Does preschool impulsivity predict teenage problem behaviors? Looking to longitudinal data for new perspectives on familiar topics

• In Event: 2-002 - Replication

Abstract

Preschool difficulty delaying gratification, or holding out for future rewards in the face of short-term costs and temptations, predicts teenage substance use and other problem behaviors (Ayduk et al., 2000; Wulfert et al., 2002), and is a common target among efforts to prevent drug abuse and addiction. However, the most widely cited studies on delay of gratification were not originally designed to be longitudinal, and their validity may be limited by high participant attrition and few repeated observations. We tested the replicability of and reasons behind associations between preschool delay of gratification and teenage problem behaviors using archival data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a large-scale, prospective longitudinal study that followed 1,354 children and their families from birth through age 15. This dataset is available to affiliated researchers upon request, and contains repeated measures of hundreds of psychosocial variables across child development, providing an invaluable resource for developmental scientists who wish to test research questions requiring longitudinal analytic methods.

A detailed study preregistration was submitted prior to the viewing of any raw data or descriptive statistics, and we examined only those variables deemed minimally necessary to carry out the planned analyses, following current best practices regarding the use of large-N datasets to conduct confirmatory hypothesis testing (Sakaluk, 2016). We found limited evidence for the conceptual replication of long-term correlates of delay of gratification: associations between preschool delay of gratification and adolescent outcomes replicated in three of five outcomes tested (academic achievement, β=0.270, F=11.22, p<.001; behavior problems, β=-0.224, F=-9.38, p=.002; and social skills, β=0.017, F=5.78, p=.017; but not emotion regulation or personality, p’s>.10). Moreover, two of those three associations were no longer significant after controlling for baseline outcome levels, leaving behavior problems as the only adolescent outcome uniquely predicted by preschool delay of gratification (β=-0.175, F=-6.45, p=.011). Using multilevel hierarchical models to explore factors driving this longitudinal association, we found that individual differences in children’s social trust far exceed their self-control in terms of predicting later behavior problems in adolescence, explaining nearly 32% of the total variance. These results suggest popular conceptualizations of delay of gratification should be re-examined, and highlight promising new directions for policies and programs that seek to improve delay of gratification in children and adults who struggle.

Authors

• Laura Michaelson, University of Colorado Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Yuko Munakata, University of Colorado Boulder