Behavioral trainings and manipulations to reduce delay discounting: A systematic review

Abstract

In everyday decision-making, individuals make trade-offs between short-term and long-term benefits or costs. Depending on many factors, individuals may choose to wait for larger delayed reward, yet in other situations they may prefer the smaller, immediate reward. In addition to within-subject variation in the short-term versus long-term reward trade-off, there are also interindividual differences in delay discounting (DD), which have been shown to be quite stable. The extent to which individuals discount the value of delayed rewards turns out to be associated with important health and disorder-related outcomes: the more discounting, the more unhealthy or problematic choices. This has led to the hypothesis that DD can be conceptualized as trans-disease process. The current systematic review presents an overview of behavioral trainings and manipulations that have been developed to reduce DD in human participants aged 12 years or older. Manipulation studies mostly contain one session and measure DD directly after the manipulation. Training studies add a multiple session training component that is not per se related to DD, in between two DD task measurements. Ninety-eight studies (151 experiments) were identified that tested behavioral trainings and manipulations to decrease DD. Overall, results indicated that DD can be decreased, showing that DD is profoundly context dependent and changeable. Most promising avenues to pursue in future research seem to be acceptance-based/mindfulness-based trainings, and even more so manipulations involving a future orientation. Limitations and recommendations are discussed to identify the mechanistic processes that allow for changes in discount rate and behavior accordingly.

Neurocognitive Dysfunctions and Their Therapeutic Modulation in Patients With Methamphetamine Dependence: A Pilot Study

“…Interestingly, a recent review shows that individual rates of delay discounting can decrease through behavioral training, endorsing context-dependent and changeable attributes in impulsive choice behavior. The most promising avenues in this regard seem to be acceptance-/mindfulness-based trainings and manipulations involving future orientation (83). Thus, we cannot exclude that impulsive choice, which did not normalize after 3 months in our study, would have improved after a longer recovery time or after implementing the aforementioned treatment modules.…”

Social Determinants of Delayed Gratification Among American Children

“…One of the tendencies that contribute to high impulsivity, fun seeking, and low inhibitory control of children is poor delayed gratification due to delay discounting [29]. As a result of poor delayed gratification, behaviors with immediate consequences are more likely to occur than behaviors with the delayed consequences [30,31]. Poor delayed gratification (high delay discounting) has implications for a wide range of outcomes such as obesity, sex, tobacco usage, alcohol usage, drug abuse, and gambling [29].…”

Economic situation and time discounting: Does construal level matter?

“…The participants in the concrete construal group were, too, more patient than the controls, with the observed effect size being even bigger (Cohen's d = 0.33 and 0.37 respectively). At a first glance, such pattern of the results seems to be counterintuitive and contrasting the existing literature, however, as noted by Scholten et al (2019) in their review covering almost a hundred studies aimed at decreasing delay discounting, both abstract and concrete mindsets seemed to be notably decreasing delay discounting rates. For instance, Kim et al (2013;study 1A, 1B and study 2) found that delay discounting was reduced when the hypothetical future option was construed more concretely and additional details were provided.…”