Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia (Tatiana Nikolaevna Romanova; Russian: Великая Княжна Татьяна Николаевна; – 17 July 1918) was the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last monarch of Russia, and of Tsarina Alexandra. She was born at Peterhof Palace, near Saint Petersburg.

Tatiana was the younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga and the elder sister of Grand Duchess Maria, Grand Duchess Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei. She was considered to be the most beautiful of all her sisters and the most aristocratic in appearance. She was known amongst her siblings as "the governess" for her domineering but also maternal ways. Tatiana was the closest of all the children to her mother (Tsarina Alexandra), often spending many hours reading to her. During World War I, she chaired many charitable committees and (along with her older sister, Grand Duchess Olga) trained to become a nurse. She tended to wounded soldiers on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo from 1914 to 1917. Her time as a nurse came to an end with her family's arrest in 1917 after the first Russian Revolution.

Her murder by Communist revolutionaries on 17 July 1918 resulted in her canonization as a passion bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. Tatiana and all her siblings were soon rumored to have survived the murder, and dozens of impostors claimed to be surviving Romanovs; author Michael Occleshaw speculated that a woman named Larissa Tudor might have been Tatiana. However, the deaths of all the last Tsar's family, including Tatiana, at the hands of Bolsheviks have since been established by scientific evidence.

## Appearance and personality

Tatiana was a famous beauty. She was tall, slender, and elegant. She had dark auburn hair, gray eyes, and fine features. Many viewed her as the most beautiful of the four grand duchesses and the one who resembled their mother most. Her mother's lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden reflected that "Tatiana was, to my mind, prettier than her sisters. She was taller than her mother, but so thin and so well built that her height was not a hindrance to her attractiveness. She had beautiful, regular features, and resembled some of the famous beauties among her royal relatives, whose family portraits decorated the walls of the palace.. She had dark hair, a rather pale complexion, and wide-apart eyes, that gave her a poetic far-away look." General Count Alexander Grabbe, Major-General of His Imperial Majesty's Own Convoy, wrote that "the prettiest of the Grand Duchesses was Tatiana, the Tsar's second daughter. In her physical appearance and her serious and ardent nature, she most resembled her mother. Slender with auburn hair and clear gray eyes, she was strikingly good looking and enjoyed the attention her beauty commanded." According to Anna Vyrubova, "when Tatiana grew up, she was the tallest and most graceful of all the Grand Duchesses, beautiful and romantic. Many officers fell in love with Tatiana, but there were no appropriate suitors for her." Meriel Buchanan described her beauty as "almost mystical." Alexander Mossolov, head of the Imperial Chancellery, wrote that Tatiana was "the best-looking of all the sisters." Her paternal aunt Xenia said that "Tatiana and her mother are like as two peas in a pod!.... so pretty." Her nanny Margaretta Eagar wrote that she was "a very pretty child, remarkably like her mother, but delicate in appearance." In 1900, the British magazine, Woman at Home, wrote that "the flower of the flock, as far as looks are concerned ... is Grand Duchess Tatiana." Nicholas wrote that Tatiana was "a very beautiful child" and he often remarked that she reminded him of Alexandra. When she was 8, her tutor Pierre Gilliard said that she "was prettier than her sister."

Despite her high status, Tatiana did not use her Imperial title and her friends, family, and servants called her by her first name and patronym, Tatiana Nikolaevna. The only nicknames that can be found for her using primary sources are 'Tanechka' in a postcard from her cousin Princess Irina Alexandrovna, and 'Tan'ka' in some notes from her sister, Anastasia Nikolaevna. According to one story, Tatiana kicked her lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden for addressing her as "Your Imperial Highness" during a committee meeting, and she hissed, "Are you crazy to speak to me like that?" When she was 14, Tatiana called Chebotareva at her home on the telephone, and she spoke first to Chebotareva's 16-year-old son. Unaware of her identity, Gregory asked her to identify herself. She replied, "Tatiana Nikolaevna". He could not believe that he was speaking to a grand duchess, and he repeated his question. Again, Tatiana did not claim the imperial title of Grand Duchess and replied that she was "Sister Romanova the Second".

Tatiana was a practical, nurturing leader. Her sisters gave her the nickname "The Governess" and sent her as their group representative when they wanted their parents to grant a favour. Olga was 18 months older than Tatiana, but she uncomplainingly allowed Tatiana to be the leader of their group. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden recalled that "It was Tatiana Nicolaevna who took care of the little ones, and who was a constant help to the Household, always willing to help them in arranging that their official duties should not clash with their private engagements."

Gilliard wrote that Tatiana was reserved and "well balanced" but less open and spontaneous than Olga. She was less naturally intelligent than Olga, but she was more hard-working and dedicated. Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky, the family's guard at Tsarskoye Selo and Tobolsk, claimed that Tatiana "had no liking for art" and that "it would have been better for her had she been a man."

Tatiana was interested in fashion. According to Sophie Buxhoeveden, "Tatiana Nicolaevna loved dress. Any frock, no matter how old, looked well on her. She knew how to put on her clothes, was admired and liked admiration." Her mother's friend Anna Vyrubova wrote that Tatiana was talented in embroidery and crocheting and that she could dress her mother's hair as well as a professional hair stylist. Sophie Buxhoeveden remembered that Tatiana once dressed her hair when her hairdresser was unavailable.

Tatiana was the most sociable of the four sisters. According to Sophie Buxhoeveden, "friends would have been welcome, but no young girls were ever asked to the Palace." Vyrubova noted that Tatiana was the most famous of the sisters in their lifetimes because of her vivacious personality and sense of duty. Vyrubova and Lili Dehn claimed that Tatiana longed for friends of her own age but that her high rank and her mother's distaste for society restricted her social life.

Like her mother, Tatiana was deeply religious. She read her Bible frequently, studied theology, and struggled with the meaning of "good and evil, sorrow and forgiveness, and man's destiny on earth". She decided that "one has to struggle much because the return for good is evil, and evil reigns." A.A. Mosolov claimed that Tatiana's reserved nature gave her a "difficult" character with more spiritual depth than that of her sister, Olga. Her English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, claimed that Tatiana viewed religion as a duty rather than a passion.

Only her closest friends and family were aware of her introspective side. "With her, as with her mother, shyness and reserve were accounted as pride, but, once you knew her and had gained her affection, this reserve disappeared and the real Tatiana became apparent," Dehn recalled. "She was a poetical creature, always yearning for the ideal, and dreaming of great friendships which might be hers." Chebotareva loved the "sweet" Tatiana as if she were her daughter, and she claimed that Tatiana would hold her hand when she was nervous. "I am so terribly embarrassed and frightened – I do not know whom I greeted and whom not," Tatiana told Chebotareva.

Like her sisters, Tatiana was unworldly and naive. When she was young, she was shocked to learn that her governess Margaretta Eagar was paid for taking care of her. When Eagar told her that "you have seen me get my money every month," Tatiana replied that "I always thought it was a present to you." When her lady-in-waiting sent a carriage without an attendant, Tatiana and Olga decided to go shopping for the first time. They ordered the carriage to stop near a group of shops and went into one of the stores. The shopkeepers did not recognize them because they wore nurses' uniforms. They left the shop without buying anything, because they didn't carry money with them and had no idea how to use it. The next day, they asked Chebotareva how to use money.

French tutor Pierre Gilliard wrote that Tatiana and Olga were "passionately devoted to one another."

Tatiana was closer to her mother than any of her sisters, and many considered her to be Alexandra's favorite daughter. "It was not that her sisters loved their mother any less," recalled her French tutor Pierre Gilliard, "but Tatiana knew how to surround her with unwearying attentions and never gave way to her own capricious impulses." On 13 March 1916, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas that Tatiana was the only one of their four daughters who "grasped it" when she explained her way of looking at things. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote that Tatiana "was closest in sympathy to her mother" and "the definite favorite of both her parents."

Tatiana was close to her father. Lili Dehn wrote that "the Emperor loved her devotedly [and] they had much in common." She recalled that "the sisters used to laugh, and say that, if a favour were required, "Tatiana must ask Papa to grant it.""

## Early life

Tatiana was born on 10 June 1897. She was the second child and daughter of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. She weighed 3.9 kg at birth, and Dr. Ott used forceps in her birth. When she regained consciousness from the chloroform used during the delivery, Alexandra saw the "anxious and troubled faces" around her and wept: "My God, it is again a daughter. What will the nation say, what will the nation say?" Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote that "everyone was very disappointed as they had been hoping for a son." Grand Duke George Alexandrovich, Nicholas' younger brother, told Nicholas "I was already preparing to go into retirement, but it was not to be." Under the Pauline Laws, the Imperial throne of Russia could not pass to a woman unless all legitimate male lines died out. As such, Nicholas' heir was his brother George unless he had a son. Grand Duchess Tatiana's siblings were Grand Duchesses Olga, Maria, Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei of Russia. All of the children were close to one another and to their parents up until the end of their lives.

