← The Marshmallow Test Mastering Self Control
The Marshmallow Test Chapter 12. Cooling Painful Emotions
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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THE MOST EXCITING FINDINGS from the marshmallow studies are not the unexpected long-term links between seconds of waiting on the Marshmallow Test and doing well later in life. More impressive is that if we have delay ability and use it, we are better protected from our personal vulnerabilities—such as a predisposition to gain unwanted weight, become angry, feel hurt and rejected, and so on—and can live with these predispositions more constructively. The research that shows how and why self-control has this positive effect has focused on a widespread and pernicious vulnerability called rejection sensitivity (RS), and I turn here to what has been learned about it.
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THE FALLOUT FROM HIGH REJECTION SENSITIVITY
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“High RS” people are extremely anxious about rejection in close relationships, anticipate abandonment, and often, through their own behavior, provoke the very rejection that they fear. If uncontrolled, the destructive effects of high RS can play out like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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High RS people like Bill easily become obsessed with whether or not they are “really” loved, and their own ruminations further trigger a cascade of hot-system anger and resentment as their fears of abandonment escalate. In response to their distress, as well as the unhappy reactions of their partners, they become more coercive and controlling—openly or with passive aggression. They blame what they do on their partner’s actions (“She made me throw my damn scrambled eggs at her”) and they validate their fears of abandonment with the rejections that they at first imagine and then help create when their own rage erupts.
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This signature pattern has predictable consequences, identified in research by Geraldine Downey and her students. Geraldine is a Columbia University psychology professor and has been my colleague since the early 1990s. She has long been the leader of research on the nature and consequences of RS. Her studies have shown that the relationships of high RS young men and women do not last as long as those who are low in RS. In middle school, high RS children are more easily victimized and bullied by their peers and are lonelier. In the long run, people who are high in this vulnerability continue to experience more rejection, which in time erodes their sense of personal worth and self-esteem, making depression more likely.
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HOW DELAY ABILITY PROTECTS
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Soon after Geraldine came to Columbia, she and I, and our students, began a long series of joint studies to examine how self-control ability might protect high RS individuals against the unfortunate consequences of their vulnerability. The basic questions we asked were: Does delay ability protect against the negative effects of high RS? Do the same attention-control skills that let toddlers cope with the distress of even a brief maternal separation and help preschoolers wait for marshmallows also allow a high RS adult to cool himself before he becomes enraged when his wife pays attention to the newspaper headlines and not to him? RS was measured by how strongly participants felt that worries like these applied to them: “I often worry about being abandoned by others” and “I often worry that my partner really doesn’t love me.”
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Ozlem Ayduk (who studied with Geraldine and me at Columbia at the time) led a study that looked at the preschoolers in the longitudinal studies I had begun at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. When they reached age 27 to 32, those high in RS who were not able to delay gratification as preschoolers on the Marshmallow Test had lower self-esteem, lower self-worth, and lower coping ability. They attained lower educational levels, used more cocaine/crack, and were more likely to get divorced. In contrast, the participants who were just as high in RS as young adults, but who had been able to delay gratification as preschoolers, were protected against these negative outcomes: their chronic anxiety about rejection did not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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In 2008, a related study by the same team, again with Ozlem as the lead author, showed that people high in RS were also more vulnerable to developing features of borderline personality disorder. This disorder predisposes them to amplify minor disagreements and see them as personal attacks to which they react by becoming destructive to others as well as to themselves. And most important, those high in RS but also high in self-control ability were protected against these effects and preserved their relationships. We found this both in the follow-up of the preschoolers at Stanford and in two new samples, one of college students and the other of adults in the Berkeley, California, community. Overall, those who had high RS but also good self-control skills coped as well in their lives as those who were low in RS. When high RS people with good self-control skills were faced with stress and potential rejection in social relationships, they were able to use those skills to cool their hot, impulsive first reactions, thus restraining themselves from becoming enraged and aggressive and destroying their relationships.
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The clearer and broader the connections became between what preschoolers did on the Marshmallow Test and what happened to them as their lives evolved, the more I kept asking myself: Would the results from Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley hold up outside these privileged and selective communities? To find out, I needed a school as far as possible from the Stanford campus—both geographically and demographically.
