延迟满足：40年后个体差异依然稳定

文章标题：Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later

该文摘要如下：

We examined the neural basis ofself-regulation in individuals from a cohort of preschoolers who performed the delay-of-gratification task 4 decades ago. Nearly 60 individuals, now in their mid-forties, were tested on “hot” and “cool” versions of a go/nogo task toassess whether delay of gratification in childhood predicts impulse control abilities and sensitivity to alluring cues (happy faces). Individuals who were less able to delay gratification in preschool andconsistently showed low self-control abilities in their twenties and thirties performed more poorly than did high delayers when having to suppress a responseto a happy face but not to a neutral or fearful face. This finding suggests that sensitivity to environmental hot cues plays a significant role inindividuals’ ability to suppress actions toward such stimuli. A subset of these participants (n = 26) underwent functional imaging for the first time to test for biased recruitment of frontostriatal circuitry when required to suppressresponses to alluring cues. Whereas the prefrontal cortex differentiated between nogo and go trials to a greater extent in high delayers, the ventral striatum showed exaggerated recruitment in low delayers. Thus, resistance to temptation as measured originally by the delay-of-gratification task is a relatively stable individual difference that predicts reliable biases in frontostriatal circuitries that integrate motivational and control processes.

此文是open access的，有兴趣的童鞋围观。http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1108561108.abstract