We examined whether self-restraint in early childhood predicted individual differences in 3 executive functions (EFs; inhibiting prepotent responses, updating working memory, and shifting task sets) in late adolescence in a sample of approximately 950 twins. At ages 14, 20, 24, and 36 months, the children were shown an attractive toy and told not…

Subjects focused attention on actual or imagined stimuli while recording intruding thoughts by pressing a button. Results showed that an internal locus of control was related to fewer intrusions than an external. Actual stimuli resulted in fewer intrusions than imagined stimuli. (Author/BEF)

Reports on an initial inquiry into children's compliant response inhibition, their tendencies to accomplish and maintain the inhibition of an attractive activity upon the request of an adult socialization agent. (Author/MP)

Recent research by Herman, Polivy, and their colleagues has been concerned with the determinants of self-control and disinhibition in dieters. The present paper summarizes a number of studies in which the reactions of dieters and nondieters to a variety of disinhibitory factors (preloading, emotional arousal, intoxication) were investigated. The…

Depressed and nondepressed college students were frustrated in an incentive task utilizing a nonreward technique. Matched controls undertook a similar task in which the frustration condition was absent. Subjects were 127 undergraduate psychology students. Pre- and post-test measures of hostility and depression were obtained. The Beck Depression…

Compared the performance of learning disabled and normal-achieving third- and fourth-grade children on Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test to determine group differences along the impulsivity-reflection dimension. Overall results suggest that learning disabled children are not more impulsive but rather use poor strategic behavior in processing…

The psychological (expectancy) and physiological (dosage) effects of alcohol on aggressive and assertive behavior were investigated. The expectancy manipulation was accomplished by informing subjects that the beer they were to receive was either half as strong or twice as strong as commercially available beer. The dosage manipulation involved…

Two types of self-blame were investigated: characterological self-blame, corresponding to the popular negative view of self-blame; and behavioral self-blame, representing a positive attempt to reestablish a belief in control. Results of a questionnaire completed by rape crisis centers located across the country attest to the pervasiveness of…

Cheating behavior has been found to relate to emotion-attribution explanations. Prior research with second-grade children has indicated that increased self-control occurs in a watching task when the child's emotional response is attributed to internal rather than external actions. In the present study, freshman women (N=221) took a reading…

Discussion of the functional relationship between self-injurious behavior (SIB) and self-restraint in people with severe disabilities considers SIB and self-restraint as members of the same functional response class, SIB and self-restraint as functionally independent responses, access to self-restraint as positive reinforcement of SIB, termination…

The present study examined whether in humans the generalized matching law described the relation between relative responding and relative drug intake by humans under concurrent variable interval variable interval (conc VI VI) schedules of drug reinforcement. Methadone-maintained patients, stabilized on 80 mg per day of methadone, were recruited…