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FROM STANFORD TO THE SOUTH BRONX
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We studied children as they entered middle school in the sixth grade at age 12 and followed them until they exited at the end of eighth grade at age 14. We did this in sequential waves over the five years of the project. When the sixth graders entered, they took the Marshmallow Test—except this time, the reward was lots of M&M’s later rather than just a few right away. During the students’ three years in the school, we collected various outcome measures so that we could see if what they did on the test did or did not predict their subsequent behavior.
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Just as with the privileged Stanford children, the Bronx eighth graders who were high RS rated themselves as having lower self-worth and were rated by their peers and teachers as functioning more poorly. But again this correlation was found only for those young adolescents who had been unable two years earlier to effectively delay gratification on the Marshmallow Test. High RS did not condemn these children to interpersonal problems as long as they were able to cool their arousal and stress, as measured in the delay of gratification situation.
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To follow how the children in the Bronx developed over time, we asked their peers to rate them on how well accepted they were socially and their teachers on how aggressive they were. The two sets of ratings turned out to correlate: kids perceived as more aggressive by their teachers were less accepted and rated more negatively by their peers. High RS youngsters were less accepted by their peers and seen as much more aggressive by their teachers, but only if they had been quick to ring the bell and settled for just a few M&M’s.
Note: hostile weakness types
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The children who worried about rejection but were able to cool their stress and wait for their M&M’s were perceived by their teachers as the least aggressive, and their peers saw them as the most socially accepted. The combination of high motivation to avoid rejection and self-control skills helped this group of children gain the acceptance they craved. High anxiety about rejection does not have to play out in a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can even help a rejection-sensitive child win the popularity contest.
Note: friendly weakness types
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When highly rejection-sensitive people feel angry and hostile, as they often do, they have an advantage if they also have the ability to cool and slow themselves down by taking a deep breath, regulating their thoughts strategically, and thinking of their long-term goals. They can make these strategies automatic rather than effortful if they develop and practice If-Then implementation plans that connect their hot triggers (If she reads the newspaper) and internal cues (If I am starting to feel angry) to their self-control strategies (then I take a deep breath and start counting backwards from 100).
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Those delay skills can also be used to cool the aggressive impulse by activating a hot thought that is incompatible with it. For example, if someone like Bill developed better self-control skills, he might be able to vividly imagine how his egg throwing in the heat of the moment would have him reading a “Dear Bill” letter when he returns home that night and finds his wife’s closet empty. The mechanisms at work here, when delay ability allows the split-second pause of reflection before action, are the same as those that help people with other vulnerabilities (tendencies toward borderline personality disorder, obesity, or drug addiction) better regulate and control their behavior.
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In the Journal of Pediatrics in 2013, Tanya Schlam and her colleagues reported that the amount of time the Bing Nursery School preschoolers at Stanford waited on the Marshmallow Test predicted their body mass index thirty years later: “Each additional minute that a preschooler delayed gratification predicted a 0.2-point reduction in BMI in adulthood.” The authors rightly caution that a significant correlation, while impressive and rare over such a long time period, does not imply a causal link. It can help, however, encourage researchers, educators, and parents to continue to develop interventions to improve self-control skills in young children.
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SELF-CONTROL IN DUNEDIN
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A scientist is always eager for independent replication of research findings, preferably in different populations and contexts. In 2011, I was reassured to learn that parallel results about the protective effects of self-control early in life were being found by another research team that worked with a very different population on the other side of the globe, decades after the marshmallow studies began. Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, and their colleagues looked closely at the lives of more than a thousand children born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in a single year and followed them over the years to see how they were doing at age 32. They used measures of self-control and long-term outcomes different from ours. They assessed self-control during the first decade of life with a wide variety of observational ratings, as well as with reports from parents, teachers, and the children themselves. They asked about aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence, inattention, and impulsivity. To assess health outcomes, they measured substance dependence, smoking, and metabolic abnormalities (such as obesity, hypertension, and high cholesterol). They looked at wealth outcomes, including income levels, family structure (such as single-parent child rearing), saving habits, credit problems, and financial dependence. They assessed antisocial behavior, such as criminal convictions. Regardless of the measure used, poor childhood self-control significantly predicted negative adult outcomes: worse health, more financial troubles, and more crimes committed.
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self-control, especially early in life, has predictive value. More important, as the other research in this chapter has illustrated, it has protective value, helping prevent dispositional vulnerabilities from playing out destructively. That makes self-control skills worth nourishing in our children, and in ourselves.