Temptation and Self-Control
Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements
Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer & Sendhil Mullainathan
American Economic Review, May 2010, Pages 624-628
"A significant part of the development experience is the change in the way work is structured. To use a historical example, the Industrial Revolution involved workers moving from agriculture to manufacturing; from working on their own to working with others in factories; and from flexible work-hours to rigid work-days. How are we to understand these changes? Why did they occur? What impacts did they have on labor productivity and possibly growth? In answering questions such as these, economic theories draw on different assumptions about aggregate production, market failures, and innovation. Yet almost all rely on one of two determinants of labor productivity: human capital and incentives. Human capital theories (broadly construed) emphasize how work arrangements utilize the distribution of human capital and, in learning models, facilitate its development. Incentive theories (again broadly construed) emphasize how workplace arrangements align worker payoffs to minimize moral hazard. In this paper, we bring together and advance a growing literature on a third feature: worker self-control. Individuals may not be able to work as hard as they would like. Some work-place arrangements may make self-control problems more severe, while others may ameliorate them. Below, we describe evidence from a field experiment broadly supportive of the self-control perspective. We then argue that many work arrangements can be understood differently through this perspective. Specifically, we use self-control considerations to interpret the productivity increases and changes in work organization that accompany the shift from agrarian to industrialized production."
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Investing in Health: The Long-Term Impact of Head Start on Smoking
Kathryn Anderson, James Foster & David Frisvold
Economic Inquiry, July 2010, Pages 587-602
Abstract:
Head Start is a comprehensive, early childhood development program designed to augment the human capital and health capital levels of disadvantaged children. Evaluations of Head Start have tended to focus on cognitive outcomes; however, there is increasing recognition that other important outcomes can be influenced by participation. This article evaluates the long-term impact of Head Start participation on smoking behavior in young adulthood by comparing the behavior of adults who attended Head Start with those of siblings who did not. We find that participation in Head Start reduces the probability that an individual smokes cigarettes as a young adult.
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The role of broken homes in the development of self-control: A propensity score matching approach
Brian Boutwell & Kevin Beaver
Journal of Criminal Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Criminologists have frequently identified broken homes as a risk factor for involvement in crime and delinquency. The association between broken homes and antisocial behavior has been replicated in numerous studies, and despite being entrenched within the study of delinquency, there is a lack of research examining its impact on the development of self-control. This is somewhat surprising given that low self-control has been shown to be a robust and consistent predictor of antisocial behavior. We address this void in the literature by examining the role of broken homes in the development of self-control in early childhood using propensity score matching. Analysis of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study revealed a statistically significant association between broken homes and the development of self-control prior to matching. After matching on six key maternal and paternal covariates, the association between broken homes and levels of self-control was no longer statistically significant. We discuss what these findings mean for criminological theories.
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Ibrahim Senay, Dolores Albarracín & Kenji Noguchi
Psychological Science, April 2010, Pages 499-504
Abstract:
Although essential for psychology, introspective self-talk has rarely been studied with respect to its effects on behavior. Nevertheless, the interrogative compared with the declarative form of introspective talk may elicit more intrinsically motivated reasons for action, resulting in goal-directed behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to solve anagrams if they prepared for the task by asking themselves whether they would work on anagrams as opposed to declaring that they would. In the next three experiments, merely writing Will I as opposed to I will as part of an ostensibly unrelated handwriting task produced better anagram-solving performance and stronger intentions to exercise, which suggests that priming the interrogative structure of self-talk is enough to motivate goal-directed behavior. This effect was found to be mediated by the intrinsic motivation for action and moderated by the salience of the word order of the primes.
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Is boredom associated with problem gambling behaviour? It depends on what you mean by 'boredom'
Kimberley Mercer & John Eastwood
International Gambling Studies, April 2010, Pages 91-104
Abstract:
The propensity to experience boredom is believed to be a predisposing factor for problem gambling; yet, a full understanding of this association is currently lacking. Some claim that gambling alleviates the under-arousal associated with boredom; others claim that gambling helps individuals avoid the negative affect associated with boredom. The purpose of the present study was to clarify this relationship. Two hundred and two undergraduate students completed measures of gambling, boredom, and sensitivity to punishment and reward. Results suggest individuals gamble in order to increase arousal, rather than to avoid the negative affect associated with boredom. Moreover, results also suggest that boredom is distinctly related to gambling problems, above and beyond its overlap with sensitivity to reward.
