Reactive and control processes – e.g., negative emotionality and immediacy preference – may predict distinct psychopathology trajectories. However, externalizing and internalizing problems change in behavioral manifestation across development and across contexts, thus necessitating the use of different measures and informants across ages. This is the first study that created developmental scales for both internalizing and externalizing problems by putting scores from different informants and measures onto the same scale to examine temperament facets as risk factors. Multidimensional linking allowed us to examine trajectories of internalizing and externalizing problems from ages 2 to 15 years (N = 1,364) using near-annual ratings by mothers, fathers, teachers, other caregivers, and self report. We examined reactive and control processes in early childhood as predictors of the trajectories and as predictors of general versus specific psychopathology in adolescence. Negative emotionality at age 4 predicted general psychopathology and unique externalizing problems at age 15. Wait times on an immediacy preference task at age 4 were negatively associated with age 15 general psychopathology, and positively associated with unique internalizing problems. Findings demonstrate the value of developmental scaling for examining development of psychopathology across a lengthy developmental span and the importance of considering reactive and control processes in development of psychopathology.

When people learn to make decisions from experience, a reasonable intuition is that additional relevant information should improve their performance. In contrast, we find that additional information about foregone rewards (i.e., what could have gained at each point by making a different choice) severely hinders participants’ ability to repeatedly make choices that maximize long-term gains. We conclude that foregone reward information accentuates the local superiority of short-term options (e.g., consumption) and consequently biases choice away from productive long-term options (e.g., exercise). These conclusions are consistent with a standard reinforcement-learning mechanism that processes information about experienced and forgone rewards. In contrast to related contributions using delay-of-gratification paradigms, we do not posit separate top-down and emotion-driven systems to explain performance. We find that individual and group data are well characterized by a single reinforcement-learning mechanism that combines information about experienced and foregone rewards.

Our study profiles a varying process of the relationship between delay of gratification (DG) and job performance over time and examines the moderating role of perceived organisational justice in the DG-job performance relationship. Employees’ ability to delay gratification was measured during their job interviews (Time 1). When they had worked for 3 months (Time 2), their job performance was rated by their supervisors. When they had worked for 5 months (Time 3), their perception of perceived informational justice was measured. Their job performance was rated again by their supervisors at 6 months (Time 4). The results showed that DG could directly predict new employees’ short-term (3-month) job performance but not their longer-term (6-month) job performance. Moreover, perceived informational justice moderated the relationship between DG and 6-month job performance.

Self-control, so important in the theory and practice of psychology, has usually been understood introspectively. This target article adopts a behavioral view of the self (as an abstract class of behavioral actions) and of self-control (as an abstract behavioral pattern dominating a particular act) according to which the development of self-control is a molar/molecular conflict in the development of behavioral patterns. This subsumes the more typical view of self-control as a now/later conflict in which an act of self-control is a choice of a larger but later reinforcer over a smaller but sooner reinforcer. If at some future time the smaller-sooner reinforcer will be more valuable than the larger-later reinforcer, self-control may be achieved through a commitment to the largerlater reinforcer prior to that point. According to some, there is a progressive internalization of commitment in the development of self-control. This presents theoretical and empirical problems. In two experiments – one with pigeons choosing between smallersooner and larger-later reinforcers, the other with adult humans choosing between short-term particular and long-term abstract reinforcers – temporal patterning of choices increased self-control.