Literature Review Blog #4

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Citation

Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-control. Little, Brown. Print. 

Summary

This book revolves around the implications of self-control and how even something as trivial as taking a marshmallow now or waiting to receive two is an indicator of a student's potential in academics or other functions.

Author

Walter Mischel: Mischel is a renowned American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. I think this fact alone is reason enough for me to use his material in my paper, especially this book of his as it focuses on self-regulation. 

Key terms

1. High delay - those who could, on a consistent basis, wait and were not subject to their impulses.
2. Hot or Cool - two ways used to describe the brain with "hot" being emotional, reflexive, unconscious — and t "cool" being cognitive, reflective, slower, and effortful.

Quotes

1. "Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.It can help people avoid becoming entrapped early in life, dropping out of school, becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs they hate." 
2. "The marshmallow experiments convinced me that if people can change how they mentally represent a stimulus, they can exert self-control and escape from being victims of the hot stimuli that have come to control their behavior."
3. "Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept.  Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand."

Value

I think this source has the potential to be the backbone of my research due to the fact that it explores my topic of self-regulation fully and it is also very famous; which means many other researchers have review or critics of this experiment which will broaden the type and amount of information I have.