10 Nov The ability to inhibit impulse is an indicator of emotional intelligence (DANIEL GOLEMAN)
Just imagine you’re four years old, and someone makes the following
proposal: If you’ll wait until after he runs an errand, you can have two
marshmallows for a treat. If you can’t wait until then, you can have
only one—but you can have it right now. It is a challenge sure to try
the soul of any four-year-old, a microcosm of the eternal battle
between impulse and restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control,
gratification and delay. Which of these choices a child makes is a
telling test; it offers a quick reading not just of character, but of the
trajectory that child will probably take through life.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than
resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all
emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
The root meaning of the word emotion, remember, is “to move.” The
capacity to resist that impulse to act, to squelch the incipient
movement, most likely translates at the level of brain function into
inhibition of limbic signals to the motor cortex, though such an
interpretation must remain speculative for now.
At any rate, a remarkable study in which the marshmallow
challenge was posed to four-year-olds shows just how fundamental is
the ability to restrain the emotions and so delay impulse. Begun by
psychologist Walter Mischel during the 1960s at a preschool on the
Stanford University campus and involving mainly children of Stanford
faculty, graduate students, and other employees, the study tracked
down the four-year-olds as they were graduating from high school.7
Some four-year-olds were able to wait what must surely have
seemed an endless fifteen to twenty minutes for the experimenter to
return. To sustain themselves in their struggle they covered their eyes
so they wouldn’t have to stare at temptation, or rested their heads in
their arms, talked to themselves, sang, played games with their hands
and feet, even tried to go to sleep. These plucky preschoolers got the
two-marshmallow reward. But others, more impulsive, grabbed the
one marshmallow, almost always within seconds of the experimenter’s
leaving the room on his “errand.”
The diagnostic power of how this moment of impulse was handled
became clear some twelve to fourteen years later, when these same
children were tracked down as adolescents. The emotional and social
difference between the grab-the-marshmallow preschoolers and their
gratification-delaying peers was dramatic. Those who had resisted
temptation at four were now, as adolescents, more socially competent:
personally effective, self-assertive, and better able to cope with the
frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze, or
regress under stress, or become rattled and disorganized when
pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of
giving up even in the face of difficulties; they were self-reliant and
confident, trustworthy and dependable; and they took initiative and
plunged into projects. And, more than a decade later, they were still
able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals.
The third or so who grabbed for the marshmallow, however, tended
to have fewer of these qualities, and shared instead a relatively more
troubled psychological portrait. In adolescence they were more likely
to be seen as shying away from social contacts; to be stubborn and
indecisive; to be easily upset by frustrations; to think of themselves as
“bad” or unworthy; to regress or become immobilized by stress; to be
mistrustful and resentful about not “getting enough”; to be prone to
jealousy and envy; to overreact to irritations with a sharp temper, so
provoking arguments and fights. And, after all those years, they still
were unable to put off gratification.
What shows up in a small way early in life blossoms into a wide
range of social and emotional competences as life goes on. The
capacity to impose a delay on impulse is at the root of a plethora of
efforts, from staying on a diet to pursuing a medical degree. Some
children, even at four, had mastered the basics: they were able to read
the social situation as one where delay was beneficial, to pry their
attention from focusing on the temptation at hand, and to distract
themselves while maintaining the necessary perseverance toward their
goal—the two marshmallows.
Even more surprising, when the tested children were evaluated
again as they were finishing high school, those who had waited
patiently at four were far superior as students to those who had acted
on whim. According to their parents’ evaluations, they were more
academically competent: better able to put their ideas into words, to
use and respond to reason, to concentrate, to make plans and follow
through on them, and more eager to learn. Most astonishingly, they
had dramatically higher scores on their SAT tests. The third of
children who at four grabbed for the marshmallow most eagerly had
an average verbal score of 524 and quantitative (or “math”) score of
528; the third who waited longest had average scores of 610 and 652,
respectively—a 210-point difference in total score.
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratification is
twice as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ
at age four; IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT only after
children learn to read.9 This suggests that the ability to delay
gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite
apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood is also a
powerful predictor of later delinquency, again more so than IQ.10) As
we shall see in Part Five, while some argue that IQ cannot be changed
and so represents an unbendable limitation on a child’s life potential,
there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as impulse control
and accurately reading a social situation can be learned.
What Walter Mischel, who did the study, describes with the rather
infelicitous phrase “goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification”
is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny
impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business,
solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His
finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a metaability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use
their other mental capacities
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Daniel Goleman
