adaptive style of the middle aged would tend to facilitate minor contributions. Finally, the broader literature was reviewed in relation to these hypotheses, and certain practical implications of this reinterpretation were laid out.     

Preschoolers find ways to resist temptation after learning that willpower can be energizing

Children's tendency to delay gratification predicts important life outcomes, yet little is known about how to enhance delay of gratification other than by teaching task‐specific strategies. The present research investigated the effect of exposing children to a model who experiences the exertion of willpower as energizing. In two experiments, 86 4‐ to 5‐year olds were read a story that represented the exertion of willpower as energizing or a control story before taking part in a delay of gratification task. Children exposed to a storybook character who struggled with waiting, but eventually found it energizing, spontaneously generated more delay strategies, which enhanced delay. By promoting the search for effective strategies, this approach provides a promising direction for efforts to foster self‐regulation early in development.     

Long-tailed macaques display unexpected waiting abilities in exchange tasks

The ability of animals to delay gratification is crucial for complex goal-directed action. It may help them in making effective decisions when facing a choice. We tested the ability of nine long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) to delay gratification in several experiments. In exchange tasks, subjects had to keep a small piece of cookie before returning it to an experimenter in order to get a larger food amount. Results showed that animals could wait between 10 s and 10 min depending on individual and sizes of reward. In another experiment, subjects could immediately give back the initial piece of cookie then wait for the return. Their performances more than doubled, demonstrating the role of consumption inhibition in postponing gratification. Such achievements underscore delays of gratification which until now were not thought possible in monkeys. Finally, subjects were presented with an accumulation of food pieces added at short intervals until they seized them. They mostly waited between 30 s and 1 min, which points at the consistency of our data, compared to those of other studies. Our results indicate that long-tailed macaques anticipated the duration of delays. We may account for their remarkable performances by their achievements in the social context.     

The role of ego-control, ego-resiliency, and IQ in delay of gratification in adolescence

The delay-of-gratification behavior of 104 14-year-old Ss (54 girls and 50 boys) was assessed in an experiment in which each subject chose between immediate monetary payment and larger, delayed payment on 5 occasions. Personality data were obtained on these adolescents in the form of California Adult Q-Set ratings made by several research examiners who were blind to the subjects' delay behavior. The number of delayed payments chosen was strongly correlated with these personality ratings, within both sexes. Ss who exhibited the most delay of gratification tended to be independently described as responsible, productive, ethically consistent, interested in intellectual matters, and overly controlled. They tended not to be described as unable to delay gratification, rebellious, unpredictable, self-indulgent, or hostile. Delay behavior in both sexes was also correlated positively with IQ and with Q-sort-derived indexes of ego resiliency and ego control. The relationship between ego control and delay behavior was particularly strong after both IQ and ego resiliency were partialled. These results were interpreted as reflecting the fundamental importance of both cognitive skillfulness and impulse control for adaptive delay behavior in situations that contain strong motivational inducements.     

The evolution of the language faculty: clarifications and implications

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff's critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of "language" into component mechanisms and interfaces, a non-trivial endeavor whose results are unlikely to map onto traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our terminological distinction between FLN and FLB is intended to help clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement. By blurring this distinction, Pinker and Jackendoff mischaracterize our hypothesis 3 which concerns only FLN, not "language" as a whole. Many of their arguments and examples are thus irrelevant to this hypothesis. Their critique of the minimalist program is for the most part equally irrelevant, because very few of the arguments in our original paper were tied to this program; in an online appendix we detail the deep inaccuracies in their characterization of this program. Concerning evolution, we believe that Pinker and Jackendoff's emphasis on the past adaptive history of the language faculty is misplaced. Such questions are unlikely to be resolved empirically due to a lack of relevant data, and invite speculation rather than research. Preoccupation with the issue has retarded progress in the field by diverting research away from empirical questions, many of which can be addressed with comparative data. Moreover, offering an adaptive hypothesis as an alternative to our hypothesis concerning mechanisms is a logical error, as questions of function are independent of those concerning mechanism. The second half of our paper consists of a detailed response to the specific data discussed by Pinker and Jackendoff. Although many of their examples are irrelevant to our original paper and arguments, we find several areas of substantive disagreement that could be resolved by future empirical research. We conclude that progress in understanding the evolution of language will require much more empirical research, grounded in modern comparative biology, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and much less of the adaptive storytelling and phylogenetic speculation that has traditionally characterized the field.     

A computational perspective on social attachment

Humans depend on social relationships for survival and wellbeing throughout life. Yet, individuals differ markedly in their ability to form and maintain healthy social relationships. Here we use a simple mathematical model to formalize the contention that a person’s attachment style is determined by what they learn from relationships early in life. For the sake of argument, we therefore discount individual differences in the innate personality or attachment style of a child, assuming instead that all children are simply born with an equivalent, generic, hardwired desire and instinct for social proximity, and a capacity to learn. In line with the evidence, this innate endowment incorporates both simple bonding instincts and a capacity for cognitively sophisticated beliefs and generalizations. Under this assumption, we then explore how distinct attachment styles might emerge through interaction with the child’s early caregivers. Our central question is, how an apparently adaptive capacity to learn can yield enduring maladaptive attachment styles that generalize to new relationships. We believe extensions of our model will ultimately help clarify the complex interacting mechanisms – both acquired and innate – that underpin individual differences in attachment styles. While our model is relatively abstract, we also attempt some connection to known biological mechanisms of attachment.     

先秦服饰色彩与现代服装设计

民族风格的服装一直是现代服装设计主要潮流,中华民族有着悠久的服饰文化历史,一些民族的元素或多或少地也出现一些现代设计中,但总的来说,不是很系统。服装设计的继承不能只停留在形制的模仿上,而是要从文化的层面上融会传统服饰的精髓,用神似的手法进行设计。本文分析了中华服饰的色彩文化的形成和色彩文化的哲学基础。从先民对色彩的认识、色彩的运用和染色技术等方面论证,显示了中华民族优秀的服饰文明,同时也给我们在现代服装设计中色彩的运用提供了很好的启示。