On 29 May 1897, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia recorded in his diary that Nicholas II had named Tatiana as an homage to the heroine in Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin. According to him, he wanted to name his daughter after Olga and Tatiana, the sisters in the famous poem.

Tatiana's title was "Grand Princess", but it was translated from Russian into English as "Grand Duchess". As an "imperial highness", she outranked the other European princesses, who were merely "royal highnesses".

Like the other Romanov children, Tatiana was raised with austerity. She and her sisters slept on camp beds without pillows, took cold baths in the morning, and embroidered and knitted projects to be given as gifts or sold at charity bazaars.

In their household, Tatiana and Olga were known as "The Big Pair". They shared a bedroom and were very close to each another from early childhood. In the spring of 1901, Olga had typhoid fever and was confined to the nursery for several weeks. When she began to recover, Tatiana was permitted to see her older sister for five minutes but didn't recognize her. When her governess, Margaretta Eagar, told her that the sickly child was Olga, four-year-old Tatiana cried bitterly and protested that the pale, thin child couldn't be her beloved older sister. Eagar had difficulty persuading Tatiana that Olga would recover.

## Relationship with Grigori Rasputin

Tatiana doted on her younger brother, Tsarevich Alexei. However, the long-awaited heir had frequent, severe attacks of hemophilia. Tatiana, her mother, and her three sisters were all potential carriers of the hemophilia gene; the Tsarina was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who had passed down the hemophilia gene to her descendants. Tatiana's paternal aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia reported that Maria, Tatiana's younger sister, hemorrhaged during an operation to remove her tonsils in December 1914. The operating doctor was so alarmed that the Tsarina needed to urge him to continue. Olga Alexandrovna claimed that all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and that they were carriers of the hemophilia gene. Symptomatic carriers of the gene are not hemophiliacs, but they can have symptoms of hemophilia, including an abnormally low blood clotting factor that can lead to heavy bleeding.

The Tsarina relied on the counsel of Grigori Rasputin, a Russian peasant and wandering starets or "holy man", and she credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich. Tatiana and her siblings viewed Rasputin as "Our Friend" and confided in him. In the autumn of 1907, Tatiana's father escorted his sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, to the nursery so that she could too meet Rasputin. Tatiana and her siblings all wore their long white nightgowns, and they were comfortable in Rasputin's presence. In February 1909, Rasputin sent the Imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework." In one letter, 11-year-old Tatiana asked Rasputin to visit her and lamented that she found it difficult to see her mother ill. "But you know because you know everything," she wrote.

Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, one of the sisters' governesses, was horrified that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when they were in their nightgowns and requested that he be banned from the household. She told Grand Duchess Xenia that he visited Olga and Tatiana before them, spoke to them, and "caressed" them. The sisters hid Rasputin's presence from Tyutcheva, and they were afraid to talk to their governess about him. Tatiana was aware of the tension and feared her mother's reaction to Tyutcheva's actions. On 8 March 1910, the 12-year-old Tatiana wrote to her mother, "I am so afr(aid) that S.I. can speak ... about our friend something bad. I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now." Alexandra dismissed Tyutcheva.

All accounts agree that Rasputin had an innocent relationship with the children, but Nicholas did ask Rasputin to avoid going to the nurseries in the future. Grand Duchess Xenia was horrified by Tyutcheva's story. On 15 March 1910, she wrote in her diary that she could not understand why her brother and his family regarded Rasputin, whom she saw as only a "khlyst", as "almost a saint".

Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, another nurse for the royal children, initially thought well of Rasputin, but she became disillusioned with him. In the spring of 1910, she claimed that Rasputin raped her, but the Tsarina refused to believe her because she saw Rasputin as holy. The Tsarina insisted to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna that she had investigated Vishnyakova's claim but that "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard." In 1913, the Tsarina dismissed Vishnyakova.

There were malicious rumors that Rasputin had seduced the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses. Rasputin had released the letters that the Tsarina and the grand duchesses had sent to him; although they were innocent in nature, they fueled the rumors about his alleged affairs. Pornographic cartoons depicted Rasputin having sexual relations with the Tsarina and her four daughters as Anna Vyrubova stood nude in the background. Much to the Tsarina's displeasure, Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until his murder in 1916. On 6 December 1916, the Tsarina wrote to Nicholas that "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed."

Allegedly, Tatiana was present at the site of Rasputin's murder, "disguised as a lieutenant of the Chevaliers-Gardes, so that she could revenge herself on Rasputin who had tried to violate her". Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia, wrote that Tatiana had witnessed Rasputin's castration, but he doubted the credibility of the rumor.

In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that all four grand duchesses were "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death. According to him, they sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa when they received the news. He wrote that they seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. On 21 December 1916, Tatiana attended Rasputin's funeral. Rasputin was buried with an icon signed on its reverse side by Tatiana, her mother and her sisters.

Tatiana kept a notebook in which she recorded Rasputin's sayings: "Love is Light and it has no end. Love is great suffering. It cannot eat, it cannot sleep. It is mixed with sin in equal parts. And yet it is better to love. In love one can be mistaken, and through suffering he expiates for his mistakes. If love is strong—the lovers happy. Nature herself and the Lord give them happiness. One must ask the Lord that he teach to love the luminous, bright, so that love be not torment, but joy. Love pure, Love luminous is the Sun. The Sun makes us warm, and Love caresses. All is in Love, and even a bullet cannot strike Love down."

## Young adulthood and World War I

As a young teenager, Tatiana was given the rank of honorary colonel and assigned a regiment of soldiers, the Vosnesensky (Ascension) Lancers. She and Olga inspected the soldiers regularly.

Tatiana enjoyed the company of soldiers, but she was often shocked by their behavior. On 11 July 1911, a group of officers aboard the Imperial yacht gave Olga a portrait of Michelangelo's nude David, cut out from a newspaper. Indignant, the 14-year-old Tatiana wrote to her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, "Olga laughed at it long and hard. And not one of the officers wishes to confess that he has done it. Such swine, aren't they?"

On 14 July 1911, Tatiana laughed at her distant cousin Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia's engagement to Helen of Serbia. On 14 July 1911, she wrote to Olga, "How funny if they might have children, can (she) be kissing him? What foul, fie!"

In 1911, Tatiana and Olga witnessed the assassination of the government minister Pyotr Stolypin during a performance at the Kiev Opera House. On 10 September 1911, Nicholas later wrote to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria, that the event had upset both girls. Tatiana sobbed and both of them had trouble sleeping that night.

When World War I broke out, Tatiana became a Red Cross nurse with her mother and Olga. They cared for wounded soldiers in a private hospital on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. According to Vyrubova, "Tatiana was almost as skillful and devoted as her mother, and complained only that on account of her youth she was spared some of the more trying cases." Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, who worked with her at the hospital, described in her journal how she planned to boil silk while Tatiana was otherwise occupied, fearing that Tatiana would be too tired to help her. But Tatiana guessed what Chebotareva was doing. "Why can you breathe carbolic acid and I can't?" she asked Chebotareva and insisted on helping her with the work. In September 1914, she was named patron of a war aid committee called the Tatiana Committee. Tatiana was fiercely patriotic. On 29 October 1914, she apologized to her mother for disparaging the German in her presence; she explained that she thought of her mother as only Russian and that she had forgotten that the Tsarina was born in Germany. The Tsarina responded that she was offended by the Russian people's gossip about her German connections because she considered herself as completely Russian.

On 15 August 1915, Tatiana wrote to her mother that she wished she could do more to support Russia during the war: "I simply can't tell you how awfully sorry I am for you, my beloved ones. I am so sorry I can in no way help you or be useful. In such moments I am sorry I'm not a man." As Tatiana grew into adulthood, she undertook more public appearances than her sisters and headed committees.

### Romances with soldiers

When she was 13, an ill Tatiana begged her mother to permit her to leave her bed so that she could watch a soldier, with whom she was infatuated. On 20 April 1911, she wrote to the Tsarina, "I would like so much to go the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn...Yes, Mama, and at the second division I will see whom I must see ... you know whom ...".

