2014

SELF-CONTROL:
A differential perspective

Master in Research in Behavior and Cognition Monica Llobera Ramrez 20/01/2014

I can resist everything except temptation Oscar Wilde

1. Conceptual definition and limits Several authors have noted the challenge of defining and measuring self-control (also referred to as self-regulation, self-discipline, willpower, effortful control, ego strength and inhibitory control, among other terms) and its converse, impulsivity or impulsiveness. (Duckworth, 2011). Interest in self-control unites all the social and behavioral sciences. Self-control is an umbrella construct that bridges concepts and measurements from different disciplines (e.g. impulsivity, conscientiousness, self-regulation, delay of gratification, inattention-hyperactivity, executive function, willpower, intertemporal choice). (Moffit, 2011) The concept of self-control was defined for the first time in 1973 by the American Psychological Association as the ability to suppress or the practise of suppression of an impulsive reaction of a behavior, desire or emotion (Sisto, 2010). But before this definition, three different intellectual approaches investigated self-control; the psychoanalytic approach by Freud, the theory of learning by Skinner and the soviet neuropsychology by Luria and Vygostsky. Nowadays, according to Duckworth (2011), self-control is the idea of voluntary selfgovernance in the service of personally valued goals and standards. Similar to this definition, Baumeister, Vohs and Tice (2007) define self-control as the capacity for altering ones own responses, especially to bring them into line with standards such as ideals, values, morals and social expectations, and to support the pursuit of long-term goals. From this point of view, self-control should contribute to producing a broad range of positive outcomes in life. In fact, empirical evidence indicates that people with high dispositional selfcontrol should have better outcomes in various spheres. (Tangney, 2004) Distinguishing self-control (high and/or low) from other concepts: Many authors refer self-control and self-regulation as the same construct. Many others distinguish between them and say that self-control is only one part of self-regulation, like for example, De Lisi (2013) as the next figure shows.

Figure 1. Nomological network of self-regulation constructs. (De Lisi, 2013) 2

Tangney (2004) found that high levels of self-control do not correlate with certain pathologies such as obsession and compulsion. In fact, he found that more self-control is better and associated with fewer symptoms and he makes a distinction between high self-control (more related with self-regulation) and overcontrol (which is characteristic of people who suffer from problems regulating and directing their capacity for self-control).

2. Evaluation There are four main distinct approaches to the measurement of self-control (Duckworth, 2011): executive function tasks, delay of gratification tasks, self-report questionnaires and informant-report questionnaires going from the weakest to the strongest measure.

Table 1. Correlation matrix for four types of self-control measures. (Duckworth, 2011)

Executive function tasks: Behavioral tasks designed to assess executive function have been used to assess individual differences in self-control (Duckworth, 2011) like the tasks go/no go (Eigsti, 2004).

Delay of gratification: First developed to understand normative, age-related changes in child development (Duckworth, 2011), Mischel and colleagues developed a simple marshmallow test , the 3

delay-of-gratification paradigm to measure preschoolers ability to delay gratification as a predictor for consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. (Mischel, 2011) Performance in delay tasks has been shown to predict academic achievement, drug use and aggressive and delinquent behavior (Duckworth, 2011; Mischel, 2011).

Self and informant-report personality questionnaires: Some examples of this questionnaires would be the Self-Control Scale (Malouf, 2013) (Tangney, 2004) , the Eysenck I7 Impulsiveness Scale (Duckworth, 2011) or the Barratt Impulsivity Scale (Tangney, 2004) In a study made by Moffit (2011), childrens self-control during their first decade of life was measured using nine measures of self-control: observational ratings of childrens lack of control (3 and 5 years of age) and parent, teacher, and self-reports of impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence, inattention and impulsivity (5, 7, 9 and 11 years old). The nine measures were positively and significantly correlated. Health, wealth and crime outcomes were assessed at age 32 by physical examinations, blood tests, personal interviews, record searches and informant reports. Self and informant personality questionnaires measures of self-control have been shown to predict academic achievement, physical health, wealth, juvenile delinquency, criminal activity in adulthood and longevity (Duckworth, 2011) (Moffit, 2011). Environmental-Risk twin study (E-Risk). It addresses (1) which specific environmental risk factors contribute to the early emergence of disruptive behaviour, (2) whether environmental risk factors interact with genetic risk to influence disruptive behaviour, (3) whether and how child-specific parenting experiences explain differences in behavioural outcomes between children in the same family, (4) how the effects of risk are mediated through childrens neuropsychological executive functions, social-information processing, and verbal skills.

