PSYCHOLOGY

Biological Psychology
Regions of the brain – Casey et al
CASEY, B. J., SOMERVILLE, L. H., GOTLIB, I. H., AYDUK, O., FRANKLIN, N. T., ASKREN, M. K., JONIDES, J., BERMAN, M.,
WILSON, N., TESLOVICH, T., GLOVER, G., ZAYAS, V., MISCHEL, W. and SHODA, Y. (2011)
Behavioural and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, (36), 14998-15003.
4. Sample
• 562, four-year-old pupils from Stanford’s Bing Nursery School completed a delay-of-gratification task during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• 155 of these completed self-control scales when in their 20s (1993) and then 135 of these when in their 30s (2003).
• 117 of the 135 individuals who were above average or below average in their original delay-of-gratification performance as well as in the selfreport
measures of self control were contacted in relation to participating in this study.
• 59 (23 males, 36 females) of the 117 agreed to participate in this longitudinal behavioural study (Experiment 1). Participants were classified as
low or high delayers from the results of (a) their delay-of-gratification performance and (b) the self-control measures. In Experiment 1 there were
32 high delayers (12 male, 20 female) and 27 low delayers (11 male, 16 female).
• 27 (13 males, 14 females) of the 59 who participated in Experiment 1 agreed to be part of a functional neuroimaging study (Experiment 2). In
Experiment 2 there were 15 high delayers (5 male, 10 female) and 11 low delayers (7 male, 4 female)
• NB: One 41-year-old man was excluded from all analyses because of poor performance so results for Experiment 2 were based on the
performance of 26 participants.
40 © OCR 2017