In the December 2004 edition of the magazine Royalty Digest: A Journal of Record, Peter de Malama wrote that his cousin, Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama, an officer in the Imperial Russian Cavalry, met Tatiana when he was wounded in 1914. De Malama claimed that Dmitri was appointed an equerry to the court of the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, where he developed a romantic relationship with Tatiana. In September 1914, Dmitri gave Tatiana a French bulldog, which she named "Ortipo". On 30 September 1914, she wrote to her mother, "Forgive me about the little dog. To say the truth, when he asked should I like to have it if he gave it to me, I at once said yes. You remember, I always wanted to have one, and only afterwards when we came home I thought that suddenly you might not like me having one. But I really was so pleased at the idea that I forgot about everything." When Ortipo died, Dmitri gave her another puppy. Tatiana took it with her to Yekaterinburg, where it died with the rest of the family. Eighteen months after he gave Ortipo to Tatiana, Dmitri paid the Imperial family a visit. On 17 March 1916, the Tsarina wrote to Nicholas that "my little Malama came for an hour yesterday evening...Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still. I must say a perfect son in law he w(ou)ld have been – why are foreign P(rin)ces not as nice!" In August 1919, Malama was killed while commanding a unit of the White Russians fighting the civil war against the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, according to Peter de Malama.

According to the diary of Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, Tatiana was fond of an officer named Vladimir Kiknadze, whom she cared for when he was wounded in 1915 and 1916. She claimed that Tatiana sat beside "Volodia" at the piano as he played a tune with one finger and talked to her in a low voice. She claimed that Tatiana and Olga made excuses to come to the hospital to see Volodia. She feared that the grand duchesses' flirtations with the wounded officers would damage their reputations.

### Negotiations for marriage

Allegedly, the Serbian king Peter I wanted Tatiana as a bride for his younger son, Prince Alexander. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić delivered a letter to Tsar Nicholas in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the Grand Duchesses.

## Captivity

The family was arrested during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and imprisoned first at Tsarskoye Selo and later at private residences in Tobolsk and Yekaterinburg, Siberia. The drastic change in circumstances and the uncertainty of captivity took its toll on Tatiana as well as on the rest of her family. "She pines without work," wrote her fellow nurse Valentina Chebotareva after receiving a letter from Tatiana on 16 April 1917. "It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not to go to the change of bandages!" Tatiana wrote Chebotareva. Tatiana, apparently trying to advocate for her mother, asked her friend Margarita Khitrovo in a letter on 8 May 1917 why their fellow nurses did not write to Tsarina Alexandra directly. Chebotareva wrote in her journal that, while she pitied the family, she could not write directly to the Tsarina because she blamed her for the Revolution. "If anyone wishes to write us, let them write directly," Tatiana wrote to "my dear dove" Chebotareva on 9 December 1917, after expressing concern for fellow nurses and a patient they had once treated together. Chebotareva's son, Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, noted the grand duchess's "firm, energetic handwriting" and how the letter "reflected the nature which endeared her so much to my mother."

Tatiana's English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, recalled that Tatiana had grown razor thin in captivity and seemed "haughtier" and more inscrutable to him than ever. In April 1918 the Bolsheviks moved Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria to Yekaterinburg. The remaining children remained behind in Tobolsk because Alexei, who had had another attack of haemophilia, could not be moved. It was Tatiana who persuaded her mother to "stop tormenting herself" and make a decision to go with her father and leave Alexei behind. Alexandra decided that level-headed Tatiana must be left behind to manage the household and look after Alexei.

During the month of separation from their parents and sister, Tatiana, Olga, Anastasia, and ladies in waiting busied themselves sewing precious stones and jewelry into their clothing, hoping to hide them from their captors, since Alexandra had written she, Nicholas and Maria had been heavily searched upon arrival in Yekaterinburg, and items confiscated. A letter from Anna Demidova to Alexandra Tegleva gave the instructions on how to deal with the 'medicines', a predetermined code name for the jewels. The concealments were successful, as the Bolsheviks were never aware of the jewels in the clothes until after the executions.

Pierre Gilliard later recalled his last sight of the imperial children at Yekaterinburg. "The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out, but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..."

## Death

At Yekaterinburg, Tatiana occasionally joined her younger sisters in chatting with some of the guards over tea, asking them questions about their families and talking about her hopes for a new life in England when they were released. On one occasion one of the guards forgot himself and told the grand duchesses an off-color joke. The shocked Tatiana ran from the room, "pale as death", and her younger sister Maria scolded the guards for their bad language. She "would be pleasant to the guards if she thought they were behaving in an acceptable and decorous manner," recalled another of the guards in his memoirs. Later, when a new commander was placed in charge of the Ipatiev House, the family was forbidden from fraternizing with the guards and the rules of their confinement became more strict. Tatiana, still the family leader, was often sent by her parents to question the guards about rules or what would happen next to the family. She also spent a great deal of time sitting with her mother and ill brother, reading to her mother or playing games to occupy the time. At the Ipatiev House, Tatiana and her sisters were required to do their own laundry and make bread. Her nursing skills were called upon at the end of June 1918 when she gave an injection of morphine to Dr. Eugene Botkin to ease his kidney pain.

On 14 July 1918, local priests at Yekaterinburg conducted a private church service for the family and reported that Tatiana and her family, contrary to custom, fell on their knees during the prayer for the dead. The final entry in Tatiana's final notebook at Yekaterinburg was a saying she had copied from the words of a well-known Russian Orthodox holy man, Father Ioann of Kronstadt: "Your grief is indescribable, the Savior's grief in the Gardens of Gethsemane for the world's sins is immeasurable, join your grief to his, in it you will find consolation." The following day, on 15 July, Tatiana and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked with one another and moved the beds in their room so visiting cleaning women could scrub the floor. They got down on their hands and knees to help the women and whispered to them when the guards weren't looking. All four young women wore long black skirts and white silk blouses, the same clothing they had worn the previous day. Their short hair was "tumbled and disorderly". They told the women how much they enjoyed physical exertion and wished there was more of it for them to do in the Ipatiev House. On the afternoon of 16 July 1918, the last full day of her life, Tatiana sat with her mother and read from the Biblical Books of Amos and Obadiah, Alexandra noted in her diary. Later, mother and daughter sat and just talked. As the family was having dinner that night, Yakov Yurovsky, the head of the detachment, came in and announced that the family's kitchen boy and Alexei's playmate, 14-year-old Leonid Sednev, must gather his things and go to a family member. The boy had actually been sent to a hotel across the street because the guards did not want to kill him along with the rest of the Romanov party. The family, unaware of the plan to kill them, was upset and unsettled by Sednev's absence. Tatiana went that evening to Yurovsky's office, for what was to be the last time, to ask for the return of the kitchen boy who kept Alexei amused during the long hours of captivity. Yurovsky placated her by telling her the boy would return soon, but the family was unconvinced.

Late that night, on the night of 16 July, the family was awakened and told to come down to the lower level of the house because there was unrest in the town at large and they would have to be moved for their own safety. The family emerged from their rooms carrying pillows, bags, and other items to make Alexandra and Alexei comfortable. The family paused and crossed themselves when they saw the stuffed mother bear and cubs that stood on the landing, perhaps as a sign of respect for the dead. Nicholas told the servants and family "Well, we're going to get out of this place." They asked questions of the guards but did not appear to suspect they were going to be killed. Yurovsky, who had been a professional photographer, directed the family to take different positions as a photographer might. Alexandra, who had requested chairs for herself and Alexei, sat to her son's left. The Tsar stood behind Alexei, Dr. Botkin stood to the Tsar's right, Tatiana and her sisters stood behind Alexandra along with the servants. They were left for approximately half an hour while further preparations were made. The group said little during this time, but Alexandra whispered to the girls in English, violating the guard's rules that they must speak in Russian. Yurovsky came in, ordered them to stand, and read the sentence of execution. Tatiana and her family had time only to utter a few incoherent sounds of shock or protest before the death squad under Yurovsky's command began shooting. It was the early hours of 17 July 1918.

The initial round of gunfire killed only the Emperor, the Empress and two male servants, and wounded Grand Duchess Maria, Dr Botkin and the Empress' maidservant, Demidova. At that point the gunmen had to leave the room because of smoke and toxic fumes from their guns and plaster dust their bullets had released from the walls. After allowing the haze to clear for several minutes, the gunmen returned. Dr Botkin was killed, and a gunman named Ermakov repeatedly tried to shoot Tsarevich Alexei, but failed because jewels sewn into the boy's clothes shielded him. Ermakov tried to stab Alexei with a bayonet but failed again, and finally Yurovsky fired two shots into the boy's head. Yurovsky and Ermakov approached Olga and Tatiana, who were crouched against the room's rear wall, clinging to each other and screaming for their mother. Ermakov stabbed both young women with his 8-inch bayonet, but had difficulty penetrating their torsos because of the jewels that had been sewn into their chemises. The sisters tried to stand, but Tatiana was killed instantly when Yurovsky shot her in the back of her head. A moment later, Olga too died when Ermakov shot her in the head.

