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The Marshmallow Test

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The Marshmallow Test Upon viewing the assigned videos/article discussing The Marshmallow Test, I feel that the motivational approach used is the Incentive Approach. The incentive approaches to Motivation suggests that motivation stems from the desire to obtain valued external goals, or incentives. The children were offered a task, to wait for a period of time before eating the marshmallows. There are two rewards or incentives if they are able to do this task. If they were able to wait, even for a little bit, they would be rewarded with one marshmallow, but if they were able to wait the full time, which equaled to 15 minutes, they were then rewarded with two marshmallows. The children were offered a task and a reward which represents the incentive approach. Using this approach I feel helps to teach the children that if they wait long enough or work hard enough to complete the task at hand, they will receive better rewards for achieving the goal. By working at the task at hand, if they were unable to complete the entire task (the amount of time to wait), they would still receive a reward for the part they were able to do but not to the full extent that they would have if they had completed the task entirely. Given that all of the children were 4 years old, this is a very challenging test for them and those that were able to wait the entire time I find to be rather impressive. I am 32 years old and would find it difficult to not eat the marshmallows right away! The emotional aspect of this experiment had to be pretty intense for the children. I am choosing to use the Schachter-Singer Theory for this part of the assignment. The Schachter-Singer Theory of emotion is the belief that emotions are determined jointly by a nonspecific kind of physiological arousal and its interpretation, based on environmental cues. The environmental cues that the children were

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