Casey Flashcards
What was the background?
Delay of gratification.
What did Metcalfe and Mischel do?
‘Cool’ system in our pre-frontal cortex - controls thinking. Cool area in brain is called the inferior frontal gryrus. More active in high delayers.
‘Hot’ system related to emotion. More active in low delayers. Hot area of the brain is called the ventral striatum.
What was the aim?
To investigate if the people who were low delayers in the marshmallow tests would still have low self-control in their 40s.
Describe the original study?
Marshmallow study, aged 4. Class split into two categories.
IVs - high delayers and low delayers.
DV - ability to resist temptation, on cognitive control.
Quasi experiment.
What did Casey find?
Casey found that we have cooling strategies. These reduce the appeal of the reward, think of it as something else. Instead of hot cues and how sweet it is. Hot cues - elicit an instant and emotional response.
Cold cues - take the emotion away from a stimulus.
What type of study was it?
Longitudinal study.
What were the samples?
562, 4 year olds.
155, 20 year olds.
135, 30 year olds.
Main core study :
Part 1 59, 27 low delayers, 32 high delayers.
Part 2 27, 15 high delayers, 11 low delayers.
Describe experiment one.
Self controlled measured by a go/no-go task. Required to push a button when seen a certain stimuli, and not push it when they see a different one. Casey made the go/no-go task have ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ stimuli to see different responses. ‘Hot’ - happy face. ‘Cold’ - neutral or fearful face.
What were the DVs of experiment one?
Wanted to see if low delayers would make more errors.
What was the procedure of experiment one?
Did four of these tests each on a home laptop delivered to their home. Each face appeared for 500ms with a 1s interval. Instructions appeared on screen saying which face was the target stimulus and not to press the button for the other face.
What were the results of experiment one?
Participants who were able to delay gratification as children showed a greater ability to supress impulse control as an adult. There was no significant difference between high and low delayers in terms of reaction times. No-go trials low delayers performed less well than high delayers on the ‘hot’ task.
What was the aim of experiment two?
To investigate regions of the brain that they predicted would be implicated in self control. Used an FMRI.
What were the meaures?
Repeated measures design same as experiment one but in a scanner. Delay of 2 to 14.5 seconds between presentation of faces.
What were the results of experiment two?
Both groups scored highly on accuracy. Low delayers showed reduced activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus than high delayers, showed increased activity in the ventral striatum.
What were the overall conclusions?
Resisting temptation is a relatively stable individual characteristic - low delayers at 4 years old had more difficulty supressing responses to happy faces. Delay ability is hindered by alluring cues and is not generally a problem with cognitive control. Empirical evidence for Mischel and Metcalfe’s hot and cold processing system the brain that affects self control.