## Romanov graves and DNA proof

For decades, conspiracy theorists suggested that one or more of the family somehow survived the slaughter. The theories were reduced in scale, but still persisted, when the bodies of most of the family were found and identified from a mass grave discovered in the forest outside Yekaterinburg and exhumed in 1991. The remaining conspiracies hinged on the fact that two bodies were missing, Tsarevich Alexei and one of the four grand duchesses, generally thought by Russians to be Grand Duchess Maria and by Americans to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. For example, author Michael Occleshaw made the claim in his 1995 book The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor that Tatiana might have been rescued and transported to England, where she married a British officer and lived under the name Larissa Tudor. Occleshaw based this claim on studying the diaries of the British agent Richard Meinertzhagen, who hinted at the successful liberation of a Grand Duchess, allegedly Tatiana. However, historians discounted this claim and continued to say that all of the Romanovs, including Tatiana, were assassinated at Yekaterinburg.

On 23 August 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of twelve and fifteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years old. Anastasia was seventeen years, one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and their brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old at the time of the assassinations. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes.

Preliminary testing indicated a "high degree of probability" that the remains belonged to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, Russian forensic scientists announced on 22 January 2008. On 30 April 2008, Russian forensic scientists announced that DNA testing proved that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters. With this result, all of the Tsar's family are accounted for.

## Sainthood

In 1981 Tatiana and her family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs. In 2000, Tatiana and her family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as a passion bearer.

The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on 17 July 1998, eighty years to the day after they were murdered.

## Ancestry

## See also

## Books

- Bokhanov, Alexander and Dr. Knodt, Manfred and Oustimenko, Vladimir and Peregudova, Zinaida and Tyutyunnik, Lyubov; Xenofontova, Lyudmila (translator); The Romanovs: Love, Power, and Tragedy. Leppi Publications, 1993.
- Christopher, Peter, Kurth, Peter, and Radzinsky, Edvard. Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra
- Dehn, Lili. The Real Tsaritsa. 1922.
- De Malama, Peter. "The Romanovs: The Forgotten Romance" in Royalty Digest. December 2004, p. 184.
- Eagar, Margaret. Six Years at the Russian Court, 1906.
- Fuhrmann, Joseph T. The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Nicholas and Alexandra: April 1914 – March 1917. Greenwood Press, 1999.
- Gilliard, Pierre. Thirteen Years at the Russian Court.
- Hawkins, George. Correspondence of the Russian Grand Duchesses: Letters of the Daughters of the Last Tsar Amazon 2020.
- King, Greg and Wilson, Penny. The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003.
- Kurth, Peter, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, Back Bay Books, 1983,
- "Tanya's Diary", Livadia.org
- Mager, Hugo. Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998,
- Massie, Robert K. Nicholas and Alexandra. 1967.
- Massie, Robert K. The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. 1995.
- Maylunas, Andrei and Mironenko, Sergei, Galy (editors); Darya (translator). A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story. 1997, Doubleday, .
- Occleshaw, Michael, The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor, Orion, 1993,
- Rappaport, Helen. The Last Days of the Romanovs. 2008. St. Martin's Griffin. 2008. .
- Rappaport, Helen. "The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra." St. Martin's Griffin, 2014.
- Radzinsky, Edvard. The Rasputin File. Doubleday. 2000,
- Shevchenko, Maxim. "The Glorification of the Royal Family", a 31 May 2000 article in the Nezavisemaya Gazeta.
- Tschebotarioff, Gregory P., Russia: My Native Land: A U.S. engineer reminisces and looks at the present, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, ASIN B00005XTZJ
- Vorres, Ian. The Last Grand Duchess. 1965.
- Vyrubova, Anna. Memories of the Russian Court.
- Zeepvat, Charlotte. The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album. 2004.

Second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia

19th-century women from the Russian Empire

Burials at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg

Christian female saints of the Late Modern era

Eastern Orthodox people executed by the Soviet Union

People executed by Russia by firing squad

Russian saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church


Linda Sarsour

Linda Sarsour (born 1980) is an American political activist. She was co-chair of the 2017 Women's March, the 2017 Day Without a Woman, and the 2019 Women's March. She is also a former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. She and her Women's March co-chairs were profiled in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2017.

A Muslim of Palestinian descent, Sarsour first gained attention for protesting police surveillance of American Muslims, later becoming involved in other civil rights issues such as police brutality, feminism, immigration policy, and mass incarceration. She has also organized Black Lives Matter demonstrations and was the lead plaintiff in a suit challenging the legality of the Trump travel ban.

Her political activism has been praised by some liberals and progressives, while her stance and remarks on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have been criticized by some conservatives and Jewish leaders and organizations. Sarsour has advocated for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Sarsour, Bob Bland, and Tamika Mallory stepped down from the Women's March organization in September 2019 following a controversy over the organization's handling of accusations of antisemitism.

## Early life

Sarsour was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of seven children of Palestinian immigrants. Her father owned a small market in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, called Linda's. She was raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and attended John Jay High School in Park Slope. After high school, she took courses at Kingsborough Community College and Brooklyn College with the goal of becoming an English teacher.

## Political activism

### Arab American Association of New York

Sarsour's early activism included advocating for the civil rights of American Muslims following the September 11 attacks. Shortly before 9/11, Basemah Atweh, a relative and founder of the Arab American Association of New York, asked Sarsour to volunteer for the organization. Atweh, who held a prominent political role uncommon for a Muslim woman, became Sarsour's mentor.

When Sarsour and Atweh were returning from the 2005 gala opening of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, their car was struck by a tractor-trailer. Atweh died of her injuries, and two other passengers suffered from broken bones. Sarsour, who was driving, was not seriously injured. She returned to work immediately, saying of Atweh, "This is where she wanted me to be". She was named to succeed Atweh as executive director of the association at age 25. Over the next several years she expanded the scope of the organization, building its budget from \$50,000 to \$700,000 annually.

Sarsour initially gained attention for protesting police surveillance of American Muslims. As director of the Arab American Association of New York, she advocated for passage of the Community Safety Act in New York, which created an independent office to review police policy and widen the definition of bias-based profiling in the state. She and the organization pressed for the law after instances of what they saw as biased policing in local neighborhoods, and it passed over the objections of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then-Police Chief Raymond W. Kelly. Sarsour also played a part in the successful campaign to have Islamic holidays recognized in New York City's public schools, which started observing Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr in 2015.

According to a 2017 article in The New York Times, Sarsour "has tackled issues like immigration policy, mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk and the New York City Police Department's spying operations on Muslims — all of which have largely inured her to hate-tinged criticism".

Sarsour has been hailed by some as a symbol of empowerment and "shattering stereotypes of Muslim women". In a dual interview with Iranian feminist activist Masih Alinejad about the practice of veiling, Sarsour elaborated on her views that the hijab is a spiritual act and not a symbol of oppression, and stressed the Islamophobia experienced by hijabi women in the West. Alinejad accused Sarsour of double standards, saying that Western Muslims in general, and Sarsour in particular, often fail to condemn compulsory hijab in the Middle East. Alinejad also said that if Sarsour is concerned with women's rights, she can not use the hijab "which is the most visible symbol of oppression in the Middle East" as a symbol of resistance.

### Black Lives Matter

Following the shooting of Michael Brown, Sarsour helped to organize Black Lives Matter protests. Sarsour helped form "Muslims for Ferguson", and she traveled to Ferguson with other activists in 2014. She has continued to work extensively with BLM ever since. Sarsour became a regular attendee at Black Lives Matter demonstrations as well as a frequent television commentator on feminism.

### Political party involvement

Sarsour is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2016, she ran for a position as a County Committee member with the Democratic Party of Kings County, New York. She placed third. She has spoken about her activism in the context of building a progressive movement in the United States, and has been praised by liberal politicians and activists. In 2012, during the presidency of Barack Obama, the White House recognized Sarsour as a Champion of Change. Sarsour was a surrogate for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign.

