Past research has explored both biological underpinnings, such as temperament and personality, and higher level strategies or skills that may contribute to individual differences in responses to the DoG task e. Recent studies in cognitive neuroscience suggest that effective self-regulation likely recruits top-down processes that modulate lower level emotional processes.
For example, frontostriatal white matter integrity explained variance in current and future delay of gratification ability Achterberg et al.
Delay of gratification is associated with individual differences in white matter connectivity in the dorsal prefrontal cortex e. However, few studies have examined potential interactions between temperament and deliberate strategy use in the prediction of self-regulation specifically, delay of gratification during the DoG task. Moreover, previous research found that boys and girls differed in temperament and self-regulation e.
Finally, most studies on strategy use have looked at preschool children, where cognitive capacities may limit the type of strategies available to them. The current study attempts to address these gaps in the literature. Temperament largely determines how children experience and interpret their world, as well as how they react to life experiences Kristal, Temperament is commonly assessed using the three main dimensions proposed by Buss and Plomin : activity e.
They described activity as the tendency to be restless or energetic and included the sub-scales tempo and vigor. Sociability is the tendency to prefer being in the presence of others rather than being alone and seeking out social interaction. Emotionality is the tendency to become upset easily.
In addition, self-regulation is a component of temperament; it also influences other aspects of temperament such as activity level and emotionality Rothbart et al. Wills et al. Kim and Kochanska measured temperament when children were 7 months old and their self-regulation when they were 25 months. They found that negative emotionality temperament was negatively correlated with self-regulated compliance to paternal control.
Previous studies have also shown that temperament also influences how self-regulation develops. For example, Duckworth et al. Mittal et al. In this study, children were classified into Delay waited for a larger gift throughout , Touch and Go waited for a larger gift in the beginning, but could not wait throughout , and Non-Delay chose not to wait.
Results showed that Non-Delayers scored higher on activity than the Touch and Go group. Touch and Go children scored higher on negative emotionality than Delayers. Despite evidence demonstrating that temperament plays a pivotal role in affecting self-regulation, personality is not destiny. In addition to the biological underpinnings such as temperament of self-regulation, individual skills developed earlier during social exchanges could also exert a significant influence on self-regulation ability Luria, Indeed, over the course of development, children are able to acquire more complex regulatory skills that affect their expression of temperamental characteristics Rothbart et al.
Thus, how well children perform in a delay of gratification task might be influenced not only by their temperament, but also by skills or strategies emerging from the interaction between temperament and experience. Past research has indicated that engagement of certain strategies can affect the ability to delay gratification.
Mischel and Ebbesen , Mischel et al. Children who were exposed to both delayed and immediate rewards waited a shorter length of time as compared to children where the reward was hidden Mischel and Ebbesen, In addition, children who engaged in self-distraction strategies tended to wait longer. By providing children with external and cognitive distractions from the reward objects, Mischel et al.
Together, these studies highlight the relation between distraction and increased delay time in DoG tasks; however, they do not consider the potential role of individual difference factors such as temperament in this process. Rodriguez et al. They found that directing attention away from the bell or rewards was positively correlated with delay time. Also by analyzing the spontaneous attention deployment used by children during a DoG task, researchers Peake et al.
In sum, children who were able to distract themselves were able to delay gratification longer. In addition, much of the research has focused on early childhood and we know much less about spontaneous strategy use in middle childhood when children have more advanced cognitive skills and knowledge of self-regulatory strategies relevant to delay gratification Brown and DeLoache, ; Mischel and Mischel, ; Canton and Kihlstrom, The current study extends earlier research by assessing, in 7—year-old children, the extent to which there are spontaneous strategies that might moderate the effects of temperament on delay of gratification.
More specifically, we investigated the extent to which the efficacy of certain spontaneous use strategies on delay time was contingent on particular temperamental variables within this middle childhood age range. Researchers have demonstrated gender differences in temperament and self-regulation in the early school years Silverman, ; Ready et al. Maccoby and Jacklin found that boys tended to have higher activity levels than girls, a difference that increases with age.
In a meta-analysis of activity level studies, Eaton and Enns confirmed that differences in activity level between boys and girls became larger as they aged. In their meta-analysis of gender differences in temperament in children ages 3 months to 13 years, Else-Quest et al.
They found consistent gender differences in overall effortful control. Their findings suggested that girls, as compared to boys, were generally better at regulating and managing their attention, inhibiting impulses, and being aware of subtle external changes; by contrast, boys scored higher in overall surgency. There was also a small gender difference in activity level consistent with other findings i. Using the California Child Q-set to rate the personalities of children at 3, 4, 7, and 11 years engaging in a DoG task, Funder et al.
Specifically, they found that boys who were able to delay gratification were more likely to be attentive, to concentrate, and to be reserved, cooperative, and generally impulse controlled than boys who did not delay, who in turn were more likely to be described as irritable, restless and fidgety, aggressive, and generally less self-controlled. Girls who delayed gratification were more likely to be described as intelligent, resourceful, and competent whereas girls who did not delay were more likely to be described as reacting poorly under stress, easily offended, sulky, and whiny.