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Emily Butler, Valerie Young & Ashley Randall
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, June 2010, Pages 599-623
Abstract:
This study assesses whether overweight women suppress emotion to accommodate their male partners, but in doing so put themselves at risk for excessive eating due to negative emotion and decreased dietary restraint. To investigate this possibility, a community sample of committed heterosexual couples completed baseline measures of height and weight, followed by a daily diary for 7 days assessing emotion suppression, positive and negative feelings about one's partner, and eating behavior. As predicted, on days when women with a higher body-mass index (BMI) reported high levels of suppressing emotions their male partners reported reduced negative feelings towards them and the women reported eating more than normal. These effects were reversed (partner feelings) or nonexistent (eating) for women with lower BMI. These results suggest that overweight and obese women may be caught in a double-bind, such that they please their male partners when they suppress emotion, but in doing so increase their risk of overeating.
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Feeding Your Feelings: Emotion Regulation Strategies and Emotional Eating
Catharine Evers, Marijn Stok & Denise de Ridder
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2010, Pages 792-804
Abstract:
The process by which emotions affect eating behavior emerges as one of the central unresolved questions in the field of emotional eating. The present studies address the hypothesis that the regulation strategies people use to deal with these emotions are responsible for increased eating. Negative emotions were induced and intake of comfort food and non-comfort food was measured by means of taste tests. Emotion induction was preceded by measuring individual differences in emotion regulation strategies (Study 1) or by instructions to regulate emotions in either an adaptive (reappraisal) or maladaptive (suppression) manner (Study 2). Study 3 also entailed a control condition without any regulation instructions. Relative to reappraisal and spontaneous expression, suppression led to increased food intake, but only of the comfort foods. Emotions themselves were not responsible for this effect. These findings provide new evidence that the way in which emotions are regulated affects eating behavior.
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Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention
Katherine MacLean et al.
Psychological Science, June 2010, Pages 829-839
Abstract:
The ability to focus one's attention underlies success in many everyday tasks, but voluntary attention cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. In the laboratory, sustained-attention failure is manifest as a decline in perceptual sensitivity with increasing time on task, known as the vigilance decrement. We investigated improvements in sustained attention with training (~5 hr/day for 3 months), which consisted of meditation practice that involved sustained selective attention on a chosen stimulus (e.g., the participant's breath). Participants were randomly assigned either to receive training first (n = 30) or to serve as waiting-list controls and receive training second (n = 30). Training produced improvements in visual discrimination that were linked to increases in perceptual sensitivity and improved vigilance during sustained visual attention. Consistent with the resource model of vigilance, these results suggest that perceptual improvements can reduce the resource demand imposed by target discrimination and thus make it easier to sustain voluntary attention.
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Mitul Mehta, Emma Gore-Langton, Nicole Golembo, Emma Colvert, Steven Williams & Edmund Sonuga-Barke
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, October 2010, Pages 2316-2325
Abstract:
Severe deprivation in the first few years of life is associated with multiple difficulties in cognition and behavior. However, the brain basis for these difficulties is poorly understood. Structural and functional neuroimaging studies have implicated limbic system structures as dysfunctional, and one functional imaging study in a heterogeneous group of maltreated individuals has confirmed the presence of abnormalities in the basal ganglia. Based on these studies and known dopaminergic abnormalities from studies in experimental animals using social isolation, we used a task of monetary reward anticipation to examine the functional integrity of brain regions previously shown to be implicated in reward processing. Our sample included a group of adolescents (n = 12) who had experienced global deprivation early in their lives in Romania prior to adoption into UK families. In contrast to a nonadopted comparison group (n = 11), the adoptees did not recruit the striatum during reward anticipation despite comparable performance accuracy and latency. These results show, for the first time, an association between early institutional deprivation and brain reward systems in humans and highlight potential neural vulnerabilities resulting from such exposures.
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Suzanne O'Neill, Colleen McBride, Sharon Hensley Alford & Kimberly Kaphingst
Annals of Behavioral Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Increased availability of genetic risk information may lead the public to give precedence to genetic causation over behavioral/environmental factors, decreasing motivation for behavior change. Few population-based data inform these concerns. We assess the association of family history, behavioral risks, and causal attributions for diseases and the perceived value of pursuing information emphasizing health habits or genes. 1,959 healthy adults completed a survey that assessed behavioral risk factors, family history, causal attributions of eight diseases, and health information preferences. Participants' causal beliefs favored health behaviors over genetics. Interest in behavioral information was higher than in genetic information. As behavioral risk factors increased, inclination toward genetic explanations increased; interest in how health habits affect disease risk decreased. Those at greatest need for behavior change may hold attributions that diminish interest in information for behavior change. Enhancing understanding of gene-environment influences could be explored to increase engagement with health information.
