Religion and self-control

An article by Laura Rowley describes how those who practice self-control are able to achieve higher grades and higher rates of success.

"....My decision to ditch Comcast was fortified by a recent interview with researcher Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Harvard, Duckworth taught high school, and found a number of students were reading far below grade level despite high IQ. A lack of self-control was the problem. She returned for her Ph.D. at Penn to study something she calls "grit" -- a combination of courage, focus, the ability to delay gratification and persevere over the long-term -- that leads to success. (It's something I talk about in my values class at Seton Hall University, but we call it fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues of Western philosophy -- along with prudence, justice and temperance.)

Duckworth has conducted a range of studies with students, from middle school, to Ivy League undergrads, to West Point cadets, testing both their ability to delay gratification and their intelligence. "The basic findings are that we could predict grades much better from self-control scores than from IQ scores," Duckworth says. For example, a study of eighth graders she conducted with Penn's Martin Seligman found self-control was twice as predictive as IQ in academic success.

Learning Self-Control
Duckworth's research builds on the work of Walter Mischel, who pioneered self-regulation psychology. He conducted a series of experiments in the 1960s with four-year-olds, offering them a marshmallow treat and then testing their ability to resist. He continued to follow the participants and found that the pre-schoolers who could delay gratification had better outcomes as adults in a variety of areas. The child who could wait 15 minutes had an SAT score that was 210 points higher than one who could wait only 30 seconds. The more impulsive children also had a higher body-mass index as adults and were more likely to have had problems with drugs. What does all this have to do with our cable service? Self-control is not just a genetic blessing, but something that can be taught and enhanced with practice." http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/moneyhappy/183910

After reading the above text, I came across a New York Times article entitled, "For good self-control, try getting religious about it."
The following are some salient words taken from the article.

"If I'm serious about keeping my New Year's resolutions in 2009, should I add another one? Should the to-do list include, "Start going to church"?
This is an awkward question for a heathen to contemplate, but I felt obliged to raise it with Michael McCullough after reading his report in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin. He and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control."
..."Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier."
..."Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there's a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion," he said. "The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control."
Click on link below for full article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/health/30iht-30tier.18994744.html