In sum, given this literature, it is possible that gender differences in temperament may mediate gender differences in self-regulation. The current study fills gaps in the previous literature on delay of gratification.
Additionally, we examine the important role of gender. Consistent with past work e. We also hypothesized that higher levels of activity level would be associated with decrease delay time, but that relation would be moderated by effective strategy use.
Given that delay of gratification requires self-regulation skills such as inhibitory and impulsive control, and past research has demonstrated that girls score higher on these abilities e. We also hypothesized that activity level would mediate the relationship between gender and delay time. There were participants boys, girls who were recruited from rural upstate New York Co-operative Extension and public school districts. The mean age of the children was 9.
The sample was predominantly Caucasian In the present sample, the mean income-to-needs ratio was 1. Informed parental consent and child assent was obtained for all participants and confidentially was assured. Families were paid for their participation. Only tasks relevant to the current hypotheses are discussed here.
Data for these tasks were collected in — For the current study, 82 participants The data from participants boys and girls were analyzed in our study.
The EAS survey consists of 20 items rated on scales from 1 not typical of their child to 5 very characteristic of their child. The EAS survey measures three dimensions of temperament: activity, emotionality, and sociability. The EAS survey has been shown to have good internal consistency for each scale and stability of temperament traits over time Bould et al.
Prior to the task, children were instructed to sit in front of a plate of candy and a bell. They were told that if they waited until the experimenter returned after 30 min , they would receive double the amount of candy; however, they could press the bell at any point to terminate the waiting time.
They were also told that if they rang the bell, they would receive only the candy in front of them instead of the larger reward that would come if they successfully waited. In order to ensure children understood the procedure, the experimenter left the room, telling the child to ring the bell to signal them to return. After answering any questions and experimenter left the room again, the protocol began and the delay time started.
Participants were not told how long they would have to wait for the experimenter to return. The whole task was videotaped. The duration of time they waited was recorded. The coding of the spontaneous strategies used by the children during the delay of gratification task was adapted from Mauro and Harris , as described next.
Attention Averted: the child appears to be focusing his or her attention on something other than the candy or bell. Attention to Candy: the child focuses his or her attention on the candy, but does not physically touch it. Attention to Bell: the child focuses his or her attention on the bell but does not physically touch it. Manipulating Bell: Touching, feeling, or spinning the bell. Examples include pretending to shoot a gun, playing with hands in a story-like way, and other types of what appeared to be fantasy play.
Imaginative with Bell: child engages with own reflection on the bell; using the bell as an object in what appears to be an imaginative scenario. For children who pressed the bell before the end of the 30 min waiting period, coding continued until the child pressed the bell. For each child, a sum score was then computed. Inter—rater reliability was analyzed using the Kappa statistic to insure consistency among three trained coders, who coded a random sample of one out of five videos.
For each behavior item, agreement was assessed between each pair of coders. The range of Cohen Kappa was between 0. Based on previous studies indicating the effectiveness of distraction and attention away strategies in a DoG task e. Besides calculating the total frequencies of effective and ineffective strategies, we also computed ratio values by dividing frequencies of effective and ineffective strategy with total delay time.
We tested both strategy proportion scores and total frequencies of effective and ineffective strategy in all of the analyses. Temperament was scored according to the guidelines provided by Buss and Plomin The mean score for emotionality was 2. Table 1 provides the mean, standard deviation, and frequency of each strategy. The total effective strategy score was The total ineffective score was TABLE 1. Descriptive statistics for strategies, overall and separately by gender.
Results summarized in Table 2 summarizes the correlation among strategy use and temperament dimensions. In the next set of analyses, we investigated whether the relationship between child activity level and delay of gratification ability was moderated by the strategies the children used during the DoG task. We focused only on activity level, as it was the only temperament dimension correlated with delay time.
For completeness, we did run regression analyses for the other two dimensions, but found no significant relations with delay time, and no significant interaction effects with strategy use. We first tested the moderating roles of frequencies of both effective and ineffective strategies between activity temperament and delay time, and then assessed the moderating roles of ratio values of effective and ineffective strategy between this relationship.
Table 3 illustrates the results. The inferential interaction analysis maintained the continuous nature of the variables. We then ran another set of analyses to examine whether ineffective strategy use moderated the relationship between activity level temperament and delay time; it did not.
TABLE 3. Interaction between temperament and effective strategies use in predicting delay time. Moderation analysis with activity temperament as predictor, effective strategy as moderator, and total delay as outcome.
Next, we used the same method to test the moderating roles of ratios of effective and ineffective strategy between activity temperament and delay time. The results indicated that both ratios of effective and ineffective strategy did not significantly interact with activity temperament in predicting delay time.
Table 4 provides the means and standard deviations for temperament and delay of gratification scores separately by gender. TABLE 4. Descriptive statistics for temperament and delay time separately by gender. ANCOVA analysis was used to assess any gender differences in delay time and temperament controlling for age, and family income.
