EFFECTS OF SELF-CONTROL STRATEGIES ON 4-YEAR-OLDS RESISTANCE TO TEMPTATION

Two experiments were conducted to examine the hypothesis that 4-year-olds' failure to resist to temptation was caused by their attention to motivational qualities of tempting objects. The forbidden toy situation forbidden to play with the attractive toy was used. In Experiment I that manipulated attention style of tempting objects, four conditions were set. Two conditions of these were conditions that prevented from attending to the motivational qualities of tempting objects and consisted of distraction condition that distracted from toy and toy-negative condition that evaluated the toy negatively. The other two conditions were control condition and toy-positive condition that attended to the motivational qualities of toy. The main results indicated that the transgression latencies of distraction and toy-negative conditions were longer than the other two conditions. In Experiment II, subjects were instructed to choose the strategy that they would use between stimulus pairs obtained by combining three strategy used in Experiment I. The results indicated that the number of subjects choosing toy-positive strategy were more than the other strategies in pairing toy-positive strategy with other two strategies. The hypothesis was supported from the present study.