### Women's March leadership

#### 2017 Women's March

Teresa Shook and Bob Bland, organizers of the 2017 Women's March, recruited Sarsour as co-chair of the event, to be held one day after Donald Trump's inauguration. According to Taylor Gee of Politico, Sarsour had by then become the controversial "face of the resistance" to Trump, adding "For Sarsour, Trump's election came after years of standing up for people he had maligned—not just women, but Muslims, immigrants and black Americans, too. Her ties with activists from around the country helped her galvanize different groups during the disorienting period following the election". Sarsour actively opposed the Trump administration's ban on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries and was named lead plaintiff in a legal challenge brought by the Council on American–Islamic Relations. In Sarsour v. Trump, the plaintiffs argued that the travel ban must be suspended because it existed only to keep Muslims out of the United States.

Melissa Harris-Perry writes that Sarsour was "the most reliable target of public vitriol" of the 2017 Women's March leaders over the following year. Following her leadership role in the Women's March, Sarsour was targeted by violent threats on social media, some from organizations with links to the Russian government, and personal attacks by conservative media outlets, including false reports that she supported the militant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and advocated imposing Islamic law in the United States. She stated that, while the march was a high point in her career, the media attacks that followed caused her to fear for her safety. Supporters used the Twitter hashtag \#IMarchWithLinda, including Sharon Brous of the National Council of Jewish Women, who worked with Sarsour in organizing the 2017 Women's March, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Sarsour, along with her three co-chairs, was named as one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" after the January march.

Sarsour was a co-chairwoman of the 2017 Day Without a Woman strike and protest, organized to mark International Women's Day. During a demonstration outside Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan, she was arrested along with other leaders of the January Women's March, including Bland, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez. She has organized and participated in other acts of civil disobedience in protest of the Trump administration's actions, such as ending the DACA program shielding young immigrants from deportation, the Trump administration family separation policy for immigrants, and the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

In a 2017 speech before the Islamic Society of North America, Sarsour said that people should "stand up" to Trump, as she deemed his administration oppressive, and that such actions would constitute a jihad. She recounted a story from Islamic scripture in which Muhammad says, "A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad." Several conservative media outlets and personalities accused her of calling for violence against the president by using the word jihad. Sarsour and other commentators rejected this interpretation, citing her commitment to nonviolent activism and the fact that "jihad" does not inherently refer to violent action. Sarsour also said that she is not the sort of person who would call for violence against the president. In a Washington Post op-ed she wrote that the term jihad has been misused by both right-wing and Muslim extremists and called her use of the term "legitimate yet widely misunderstood." Some on social media criticized Sarsour for using the term jihad since the general public associates it with violence, while others defended her choice of words.

#### 2019 Women's March

In September 2018, Sarsour announced that she would lead the 2019 Women's March on Washington along with Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, and Carmen Perez. Later that year, Sarsour and Mallory became the focus of a controversy over their perceived refusal to clearly condemn Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whose rhetoric has been deemed antisemitic and homophobic by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. In November 2018, Teresa Shook, the march's founder, called for Sarsour and her fellow co-chairs to step down, accusing them of having "allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs." Sarsour refused, suggesting the criticism of her was due to her support for BDS and that criticism of Mallory was due to racism. She later apologized to supporters of the march, expressing regret that she and Mallory did not "make their commitment to combating antisemitism clear." She also apologized to the March's LGBTQ and Jewish members, saying that she valued them and would "fight" for them. Sarsour stepped down from the Women's March organization in September 2019 along with Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory.

### Stance on Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Haaretz has called Sarsour one of the most widely known Palestinian American women for her advocacy on behalf of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, noting that some on the center and right consider her a polarizing figure due to her anti-Zionist activism. She has said she supports a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict but believes in Israel's right to exist and does not support either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. She has dismissed smears circulated on social media and conservative websites that she has ties to Hamas, calling them "fake news". Sarsour has said members of her extended family in the Israeli-occupied territories have been arrested and jailed on accusations of supporting Hamas, but denied having contact with any radical Muslim groups. She has said she would like Israelis and Palestinians to coexist peacefully and justly. According to the Brooklyn Eagle, Sarsour's support for the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, her view that Israel has a right to exist, and her relationship with Bill de Blasio have garnered her criticism from some Islamists.

Sarsour told Haaretz that she is and always will be a critic of Israel and fully supports BDS. Sunaina Maira has described Sarsour's advocacy for BDS as an element of her feminist politics. In a March 2017 interview with The Nation, Sarsour opined that those who support and do not criticize the state of Israel cannot be part of the feminist movement; she believes such people ignore the rights of Palestinian women.

#### Relations with Jewish-American advocacy groups

Sarsour has been criticized by American conservatives and pro-Israel Democrats, along with some Zionist activists for her stance on Middle Eastern politics, including her support for BDS against Israel. The Guardian wrote that Sarsour "has been a frequent target of pro-Israel pressure organisations". According to an investigation by Haaretz, a private Israeli intelligence firm spied on Sarsour and her family in an attempt to collect damaging information. A dossier was shared with the Act.IL group, which used the material to dissuade U.S. universities from allowing Sarsour to speak on campus.

Sarsour has worked with left-wing Jewish groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. According to Haaretz, mainstream Jewish organizations "long held her at arms' length" due to her criticism of Israel and her support for the BDS movement. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, progressive Jews are willing to ignore her anti-Zionism whereas right-wing Jews and some centrist Jews are not. Two directors of the U.S.-based Jewish NGO the Anti-Defamation League, along with the president of the Zionist Organization of America, have criticized her stance on Israel; the ADL's director, Jonathan Greenblatt, has said that Sarsour's support of BDS inspires and increases antisemitism. A Facebook post in which she defended Representative-elect Ilhan Omar by attributing criticism of her support for BDS to "folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech" led to the American Jewish Committee accusing Sarsour of drawing on antisemitic tropes. Sarsour has disputed accusations of antisemitism and says that her criticism of the state of Israel has been wrongly conflated with antipathy for Jews. In late January 2019, Sarsour drew criticism for not mentioning Jews in her International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, with some commentators noting that in 2017 she had called President Trump antisemitic for not mentioning Jews in his own Holocaust Remembrance Day statement.

#### CUNY commencement speech

When Sarsour was selected to deliver a commencement speech at the City University of New York (CUNY) in June 2017, there was strong opposition from some conservatives. Dov Hikind, then a Democratic Party state assemblyman in New York, sent then-Governor Andrew Cuomo a letter objecting to the choice, signed by 100 Holocaust survivors. His objection was based on Sarsour's previously having spoken alongside Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli court for taking part in a bombing that killed two civilians in 1969.

Sarsour said that she had nothing to apologize for and questioned the integrity of Odeh's conviction. She ascribed the critical reaction to her speech to her prominent role as an organizer for the 2017 Women's March. The university chancellor, the dean of the college, and a group of professors defended Sarsour's right to speak, as did some Jewish groups, including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. A group of prominent left-leaning Jews signed an open letter condemning attacks on her and promising to work alongside her for the sake of justice. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League defended Sarsour's First Amendment right despite opposing her views on Israel. A rally in support of Sarsour took place in front of New York City Hall. Constitutional scholar Fred Smith Jr. tied the controversy to broader disputes over freedom of speech in the United States. Sarsour delivered the speech on June 2, 2017.

### Comments about Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In 2011, in reference to Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a noted critic of Islam, and Brigitte Gabriel, a conservative activist and leader of the lobbying group ACT! for America, Sarsour tweeted, "She's asking 4 an a\$\$ whippin'. I wish I could take their vaginas away - they don't deserve to be women." She had debated both women on radio or television and said the dispute centered on Ali and Gabriel's promotion of the idea that Islam is misogynistic. In response, Ali called Sarsour a "fake feminist" and criticized her for defending sharia. In 2017, Sarsour told The Washington Post that the tweet (then already deleted) was "stupid" and that she did not remember writing it. Later that year, an exchange between Sarsour and a student activist at Dartmouth College in which she was asked about the tweet circulated widely on social media. Sarsour noted that the question had been posed by a "white man" at an event celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and her words garnered criticism.

### Fundraising efforts

After a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis was vandalized in an apparent anti-Semitic incident in February 2017, Sarsour worked with other Muslim activists to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for repair and restoration work. Among other recipients of funds from the effort was a Colorado Jewish cemetery listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The project generated some controversy after New York assemblyman Dov Hikind accused Sarsour of withholding the funds. Sarsour characterized the controversy as the work of "alt-right Zionists."

Sarsour's request for donations to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts was criticized by her conservative opponents; according to Alexander Nazaryan of Newsweek, this was indicative of the right wing's increasing antipathy for Sarsour. MPower Change, a group Sarsour co-founded, has also worked to raise money for the victims of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, which some progressive supporters of Sarsour have pointed to along with the St. Louis cemetery fundraising campaign in defending her against accusations of anti-Semitism.

