Fifty-eight 30-month-old children and their mothers were observed during a task in which the child was asked to refrain from touching an attractive toy. Child and maternal regulatory strategies were independently coded in 5-second intervals. Consistent with past research, the ability to refrain from touching the toy was associated with less time orienting to the forbidden object and more time f...

Oxytocin is well-known for its impact on social cognition. This specificity the domain, however, has been challenged by findings suggesting a domain-general allostatic function oxytocin promoting future-oriented and flexible behavior. In this pre-registered study, we tested hypothesized of assessing intranasal (24 IU) core aspects human (inequity aversion) non-social decision making (delay grat...

The role of perspective taking in affective decision making was studied in children at two ages (3 and 4 years) using a delay-of-gratification paradigm in which children chose between an immediate reward of lower value and a delayed reward of higher value. Half the children chose for themselves (self condition), and half chose for the experimenter (other condition). Three-year-olds chose delaye...

This investigation tests whether the predictive power of the delay of gratification task (colloquially known as the "marshmallow test") derives from its assessment of self-control or of theoretically unrelated traits. Among 56 school-age children in Study 1, delay time was associated with concurrent teacher ratings of self-control and Big Five conscientiousness-but not with other personality tr...