In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple 'marshmallow test' to measure preschoolers' ability to delay gratification. In numerous follow-up studies over 40 years, this 'test' proved to have surprisingly significant predictive validity for consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. In this article, we review key findings from the longitudinal w...

Members of social networks are given opportunities to bestow positive recognition upon one another by means of constructs such as “likes” and “retweets.” Although recipients no doubt experience utility from these actions, one might question why these constructs with no intrinsic value for the sender are exchanged at all. Here we formulate a metric for the prestige of a member of a social networ...

Semantic annotations could improve the Legacy Web by adding semantics to information which has already been published in form of unstructured text. Semi-automatic annotation tools seem the most viable way to obtain a contribution from users without requiring them to have a deep knowledge about semantics, however the effort to make them work is still, most of the times, not worth the reward for ...

BACKGROUND Little has been published on gratification disorder ("infantile masturbation") in early childhood. AIMS To expand on the profile of patients diagnosed with this condition. METHODS Retrospective case note review; Fraser of Allander Neurosciences Unit paediatric neurology outpatient department 1972-2002. RESULTS Thirty one patients were diagnosed (11 males and 20 females). Twenty...

Mobile electronic devices are playing an increasingly pervasive role in our daily activities. Yet, there has been very little empirical research investigating how mobile technology habits might relate to individual differences in cognition and affect. The research presented in this paper provides evidence that heavier investment in mobile devices is correlated with a relatively weaker tendency ...

In all those stories John A. Zachman is telling us, we can recognize frequently an opposition, implicit or explicit, between two ways of perceiving the future: the long and the short term. This difference in the duration of looking forward is fundamental: “Life’s trade-off in its most simplistic form is between the short term (“immediate gratification”) and the long term (what’s ‘good’ for us)“...

It has been theorized that high drive initiates an "autistic" perceptual process operating in the direction of drive gratification. In the present study, it was hypothesized that (a) under conditions of high drive, perceptual distortion of drive-relevant objects occurs principally along drive-relevant dimensions; (b) the direction of distortion is toward enhancement of the object's potential fo...

A multitude of evidences show impulse purchase is prevalent online, yet relatively limited knowledge is available on this phenomenon. The study borrows marketing wisdom to information systems space to quantify how the website cues (products availability, website ease of use and visual appeal) affect personality traits (instant gratification, normative evaluation and impulsiveness) to urge the i...

OBJECTIVE Modification and prevention of risky sexual behavior is important to individuals' health and public health policy. This study employed a novel sexual discounting task to elucidate the effects of social learning and regret expression on delay to sexual gratification in a behavioral task. METHODS Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers were assigned to hear one of three scenarios about a frien...

The ability of children to delay gratification is correlated with a range of positive outcomes in adulthood, showing the potential impact of helping young children increase their competence in this area. This study investigated the influence of symbolic models on the self-control of 3-year old children. Eighty-three children were randomly assigned to one of three modelling conditions: personal ...