## Personal life

As of 2011, Sarsour lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. At 17, she entered into an arranged marriage and had three children by her mid-20s. Both Sarsour's family and her husband are from the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank, and about 9 miles (14 km) north of Jerusalem.

Sarsour is a Muslim. On the subject of women in Islam, she told The Washington Post, "There are Muslims and regimes that oppress women, but I believe that my religion is an empowering religion." She chooses to wear a hijab. Sarsour argues that the Islamic religious laws and principles known as sharia do not impose on non-Muslims and that Muslims must also follow civil laws.

American Muslim feminist activist

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America


Delayed gratification

Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, is the resistance to the temptation of an immediate pleasure in the hope of obtaining a valuable and long-lasting reward in the long-term. In other words, delayed gratification describes the process that the subject undergoes when the subject resists the temptation of an immediate reward in preference for a later reward. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.

A person's ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills such as patience, impulse control, self-control and willpower, all of which are involved in self-regulation. Broadly, self-regulation encompasses a person's capacity to adapt the self as necessary to meet demands of the environment. Delaying gratification is the reverse of delay discounting, which is "the preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger but delayed rewards" and refers to the "fact that the subjective value of reward decreases with increasing delay to its receipt". It is theorized that the ability to choose delayed rewards is under the control of the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS).

Several factors can affect a person's ability to delay gratification. Cognitive strategies, such as the use of distracting or "cool" thoughts, can increase delay ability, as can neurological factors, such as strength of connections in the frontal-striatal pathway. Behavioral researchers have focused on the contingencies that govern choices to delay reinforcement, and have studied how to manipulate those contingencies in order to lengthen delay. Age plays a role too; children under five years old demonstrate a marked lack of delayed gratification ability and most commonly seek immediate gratification. A very small difference between males and females suggest that females may be better at delaying rewards. The inability to choose to wait rather than seek immediate reinforcement is related to avoidance-related behaviors such as procrastination, and to other clinical diagnoses such as anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, discussed the ego's role in balancing the immediate pleasure-driven desires of the id with the morality-driven choices of the superego. Funder and Block expanded psychoanalytic research on the topic, and found that impulsivity, or a lack of ego-control, has a stronger effect on one's ability to choose delayed rewards if a reward is more desirable. Finally, environmental and social factors play a role; for example, delay is affected by the self-imposed or external nature of a reward contingency, by the degree of task engagement required during the delay, by early mother-child relationship characteristics, by a person's previous experiences with unreliable promises of rewards (e.g., in poverty), and by contemporary sociocultural expectations and paradigms. Research on animals comprises another body of literature describing delayed gratification characteristics that are not as easily tested in human samples, such as ecological factors affecting the skill.

## Background

### Cognitive-affective processing system

One well-supported theory of self-regulation, called the Cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS), suggests that delaying gratification results from an ability to use "cool" regulatory strategies (i.e., calm, controlled and cognitive strategies) over "hot regulatory strategies (i.e., emotional, impulsive, automatic reactions), when faced with provocation. In "hot" processing, a person thinks intently about the object causing temptation, and especially about its most appealing elements, and is subsequently less able to resist the immediate reward. The use of cool strategies can translate to more control over behavior. Effective "cool" strategies involve distraction and restructuring the perception of the tempting stimulus to make it seem less appealing. For example, in one study of pre-adolescent boys with behavioral problems, the boys showed a reduction in verbal and physical aggression when they used "cool" strategies, such as looking away or distracting themselves. The most effective type of distraction seems to be imagining another desirable reward, which takes attention away from the immediate temptations.

### Stanford marshmallow experiment

The seminal research on delayed gratification – the now-famous "marshmallow experiment" – was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s and 1970s at Stanford University. Mischel and his colleagues were interested in strategies that preschool children used to resist temptation. They presented four-year-olds with a marshmallow and told the children that they had two options: (1) ring a bell at any point to summon the experimenter and eat the marshmallow, or (2) wait until the experimenter returned (about 15 minutes later), and earn two marshmallows. The message was: "small reward now, bigger reward later." Some children broke down and ate the marshmallow, whereas others were able to delay gratification and earn the coveted two marshmallows. In follow-up experiments, Mischel found that children were able to wait longer if they used certain "cool" distraction techniques (covering their eyes, hiding under the desk, singing songs, or imagining pretzels instead of the marshmallow in front of them), or if they changed the way they thought about the marshmallow (focusing on its similarity to a cotton ball, rather than on its gooey, delectable taste).

The children who waited longer, when re-evaluated as teenagers and adults, demonstrated a striking array of advantages over their peers. As teenagers, they had higher SAT scores, social competence, self-assuredness and self-worth, and were rated by their parents as more mature, better able to cope with stress, more likely to plan ahead, and more likely to use reason. They were less likely to have conduct disorders or high levels of impulsivity, aggressiveness and hyperactivity. As adults, the high delayers were less likely to have drug problems or other addictive behaviors, get divorced, or be overweight. Each minute that a preschooler was able to delay gratification translated to a .2% reduction in Body Mass Index 30 years later.

Each of these positive outcomes requires some ability to forgo short-term reward in favor of a higher payoff in the future. The ability to delay gratification also appears to be a buffer against rejection sensitivity (the tendency to be anxious when anticipating interpersonal rejection). In a 20-year follow-up of the marshmallow experiment, individuals with vulnerability to high rejection sensitivity who had shown strong delay of gratification abilities as preschoolers had higher self-esteem and self-worth and more adaptive coping skills, in comparison to the individuals who had high rejection sensitivity but low delay of gratification as four-year-olds. These compelling longitudinal findings converge with other studies showing a similar pattern: The ability to resist temptation early in life translates to persistent benefits across settings.

Forty years after the first marshmallow test studies, neuroimaging data has shed light on the neural correlates of delayed gratification. A team led by B. J. Casey, of Cornell University, recruited 59 of the original participants – who are now in their mid-40s – and gave them a delayed gratification task. Instead of resisting marshmallows, these adults were instructed to suppress responses to images of happy faces, but not to neutral or fearful faces. Those who had been high delayers as pre-schoolers were more successful at controlling their impulses in response to the emotional faces (i.e., not pressing the button in response to happy faces), suggesting that the high delayers continued to show better ability to dampen or resist impulses. Casey and colleagues also scanned the brains of 26 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they completed the task. The researchers hypothesized that high delayers would be more likely to use "cool" regulation strategies to control their responses, which would manifest as activation of the right prefrontal cortex, whereas low delayers would use "hot" strategies, which would activate the ventral striatum, an area also linked to addiction. Indeed, results showed this differential brain activity. This mirrors other fMRI research of delayed gratification conducted by Noah Shamosh and Jeremy Gray, of Yale University, demonstrating that individuals who chose larger delayed rewards over smaller immediate rewards (in hypothetical situations) showed greater brain activation in the anterior prefrontal cortex.

## Factors affecting one's ability

### Neurocognitive factors

The way that a person frames a situation heavily influences a decision's outcome. Research on "hot" and "cool" strategies suggests that when children cognitively represent what they are waiting for as a real reward by focusing on the reward's arousing, "hot" qualities (taste, smell, sound, feel, etc.) their self-control and delay of gratification decreases, while directing attention to a symbol of the reward by focusing on its abstract, "cool" qualities (shape, color, number, etc.), can enhance self-control and increase the delay. Optimal self-control and the longest delay to gratification can be achieved by directing attention to a competing item, especially the arousing, "hot" qualities of a competing item. For example, delays are increased when thinking about the taste and smell of popcorn while waiting to eat candy. This illustrates an individual's ability to manipulate their cognitive representation of external stimuli for goal-directed purposes.

Delaying gratification is the same as controlling the impulse for immediate gratification, which requires cognitive control. The ventral striatum, located in the midbrain, is the part of the limbic system that is the reward center as well as a pleasure center. The limbic system will always react to the potential for instant pleasure. To override this instinct, the prefrontal cortex, which is also associated with reasoning and rational thought, must be active. The prefrontal cortex is also the part of the brain that determines the focus of a person's attention, which enables a better framing that facilitates delayed gratification. During adolescence and early adulthood, the prefrontal cortex develops and matures to become more complicated and connected with the rest of the brain. Older children and adults find the deferment-of-gratification tasks easier than do young children for this reason. However, the relative ability to defer gratification remains stable throughout development. Children who can better control impulses grow up to be adults who also have better control. Practicing deferred gratification is quite beneficial to cognitive abilities throughout life.

