Findings on the relation of maternal verbal teaching strategies to children's effortful control (EC; i.e., self-regulation) are limited in quantity and somewhat inconsistent. In this study, children's EC was assessed at 18, 30, and 42 months (ns = 255, 229, and 209, respectively) with adults' reports and a behavioral measure. Mothers' verbal teaching strategies were assessed while the mother an...

The target article develops an account of religious prosociality that is driven by increases in self-control. We suggest this account is incomplete. Although religion might increase prosociality to the in-group, it decreases it to the much larger out-group. Rituals, for example, lead to out-group derogation. We also challenge the link between religion and improved self-control, offering evidenc...

Why do chronic dieters often violate their dieting goals? One possibility is that they experience stronger hedonic responses to tempting food than normal eaters do. We scrutinized hedonic processing in dieters and normal eaters (a) by manipulating food preexposure and (b) by assessing both immediate and delayed hedonic responses to tempting food with an adapted affect-misattribution procedure. ...

We evaluate Henriques' Justification Hypothesis (JH; this issue) and argue that his explanation for the evolution of self-consciousness is overly narrow and the evolutionary sequence of events is backwards. Instead, we propose a broader theory of the evolution of self-consciousness, with four categories of adaptive functions: (a) self-regulation, (b) selective information processing, (c) unders...

Given assertions of the theoretical, empirical, and practical importance of self-control, this meta-analytic study sought to review evidence concerning the relationship between dispositional self-control and behavior. The authors provide a brief overview over prominent theories of self-control, identifying implicit assumptions surrounding the effects of self-control that warrant empirical testi...

Self-regulation has been conceptualized as the interplay between controlled and impulsive processes; however, most research has focused on the controlled side (i.e., effortful self-control). The present studies focus on the effects of motivation on impulsive processes, including automatic preferences for goal-disruptive stimuli and subjective reports of temptations and obstacles, contrasting th...

Despite the simplicity of Kurzban et al.'s framework, we argue that important information is lost in their simplification. We discuss research on delay of gratification and self-regulation that identifies key situational and psychological factors affecting how people represent rewards and costs. These factors affect the expected utilities of behavioral options and thus dramatically influence wh...

In this paper, the relations between academic goals and various indicators that define the quality of the learning process are analyzed. The purpose was to determine to what extent high, moderate, or low levels of academic goals were positively or negatively related to effort regulation, the value assigned to academic tasks, meta-cognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, beliefs about learning ...

This study explored relations between religiosity, both parent and student, and maternal parenting style and student academic self-regulation, academic achievement, and risk behavior among African-American youth attending a parochial college. Eighty-five students completed self-report survey measures of religiosity, self-regulation, academic achievement, and risk behavior. Participants also com...