The scene is familiar: a child is given a marshmallow, and a choice to eat it immediately or wait approximately 15 minutes to earn an extra marshmallow. Some children, though struggling to resist, successfully wait to claim their reward until the tester returns, while others surrender to temptation and gulp down the marshmallow. This was the famous Marshmallow Test, conducted at Stanford Bing Nursery School back in the late 1960s and early 1970s by psychologist Walter Mischel, to study self-control and delayed gratification in preschool children. Dr. Philip Peake, Professor of Psychology at Smith College, continues this work on preschool waiting by following the cohort of 550 children who participated in these studies, now approaching 50 years of age. The long-term linkages demonstrate that children who were able to wait and exercise self-control yielded positive later life outcomes. Currently, Dr. Peake and his colleagues examine different life trajectories and explore the strategies people use in order to deal with waiting situations. The interventions they develop may help children improve their ability to wait and thus propel them to live successful lives.

As a doctoral student working with Dr. Mischel a decade after the original Marshmallow Experiment was conducted, Dr. Peake organized the first longitudinal assessments of the participants in the early 1980's and then again in the mid-1990's. Since then, this pioneering investigation has grown to include interdisciplinary collaborations with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, economists and health researchers all attempting to understand the components of self control. This effort has been guided by Dr. Mischel, Dr. Peake, Dr. Yuichi Shoda at the University of Washington, and Dr. Ozlem Ayduk at the University of California, Berkeley. To continue Dr. Mischel’s work as the new principal investigator with Dr. Shoda, Dr. Peake is working to migrate the project and all its data from to Smith College, where the researchers hope to establish a data archive for continued explorations as the original sample moves into the later stages of life. In addition, Dr. Peake will be continuing his own line of research of training a new group of preschool students with different strategies for waiting. These strategies, he hopes, will ultimately guide direct interventions for students in the earliest years of schooling, that can help children exercise self-control and produce positive results -- like academic success, drug-free lifestyle, strong interpersonal relations, and economic stability -- in their later lives.

Current research includes:

• Linking Preschool Waiting to Life Outcomes: Preschool delay of gratification is the paradigm that Dr. Peake and his team use to study self control in preschoolers. They have thus far discovered that children’s ability to wait for things in preschool is predictive of many later life outcomes. Currently, his research attempts to understand why this is true by analyzing follow-up assessments of the original participants in the Marshmallow experiments that now span nearly 40 years or their lives.
• Training Self-Control: Dr. Peake and his team are conducting new experiments that examine the feasibility and consequences of "training" children on effective strategies for waiting. This work will allow them to understand whether common strategies are easily acquired and can then potentially improve performance in self-control tasks.
• Identifying Issues Influencing Life Outcomes: 50 years of collaborative data collection in eight different waves yields an enormous data set where main questions are yet to be fully explored. By organizing the data in accessible ways, Dr. Peake and his team hope to look at what factors influence children’s life outcomes. A subset of the data deals with fMRI results that show differences in brain function between children who waited and those who did not in response to a self-control task in adulthood. These promising efforts were limited due to expensive brain imaging costs. To date, the team has been able to collect brain images for approximately 40 participants who exhibited either stably high or stably low levels of self-control throughout their lives; with adequate funding, they will be able to include those with different life trajectories. For example, further funding will enable examining the brain functioning of those who overcame self-control difficulties early in life (e.g., from preschool to adolescence) to achieve higher levels of self-control rivaling some of the best in the sample.
• Studying Health and Economic Outcomes: By analyzing the results of the participants’ most recent survey, Dr. Peake hopes to understand how preschool delay of gratification relates to the economic well-being of the participants. To this end, the research team collaborates with economists to determine the factors that contribute to one’s economic welfare (e.g., wealth, savings rate, credit card misuse, etc.).
• Building Personal Narratives: Dr. Peake and his team are launching a new effort where they will interview subgroups of these participants for the first time. This interview process will allow participants to tell their stories of how their lives unfolded, beyond questionnaires and brain scans. By recording personal narratives of the participants themselves, Dr. Peake and his team will be able to document the richness of how the participants experienced their life trajectories.