No statistically significant association was found between the other two temperament dimensions Emotionality and Sociability and delay time. With gender as the independent variable, activity level as the mediator, and delay time as the dependent variable, analyses Figure 2 revealed that the indirect effect via activity equaled 0.
Results of the regression analysis show that the effect of Gender on Delay time is mediated by Activity temperament. The numbers are standardized regression coefficients. Previous literature makes it clear that the ability to delay gratification is an important component of self-regulation abilities that foreshadow important aspects of human development, including adaptation and coping, social interaction, and academic achievement Eisenberg and Fabes, ; Eisenberg et al.
We also demonstrate that gender differences in temperament, namely activity level mediates the gender differences in the ability to delay gratification. Previous studies had found that both the experimentally primed distraction strategies and spontaneous attention deployment increase delay of gratification in a waiting paradigm. In their early study, Mischel and Ebbesen , p. Additionally, the negative effect of high activity level on delay time has been consistently demonstrated Mischel and Ebbesen, ; Baumeister et al.
Consistent with this work, we found that when the children used more effective strategies, the relation between activity level was not associated with performance in the DoG task.
However, when they used less effective strategies, their activity temperament showed a significant negative influence on their delay time. One possible interpretation of why using effective strategies helped children with higher activity level delay longer in DoG task is that since children higher in activity temperament react poorly to enforced idleness, when they are able to direct their attention away from the situation of enforced idleness and toward something else in the room or use their imagination to perform fantasy play, their tendency to be restless and energetic is temporarily subdued by attention control.
Thus, these strategies helped children with higher activity temperament distract themselves away from the enforced idleness of the task and delay longer in the task. One additional important consideration is the conceptual relations between temperament and self-regulation. One major mile stone is to develop the self-regulatory capacities to modulate this reactivity. However, it is unclear whether self-regulatory abilities may in essence be integral to temperament.
For example, is it the case that children who are low on activity level inherently have higher levels of self-regulatory capacities for a discussion see Bridgett et al.
Disentangling these aspects and their relations to outcomes is important for future research. In terms of ineffective strategies, we did not find a moderating effect between temperament and delay time. One interpretation of this is simply that any strategy which children are using may be better than nothing.
In addition, the correlation results showed that ineffective strategy use was negatively correlated with activity temperament. One possible reason for this is that children high on activity levels may have difficulty with attention, and staying still, thus they may be less likely to engage in secondary strategies. Interestingly, although the frequency of effective strategy moderated the relationship between activity temperament and delay time, the ratio of effective and ineffective strategy did not.
That means, how fast children use effective strategy or ineffective strategy did not interact with their temperament in predicting delay time. As both ratios of effective and ineffective strategy were negatively correlated with delay time, it is possible that using strategies too quickly actually prevent children wait longer. Thus, it is possible that children who are able to use effective strategy to down-regulate their arousal when they felt anxious in DoG task, could wait longer; and they more strategy they use, the longer they can wait.
While using strategy too quickly did not help them wait longer. Additionally, we found that family income was positively correlated with delay time. Children who came from a higher income family were able to delay longer in this task. This result was consistent with previous studies that low-income children have multiple self-regulatory deficits and exhibited weaker self-control e.
For completeness sake, we tested three way interactions with income, temperament, and strategy use and did not find that the moderating effect of strategy use was influenced by income. Future, research should, however, considered more thoroughly the extent to which income may influence the type of strategy as well as their relative effectiveness. Results from our study showed that compared to girls, boys had greater difficulties with self-regulation as shown by significantly lower delay time.
Boys also scored significantly higher on activity temperament. Both of these findings are consistent with previous findings Maccoby and Jacklin, ; Eaton and Enns, ; Else-Quest et al. Results also showed that children with higher activity temperament were less able to delay overall, which is consistent with findings by Else-Quest et al. Since most previous research focused on younger children, our findings extend these prior studies on gender and temperament in relation to delay of gratification to older children.
Additional mediational analyses show that these gender differences in DoG are mediated, at least in part, by the higher activity temperament levels of males. Buss and Plomin , p. In their meta-analysis of temperament, Else-Quest et al. They also showed that girls scored higher on the broad factor effortful control, which included attention.
Thus, gender differences in activity temperament are able to explain at least part of why boys are less likely to succeed at the DoG task specifically. Extending beyond our data, this mediational pattern of gender differences in temperament might also help explain why boys in general are poorer in self-regulatory functioning than girls.
The ability to delay gratification has been shown to be crucial to positive growth; thus, it is important to understand what kind of factors may contribute to individual differences in this ability. High temperamental activity level has been shown in both this study and a few other recent studies to have a negative effect on delay of gratification e. However, strategy use was found to moderate the effects of high activity level temperament on self-regulatory behavior.
Children with high activity temperament benefitted from greater use of effective attentional strategies that provided a means to divert attention away from the object of immediate gratification large plate of candy herein.
Children low in activity temperament did not gain much advantage from use of these attentional avoidance strategies. Future research should focus on which strategies may be helpful to children with specific temperaments, particularly children with a temperament characterized by high activity levels. Perhaps instructing children who have high activity temperament with effective strategies may help them improve in the DoG task.
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