### Behavioral factors

Behaviorists focus on the acquisition and teaching of delayed gratification, and have developed therapeutic techniques for increasing ability to delay. Behavior analysts capitalize on the effective principles of reinforcement when shaping behavior by making rewards contingent on the person's current behavior, which promotes learning a delay of gratification. It is important to note that for a behavior modification regimen to succeed, the reward must have some value to the participant. Without a reward that is meaningful, providing delayed or immediate gratification serves little purpose, as the reward is not a strong reinforcer of the desired behavior.

Behavior theorists see delaying gratification as an adaptive skill. It has been shown that learning to delay gratification promotes positive social behavior, such as sharing and positive peer interactions. For example, students who learn to delay gratification are better able to complete their assigned activities. To put it simply, if someone undertakes an activity with the promise of a delayed reward after, the task's completion becomes more likely.

Behavioral researchers have found that a choice for instant versus delayed gratification is influenced by several factors including whether the reward is negative or positive reinforcement. A past study by Solnick et al., focused on an experiment where the main concentrations were time added to both conditions and the preference of the participants with experiencing a loud noise for variable amounts of time: 15, 30, 60, and 90 seconds. The buttons to turn off the noise were manipulated by one button turning off the noise for a short amount of time and the other turning the noise off for an extended time. The participants were found to be more willing to turn off the noise immediately for 90 seconds rather than turning it off for the 120 seconds after a 60-second delay was issued. Findings illustrate that participants chose not to delay their gratification for the relief of noise but rather instantly silence it for a shorter amount of time.

#### Individual thresholds for delay

In a 2011 study, researchers tested to see if people would willingly choose between instant and delayed gratification by offering them a set amount of (hypothetical) money that they could receive presently, or telling them they could wait a month for more money. Results suggested that willingness to delay gratification depended on the amount of money being offered, but also showed wide individual variation in the threshold of later reward that was motivating enough to forgo the immediate reward. The subjective value of a reward can also stem from the way one describes the potential reward. As prospect theory states, people are heavily loss-averse. People tend to value a commodity more when it is considered to be something that can be lost or given up than when it is evaluated as a potential gain.

#### Duration of time delay

The duration of time until an eventual reward also affects participants' choice of immediate or delayed gratification. A 2001 study demonstrated that if a reward will not be granted for an extensive amount of time, such as 180–300 months (15–25 years), the monetary amount of the reward is inconsequential; instead, the bulk of the participants choose the immediate reward, even if their delayed reward would be quite large. Delayed gratification has its limits, and a delay can only be so long before it is judged to be not worth the effort it takes to wait.

#### Behavioral training

##### Applications in classroom settings

In a Year 3 elementary classroom in South Wales a teacher was having difficulty keeping three girls on task during designated private study times. The teacher reached for aid from behavior analysts, and a delayed gratification behavior modification plan was put into place. The study gave limits on the numbers of questions the children could ask, and if they did not exceed the limit, they were given tokens for rewards. The token economy for rewards is an example of delayed gratification, by way of cool processing. Instead of having the girls focus on attention-seeking behaviors that distracted the teacher and the students, the teacher had them focus on how many questions they had, and if they needed to ask for help from the teacher. They also focused on gaining tokens rather than focusing on the final reward, which increased their delays. By giving the children this goal and the promise of positive reinforcement for good behavior, the girls dropped their rate of question-asking and attention-seeking.

##### Applications to ADHD

Compared to neurotypical children, those with ADHD generally demonstrate greater impulsivity by being influenced by reward immediacy and quality more than by the frequency of reward and effort to obtain it. However, researchers have empirically shown that these impulsive behavior patterns can be changed through the implementation of a simple self-control training procedure in which reinforcer immediacy competes with the frequency, quantity or saliency of the reward. One study demonstrated that any verbal activity while waiting for reinforcement increases delay to gratification in participants with ADHD. In another study, three children diagnosed with ADHD and demonstrating impulsivity were trained to prefer reward rate and saliency more than immediacy through manipulation of the quality of the reinforcers and by systematically increasing the delay with a changing-criterion design. Post-assessment of the children illustrated that self-control can transfer to untrained dimensions of reinforcement.

### Across the lifespan

At birth, infants are unable to wait for their wants and needs to be met and exhibit a defining lack of impulse control. With age, developing children are able to retain impulsivity but also gain control over their immediate desires and are increasingly able to prolong gratification. Developmental psychologists study the progression of impulse control and delay of gratification over the lifespan, including deficiencies in development that are closely related to attention deficits and behavior problems.

Children under five years old display the least effective strategies for delaying gratification, such as looking at the reward and thinking about its arousing features. By 5 years old, most children are able to demonstrate better self-control by recognizing the counter-productivity of focusing on the reward. Five-year-olds often choose instead to actively distract themselves or even use self-instructions to remind themselves of the contingency that waiting produces a reward of a greater value. Between 8 and 13 years old, children develop the cognitive ability to differentiate and employ abstract versus arousing thoughts in order to distract their minds from the reward and thereby increase the delay. Once delaying strategies are developed, the capacity to resist temptation is relatively stable throughout adulthood. Preschoolers' performance on delayed gratification tasks correlates with their adolescent performance on tasks designed to measure similar constructs and processing, which parallels the corresponding development of willpower and the fronto-striatal circuit (neural pathways that connect the frontal lobe to other brain regions). Declines in self-regulation and impulse control in old age predict corresponding declines in reward-delaying strategies, specifically reduced temporal discounting due to a decrease in cooling strategies.

#### Effects of gender

Throughout 33 studies on gender differences, a small significant effect (r = .06) has been found indicating that a base-rate of 10% more females are able to choose delayed rewards than males, which is the typical percentage of difference found between the sexes on measures such as personality or social behavior. This effect may be related to the slight gender differences found in delay discounting (i.e., minimizing the value of a delayed reward) and higher levels of impulsivity and inattention in boys. Further studies are needed to analyze if this minute difference begins at a certain age (e.g., puberty) or if it has a stable magnitude throughout the lifespan. Some researchers suggest this gender difference may correspond with a mother's tendency to sacrifice her wants and needs in order to meet those of her child more frequently than a father does.

### Clinical factors

#### Contemporary clinical psychology perspectives

Self-control has been called the "master virtue" by clinical and social psychologists, suggesting that the ability to delay gratification plays a critical role in a person's overall psychological adjustment. People with better ability to delay gratification report higher wellbeing, self-esteem and openness to experience, as well as more productive ways of responding to anger and other provocations. Early delay ability has been shown to protect against the development of a variety of emotional vulnerabilities later in life, such as aggression and features of borderline personality disorder. Meanwhile, many maladaptive coping skills that characterize mental illness entail a difficulty delaying gratification. The tendency to choose short-term rewards at the expense of longer-term benefits permeates many forms of psychopathology.

A growing body of research suggests that self-control is akin to a muscle that can be strengthened through practice. In other words, self-control abilities are malleable, a fact that can be a source of hope for those who struggle with this skill. In psychotherapy, treatment for impulse-control issues often involves teaching individuals to realize the downsides of acting on immediate urges and in turn to practice delaying gratification. In anxiety disorders, this process occurs through exposure to a feared situation – which is very uncomfortable at first, but eventually becomes tolerable and even trains a person's mind and body that these situations are less threatening than originally feared. Exposure therapy is only effective if an individual can delay gratification and resist the urge to escape the situation early on. To shed insight on the tradeoff between short- and long-term gains, therapists might also help individuals construct a pro-con list of a certain behavior, with sections for short-term and long-term outcomes. For maladaptive coping behaviors such as self-injury, substance use or avoidance, there are generally no long-term pros. Meanwhile, abstinence from acting on a harmful urge (i.e., delayed gratification) generally results in long-term benefits. This realization can be a powerful impetus for change.

##### Externalizing disorders

Externalizing disorders (i.e., acting-out disorders) show a clearer link to delayed gratification, since they more directly involve deficits in impulse control. For example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and aggressive behavior are associated with difficulty delaying gratification in children and adolescents, as are substance abuse, gambling, and other addictive behaviors in adolescents and adults. In a 2010 study, teenagers and young adults with stronger abilities to delay gratification were less likely to drink alcohol, or to smoke cigarettes or cannabis. A 2011 study found that the contrast in delayed gratification between children with and without ADHD was no longer significant after statistically controlling for IQ (in other words, ADHD was not associated with delayed gratification above and beyond the influence of IQ). This may stem from the high correlation between intelligence and delayed gratification, and suggests that the tie between delayed gratification and ADHD could benefit from more investigation.

