It is common to see people behaving in a way which will negatively affect their future goal for the sake of attaining immediate pleasure. Such need for instant gratification besiege people and make them to chase flimsy immediate gratification by abandoning awesome benefits awaiting them in long term. Studies indicated that such needs are among predictors of health and financial problems. Drug addiction, eating disorder, financial crisis and compulsive buying are the frequently sited problems associated with inability to delay gratification. Ability of delaying gratification on the other hand is among predictors of important life outcomes including good health, academic achievement and success. Nevertheless, people are different in their level of resisting temptation of attaining immediate goal. Thus, in this review an attempt is made to get deeper understanding on the possible predictor variables of impulsivity and measurement methods associated with it. Apart from what is frequently studied predictors, in this review, an attempt was made to see the role of external and contextual variables like parenting style, birth order and religiosity on delay of gratification. In line to this, I tried to address the consequences of chasing immediate gratification and some methodological issues regarding studies conducted in addressing gratification.

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Recently Diener et al. used a new measurement to distinguish between cognitive/ global and emotional components of well-being. Kormi-Nouri et al. examined this distinction among Swedish and Iranian university students and found no cultural differences in cognitive component but cultural differences in emotional component. The present study examined the distinction between global/cognitive and emotional components of well-being where the two groups of Swedish and Iranian participants were in an unpleasant situation and experience a significant amount of stress and negative emotions, namely infertility. The results showed no difference between infertile Swedish and Iranian women in flourishing. However, infertile Swedish women reported higher levels of positive and negative emotions than infertile Iranian women. In both infertile populations, the most predictive affect with regard to flourishing was the balance affect. It was concluded that, under a stressful and unpleasant situation like infertility compared to a normal situation, the same pattern of distinction between global/cognitive and emotional components of well-being can be still observable. However, negative emotions can act differently at cultural level: they become more noticeable in the Swedish population than in the Iranian population. The results are discussed with respect to individualistic-collectivistic dimension.