3. Dispositional vision, origin and development of the self-control Many authors have pointed out different aspects when talking about self-control. Whiteside and Lynams (2001) UPPS model situates facets of self -control within the five-factor model of personality, relating urgency to neuroticism, perseverance and planning to conscientiousness, and sensation seeking to extraversion (Duckworth, 2011). Many authors consider self-control to be coextensive with Big Five conscientiousness (Duckworth (2011); Moffit, (2011)).

Tangney found some dispositional features related to self-control. Just as Moffit (2011) and Duckworth (2011) said, Tangney et al.(2004) found a positive correlation between the Big Five factor of conscientiousness and self-control (see table 2, pag. 6).

Table 2. Relationship of self-control to the Big Five and perfectionism (from Tangney, 2004) They related some psychopathology symptoms with a low self-control. They also found a significant positive correlation between self-control and the Rosenberg self-esteem scale which means that people with high self-control apparently accept themselves as valuable, worthy individuals and are relatively well able to sustain this favorable view of self across time and circumstances. Another finding was that people with good capacity for self-control were also emotional stable. Relative to the interpersonal domain, they found that those participants 5

who reported a positive family environment in their family of origin had higher self-control, compared with those with dysfunctional families.

Caspi (2000) also found the same relation between consciousness and self-control and a high stability in their personality traits as well as good predictors of their outcomes.

Figure 3 and 4. Relation between self-control and the three styles of personality (Caspi, 2000) 6

In a more phisiological point of view, through magnetic resonance imaging it has been identified areas of the brain that become differentially activated when people engage in the process of self-regulation, as well as connections among areas of the brain that seem to play a key role in the tasks implicated in the process. Specifically, Mischel et al. (2011) predicted that participants with consistently low levels of self-control, compared with their consistently highcontrol counterparts, would be characterized by less refined connectivity in frontostriatal and frontoparietal circuitry. Heatherton and Wagner (2011) suggest that the problems in selfregulation are due to failures in the prefrontal cortex or because of the influence on reward.

Behavioral geneticists have also shown that self-control is under both genetic and environmental influences. (Moffit, 2011). Bouchard and McGue (2003) said that the differences between individuals is composed by an additive function of genetic effects, shared environmental effects and nonshared environmental effects. When they talk about personality, they conclude saying that genetic influences account for about 40-55% of variance (although he also says that the results can only generalized to populations exposed to a range of environments similar to those studied). So, taking into account the authors, we could say that self-control has a great part of heradibility. The study carried out by Moffit (2011) to siblings followed up to age of 12, showed that the 5y-old sibling with poorer self-control was significantly more likely to begin smoking as a 12-yold (a precursor of adult ill health), perform poorly in school (a precursor of adult wealth) and engage in antisocial behaviors (a precursor of adult crime), and these findings remained significant even after controlling for sibling differences in IQ. Dunedin study children with greater self-control were more likely to have been brought up in socioeconomically advantaged families (r=0.25, p<0.001) and had higher IQs (r=0.44, p<0.001), raising the possibility that low self-control could be a proxy for low social class origins or low intelligence. (Moffit, 2011) Moffit found that differences between individuals in self-control are present in early childhood and stable and can predict multiple indicators of health, wealth and crime across life in both genders as well as low intelligence and low social class origins. Even among teenagers who managed to finish high school as nonsmokers and nonparents, the level of personal self-control they had achieved as children still explained variation in their health, finances and crime when they reached their thirties. Romer, Duckworth, Sznitman and Park (Duckworth, 2011) found that sensation seeking peaks sharply during late adolescence and then falls in early adulthood, whereas the developmental trajectories for future time perspective and delay of gratification over the same period are monotonically positive. Recent neuroscience research suggests that sensation seeking impulses may be generated by dopaminergic subcortical structures whose activity normatively spikes during adolescence, whereas the psychological processes associated with inhibitory control, premeditation, and perseverance correspond to slowly maturing frontal areas. 7

So, we can conclude that self-control is a multidimensional trait, a stable trait that starts in the early childhood and remain quite stable during the lifetime and which involves situational, perceptual, cognitive aspects, attitudes and motivations.

4. Consequences Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money and promote prosperity (Moffit, 2011) Moffit says that even after accounting for study members differences in social status and IQ, children as young as three who scored lower on measures of self-control were more likely than children with higher self-control to have the following outcomes as adults:

Table 3. Results for adult outcomes related with self-control (Moffit, 2011)

Predicting Health Childhood self-control predicted adult health problems, (including poorer lung function, sexually transmitted infections, obesity, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, dental disease) even after accounting for social class origins and IQ. In the same way, Roberts et al. (2007) found that high scores in consciousness as a good protector of early death.

