Casey (biological) Flashcards
What is instant gratification?
The inability to resist temptation for an immediate reward and not able to wait for a later reward
What is cognitive control ?
The ability to suppress in appropriate thoughts in favour of appropriate ones
Previous research suggests that people with good cognitive control can be more healthy, wealthy and have better social relationships than those with poor
Why is good cognitive control good ?
You may be more likely to achieve certain goals if you are able to resist temptation
What part of our brain facilitates out rewards and excites our behaviour in social interactions ?
Ventral striatum
What is the cognitive control part of the brain ?
And what does it do ?
Inferior frontal gyrus
Interprets facial expressions and gives us appropriate emotional responses to an expression
Aim of caseys study ?
To conduct a longitudinal study to investigate delayed gratification 40 years from when p’s were initially tested
Time line of data ?
Late 60’s/ early 70’s - 562 4 yr olds from stanford university nursery school did a gratification task using cookies and marshmallows
1993 - 155 of the original sample completed self reports in their 20’s which looked at their self control
2003 - 135 of the original sample completed self reports in their 30’s which looked at their self control
2011 - 59 of the original sample completed experiment 1 and within the 59 27 agreed to do experiment 2
What was experiment 1
59 p’s completed the hot and cool Go/NoGo tasks
Hot and cold
What was experiment 2 ?
27 (minus 1) completed the hot task only whilst having an fMRI scan to look at their brain activity
What was a Go/NoGo task ?
P’s to click when they see a certain stimulus e.g male face not a female face
Stimulus shown for 0.5 seconds then they would have to decide weather to click or not
There was a one second break between stimuli
Performance is measured on accuracy and reaction times
Difference between hot and cold tasks
Hot - emotion e.g asked to click when showing a happy expression
Cold- gender e.g asked to click when they saw a specific gender
Results of experiment one ?
LDs made more errors on the hot tasks than on the cool tasks
Both conditions were accurate on the Go trails but not on the NoGo
Results of experiment 2 ?
Low delayers had less activity in their inferior frontal gyrus and more actually in their ventral striatum when told not to click (opposite for high delayers)
Conclusions ?
Our ability to delay gratification during childhood may be the same when we are adults
Resisting temptation may be biological rather than learnt
What was the IV ?
Exp -1 - low delayers and high delayers
- Hot Go/NoGo and cool
Go/NoGo tasks
Exp -2 low delayers and high delayers