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Road Rage: Relationships with Borderline Personality and Driving Citations
Randy Sansone, Charlene Lam & Michael Wiederman
International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, Spring 2010, Pages 21-29
Objective: The objectives of this study were to determine: (1) the prevalence of self-reported road rage in a primary care sample; (2) the relationship, if any, between road rage and borderline personality disorder (BPD); and (3) whether those with road rage have a greater prevalence of different types of driving citations compared to those without road rage.
Method: Using a consecutive, cross-sectional sample of primary care outpatients, we surveyed 419 individuals.
Results: The prevalence of self-reported road rage in this sample was 35.3%. BPD was significantly more prevalent among participants with road rage (24.8% vs. 9.8%). Compared to those without road rage, those with road rage reported statistically significantly higher numbers of different types of driving citations, including moving and non-moving violations, as well as having had a driver's license suspended. There were no differences between the groups with regard to vehicular crashes or driving while intoxicated.
Conclusions: About one-third of individuals reported road rage. The prevalence of BPD was significantly higher among those with road rage compared to those without road rage, and is likely to be one of the contributory variables to reckless driving. Individuals who reported road rage appear to be less disciplined drivers and are subject to more types of driving citations, although they do not report greater rates of vehicular crashes or driving while intoxicated.
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Dara Musher-Eizenman, Kathleen Young, Kimberly Laurene, Courtney Galliger, Jessica Hauser & Marissa Wagner Oehlhof
Health Education & Behavior, April 2010, Pages 186-192
Abstract:
Overweight is increasing in children, leading to negative health consequences. Children also lack appropriate levels of important vitamins and nutrients in their diets. Environmental cues, such as food proximity, have been shown to influence consumption rates in adults. The present study has tested whether proximity to either a nutrient-dense or caloric-dense food would influence children's snack consumption in a day care setting. Children (N = 46, age range 3.4-11) consumed more of both nutrient- and energy-dense foods when they are sitting closer to the food than if they are sitting farther away from the food, above and beyond the effects of age. The data indicate that it may be possible to increase the consumption of nutrient-dense foods or decrease the consumption of energy-dense foods, respectively, by modifying the proximity of such foods within a child's environment.
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Priming for self-esteem influences the monitoring of one's own performance
Sara Bengtsson, Raymond Dolan & Richard Passingham
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social cues have subtle effects on a person, often without them being aware. One explanation for this influence involves implicit priming of trait associations. To study this effect, we activated implicit associations in participants of ‘being Clever' or ‘being Stupid' that were task relevant, and studied its behavioural impact on an independent cognitive task (the n-back task). Activating a representation of ‘Clever' caused participants to slow their reaction times after errors on the working memory task, while the reverse pattern was seen for associations to ‘Stupid'. Critically, these behavioural effects were absent in control conditions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that the neural basis of this effect involves the anterior paracingulate cortex (area 32) where activity tracked the observed behavioural pattern, increasing its activity during error monitoring in the ‘Clever' condition and decreasing in the ‘Stupid' condition. The data provide a quantitative demonstration of how implicit cues, which specifically target a person's self-concept, influences the way we react to our own behaviour and point to the anterior paracingulate cortex as a critical cortical locus for mediating these self-concept related behavioural regulations.
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Culture and Embodied Cognition: Moral Discourses in Internet Support Groups for Overeaters
Gabriel Ignatow
Social Forces, December 2009, Pages 643-669
Abstract:
This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's habitus concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis of culture as embodied cognitive structures linking individuals to primary-group discourses. To demonstrate the utility of this conception, I examine the unique abstract language and embodied metaphors used by members of religious and secular overeaters' internet support groups. The religious group used far more cleanliness metaphors, and members who made frequent use of such metaphors remained with the group longer and posted more messages. This effect was not found for either group's abstract language or for the secular group's embodied metaphors. The findings suggest that a cultural influence on social bonding can be shown when culture is operationalized in terms of embodied cognitive schemas that operate within both the habitus and group discourses. Also, traditionally religious moral culture may be more strongly associated with cultural coherence and social bonding than is modernist culture.