As adults, children with poor self-control were not at elevated risk for depression. They had elevated risk for substance dependence (including tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, and harder drugs).

Predicting Wealth Poor self-control offered significant incremental validity in predicting the socioeconomic position they achieved and the income they earned. At the age of 32, children with poor self-control were less financially planful. Compared with other 32-y-olds, they were less likely to save and had acquired fewer financial building blocks for the future. They reported more money-management difficulties and had accumulated more credit problems (including savings habits, home ownership, investments, retirement plans).

Predicting crime Children with poor self-control were more likely to be convicted of a criminal offense, even after accounting for social class origins and IQ. According to that, Denson et al. (2012) assessed the relation between aggressiveness and self-control and they found that people who had being trained to increase their self-control where less aggressive. However, they also mentioned the importance to determine when self-control increases aggression rather than decreases considering that many premeditated acts of aggression or terrorism require exceptional self-control to resist the urge to retaliate immediately, to plan an attack years in advance or to force oneself to enact brutal behaviors. And they put as an example the training military personnel who need self-control to override inhibitions toward harming others.

Self-control and Adolescent Mistakes: data collected at the ages of 13, 15, 18 and 21 showed that children with poor self-control were more likely to make mistakes as adolescents, resulting in snares that trapped them in harmful lifestyles. Rearing a child in a single-parent household

(Moffit, 2011)

Mischel (2011) found that preschool delay ability continued to predict later outcomes in adulthood including higher educational achievement, higher sense of self-worth, better ability to cope with stress and less substance abuse and seems to buffer against the development of a a variety of dispositional vulnerabilities later in life, such as features of borderline personality disorder. (Mischel, 2011) Self-control would bring, according to (Bouchard, 2003)and (Ozer, 2006), a certain choice in occupational interests (conventional in our case) as well as satisfaction and good performance at work. Bouchard also mention the influence of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) in satisfaction at work. (Baumeister R. a., 2007) refers to motivation as a basic aspect in life and self-control as the vital function to manage conflicts between inner motivations and external constraints and inner motives. So, according to that, people with a good level of self-control, will be more consistent with their motivations and will be more succesful in their lifes. According to Tangney (2004), and very similar to what other authors have found: People with high self-control had better grades, as compared with people low in self-control. People with high self-control showed fewer impulse control problems. They showed better psychological adjustment. 10

They also had higher self-acceptance or self-esteem, which is often regarded as a vital aspect of mental health and adjustment. High self-control was correlated with better interpersonal relationships, as indicated by better family cohesion and less family conflict. In addition, people with high self-control reported less anger and better management of anger when they do get angry.

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5. References

Baumeister, R. a. (2007). Self-regulation, ego depletion and motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1-14. Baumeister, R. V. (2007). The strength model of Self-Control. Current directions in psychological science, 16(6), 351-355. Bouchard, T. a. (January de 2003). Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology, 54(1), 4-45. Caspi, A. (2000). The Child is father of the man: Personality Continuities from childhood to adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 158-172. De Lisi, M. (2013). Pandora's Box: the consequences of low self-control into adulthood. En C. a. Gibson, Handbook of life-course criminology (pgs. 261-273). New York: Springer. Denson, T. D. (2012). Self-control and aggression. Association for psychological science, 21(1), 20-25. Duckworth, A. a. (1 de June de 2011). A Meta-Analysis of the convergent validity of self-control measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(3), 259-268. Eigsti, I. Z. (2004). Predicting cognitive control from preschool to late adolescence and young adulthood. Psychological science, 17(6), 478-484. Heatherton, T. a. (March de 2011). Cognitive neuroscience of self-regulation failure. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(3), 132-139. Malouf, E. S. (2013). The Brief Self-Control Scale predicts jail inmates' recidivism, substance dependence and post-release adjustment. Personality and Social Psychology bulletin XX (X), 1-14. Mischel, W. A. (2011). 'Willpower' over the life span: decomposing self-regulation. SCAN(6), 252-256. Moffit, T. A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. PNAS vol.108, no. 7, 2693-2698. Ozer, D. a.-M. (2006). Personality and the prediction of consequential outcomes. Annual reviews of psychology, 57, 401-421. Roberts, B. K. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on psychological science, 2(4), 313- 345. Sisto, F. M. (2010). Relation between self-control and self-concept in child and young. Liberabit, 16(2), 217-226. 12

Tangney, J. B. (April de 2004). High Self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271-324.

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