[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Page 14542]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 RECOGNIZING DR. YUICHI SHODA, DR. WALTER MISCHEL, AND DR. PHILIP PEAKE

 Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the 
Golden Goose Award, which recognizes researchers whose seemingly 
obscure, federally funded research has returned significant benefits to 
society.
  In particular, I rise to celebrate 2015 Golden Goose Awardees Drs. 
Walter Mischel, Philip Peake, and Yuichi Shoda for the impact of their 
Marshmallow Test research. Their work--funded by the National 
Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation--has had a 
significant impact on how we understand human behavior, how we educate 
our children, and even how we save for retirement.
  These researchers used a simple test to measure pre-schoolers' self-
control, offering children one marshmallow now or two if they could 
wait just 15 minutes alone with their prospective treat. They never 
expected to find that how children performed on this simple, silly-
sounding test would be related to the children's future SAT scores, 
their propensity for obesity or drug addiction, and even the very 
chemistry of their brains.
  In their followup study, Dr. Yuichi Shoda, now a professor at the 
University of Washington, found, based on reporting by parents and 
teachers, that children who had been able to wait longer for their 
extra treat at age 4 tended to show better adjustment in adolescence. 
They had more social and academic competence, were more able to handle 
stress adeptly, and persisted better in goal pursuit in the face of 
frustration. The researchers, joined by many collaborators across an 
array of disciplines, have followed these children now for more than 30 
years. They have documented correlations between the ability to delay 
and life outcomes as diverse as SAT scores, body-mass index, the 
frequency of drug abuse, and measurable differences in brain 
functioning, which are visible thanks to modern functional MRI 
techniques.
  Today, Dr. Shoda is looking at how people can benefit from an 
awareness of the kinds of situations in which they excel at self-
control and those in which they are most vulnerable to self-control 
failure.
  Far from a story about fixed fates, their discoveries about the 
importance of self-control and how it can be cultivated today informs 
how we teach our children and helps us recognize the potential that 
lies in all of us. They have helped usher in a new age of understanding 
of human development and behavior. Our lives are the better for it. I 
am proud to stand in recognition of their work.

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