The Emotional Factors That Influence Delay Of Gratification

Delay of gratification refers to an individual's ability to forego immediate reward, opportunities, or needs in favor of alternative opportunities, needs, or rewards that are greater valuable but are more temporally remote. It's important to individual's adaption and development.In the daily life, university students have to face lots of temptations. So they must have stronger ability of delay of gratification. There are many factors affecting university students'delay of gratification, such as physiology, cognitive and emotional situation. In this research, we pay attention to reveal the emotional factors how influence the delay of gratification.This research used two experiments to investigate the emotional factors how affect the behaviors of delay of gratification. Method: Study1, we adopt single factor experiment design. The independent variable is emotion, including three types: positive emotion, neutral and negative emotion; the dependent variable is the score of delay of gratification. Study2, we using 2(emotion: positive and negative emotion)×2(regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal, expression suppression) experimental design to examine emotion regulation strategies how moderate the relationship of emotion and delay of gratification?Conclusions drawn from the study are:(1) The main effect of emotion is significant. There is no significant difference between positive and neural emotion groups, positive emotion group in terms of gratification was significantly higher than negative group, so did neural emotion group.(2) In positive emotions condition, the scores of delay of gratification in boys and girls have no significant difference. In negative emotions condition, boys'scores are significantly higher than girls.(3) Emotion and emotional regulation strategy have interaction effect on delay of gratification. Under negative emotional state, cognitive reappraisal group scored significantly higher than expression suppression group, and the two groups scored no significantly effect in positive emotional state.