##### Internalizing disorders

Difficulty delaying gratification also plays a role in internalizing disorders like anxiety and depression. A hallmark behavior in anxiety is avoidance of feared or anxiety-provoking situations. By seeking the immediate relief that comes with avoidance, a person is succumbing to the pull of instant gratification over the larger reward from overcoming the fear and anxiety that caused the avoidance. Procrastination, which is often a reflection of anxiety, is a clear example: a person avoids a dreaded task by engaging in a more enjoyable immediate activity instead. Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a more jarring case of this anxiety-related struggle to delay gratification; someone with OCD is unable to resist compulsions that temporarily mitigate the torture of obsessive thoughts, even though these compulsions do not banish the obsessions in the long run. One experiment, however, did not find any significant differences between samples with OCD and healthy controls in delayed gratification, while finding substantially improved delayed gratification among those with obsessive–compulsive personality disorder. Depression is also associated with lower capacity to delay gratification, though the direction of cause and effect is not clear. A depressed person who has difficulty pushing themself to engage in previously enjoyed activities is (deliberately or not) prioritizing short-term comfort and is demonstrating an impaired ability to delay gratification. There is evidence that individuals who engage in deliberate self-harm (e.g. cut themselves) are less able to tolerate emotional distress but are more able to tolerate physical pain. Thus it is argued that they injure themselves because they cannot delay gratification and need a way to end emotional pain quickly.

#### Psychoanalytic drives and impulses

Sigmund Freud viewed the struggle to delay gratification as a person's efforts to overcome the instinctive, libidinal drive of the id. According to classic psychoanalytic theory, a person's psyche is composed of the id, ego and superego. The id is driven by the pleasure principle: it wants physical pleasure, and it wants it now. The ego, operating under the reality principle, serves to moderate the id's desire for instant gratification against the superego, which is guided by a person's internalized sense of morality. According to psychoanalytic theory, a person with difficulty delaying gratification is plagued by intrapsychic conflict – the ego cannot adequately regulate the battle between the id and the superego – and experiences psychological distress, often in the form of anxiety or "neurosis".

Other psychoanalytic researchers describe a more nuanced, and less universally positive, view of delayed gratification. David C. Funder and Jack Block theorized that a person's tendency to delay, or not delay, gratification is just one element of a broader construct called ego control, defined as a person's ability to modulate or control impulses. Ego control "ranges from ego undercontrol at one end to ego overcontrol at the other", according to Funder. These tendencies are thought to be relatively stable in each individual, such that someone who tends toward undercontrol will "grab whatever rewards are immediately available even at the cost of long-term gain" and someone who tends toward overcontrol will "delay or even forgo pleasures even when they can be had without cost". By this view, delay of gratification may be adaptive in certain settings, but inappropriate or even costly in other settings.

Funder and Block draw a distinction between the ego-control model, in which delayed gratification is seen as a general tendency to contain motivational impulses (whether or not it is adaptive in a specific instance), and the ego-resiliency model (supported by Mischel's research), in which delayed gratification is seen as a skill that arises only when it is adaptive. To tease apart these models, Funder and Block explored the association between ego control, ego resiliency, IQ and delayed gratification in adolescents. The adolescents had the choice between being paid \$4 at each of six study sessions or delaying their payment until the last session, in which case they would also earn an additional \$4 of "interest".

The results supported both models of delayed gratification. The teens' tendency to delay gratification was indeed associated with IQ and with ego resiliency (e.g., higher delayers were rated as more responsible, consistent, likable, sympathetic, generous; less hostile, moody, self-indulgent, rebellious), but was also independently associated with ego control (e.g., higher delayers were rated as "tends toward over-control of needs and impulses" and "favors conservative values in a number of areas"). The researchers noted that individual differences in ego control (i.e., overall impulsivity) may play a larger role in delayed gratification when the incentives are larger and more motivating.

Writing in 1998, Funder described delayed gratification as a "mixed bag". He concluded: "Participants who exhibited the most delay were not just 'better' at self-control, but in a sense they seemed unable to avoid it. ... Delayers are in general smart and well-adjusted, but they also tend to be somewhat overcontrolled and unnecessarily inhibited."

### Environmental and social factors

#### Who is in control

Factors affecting one's ability to delay gratification depend on whether the delay contingency is self-imposed (delay can be terminated at the will of the person waiting) or externally imposed by another person, institution or circumstance. When the contingency is self-imposed, the physical presence of the reward seems to aid in delaying gratification. On the other hand, when the delay is externally imposed, children are not able to wait as long when the reward is present, suggesting greater frustration under these circumstances.

#### Task engagement

Engaging in work or an assigned task can generate an effective distraction from a reward and enable a person to wait for a longer delay, as long as the reward is not being flaunted. Having the reward present during work (and easily accessible) creates a negative frustration—akin to teasing—rather than providing motivation. For example, a child who can see other children playing outside while the child is finishing their homework will be less motivated to wait for their turn for recess. Another factor work and task engagement adds to the delay of gratification is that if the work is interesting and has some reinforcing quality inherent to it, then attention to the reward will reduce work productivity since it becomes a distraction to the work rather than a motivation to finish it.

#### Mother–child relationship

The more positive emotions and behavior that a 12- to 24-month-old toddler displays when coping with separation from a parent, the better they are 3.5 years later at using cooling strategies in order to defer gratification. This suggests that the emotional skills and processes required for coping with social and interpersonal frustrations are similar to those utilized for coping with the aggravation of goal-directed delay of gratification. Maternal attachment also influences the development of a child's ability to delay gratification. An interaction has been found between a mother's level of control and how close a child stays to the mother while exploring the environment.

Children who have controlling mothers and explore their environment at a far distance from her are able to employ more cooling strategies and prefer rewards that come later. Similarly, children who stay close to a non-controlling mothers also use more cool strategies and demonstrate longer delays. This suggests that some children of controlling mothers have better learned how to distract themselves from or effectively avoid intrusive stimuli, although additional effects on their emotional competency are speculated but unknown. A greater capacity to delay gratification by using effective attentional strategies is also seen in preschoolers whose mothers had been responsive and supportive during particularly stressful times of self-regulation when the child was a toddler, indicating that maternal responsiveness during highly demanding times is crucial for the development of self-regulation, self-control and emotional competency.

#### Reliability of gratification

Researchers have investigated whether the reliability of the reward affects one's ability to delay gratification. Reliability of the reward refers to how well the reward received matches what the person was expecting or promised in terms of quality and quantity. For example, researchers told children that they would receive better art supplies if they waited. After the children successfully waited for the reward, better supplies could not be "found" and so they had to use the crayons and stickers that were in poor shape. Comparing these children to ones who received their promised rewards reliably revealed different results on subsequent Marshmallow tests measuring delayed gratification. Children who had learned that the researcher's promise was unreliable quickly succumbed to eating the marshmallow, waiting only an average of three minutes. Conversely, children who had learned that the researcher was reliable were able to wait an average of 12 minutes, with many of them waiting the full 15 minutes for the researcher to return in order to double the reward to two marshmallows.

### Genetics and evolution

Evolutionary theory can argue against the selection of the deferred gratification trait since there are both costs and risks associated with delaying gratification behavior. One such cost is the basic opportunity cost associated with time spent waiting. While waiting, individuals lose time that could be used to find other food. Seeking high calorie food conveys a clear evolutionary advantage. There are also two risks associated with being patient. First, there is a risk that another animal might get to the food first, also known as an interruption risk. Second, there is the risk that the chance to get the reward will be cut short, perhaps by a predator, also known as a termination risk. These costs and risks create situations in which the fitness of the individual is threatened. There are several examples that show how reward delay occurs in the real world. For example, animals that eat fruit have the option of eating unripe fruit right away, or waiting, delaying gratification, until it becomes ripe. The interruption risk plays a part here, because if the individual forgoes the unripe fruit, there is a chance that another individual may come along and get to it first. Also, in extractive foraging, such as with nuts and shellfish, the outer shell creates a delay. However, animals that can store food and defer eating are more likely to survive during harsh conditions, and thus delaying gratification may also incur an evolutionary advantage.

It is likely that there is a strong genetic component to deferred gratification, though no direct link has been established. Since many complex genetic interactions are necessary for neurons to perform the simplest tasks, it is hard to isolate one gene to study this behavior. For this same reason, multiple genes are likely responsible for deferred gratification. Further research is necessary to discover the genetic corollaries to delayed gratification.

## Animal studies

Delayed gratification or deferred gratification is an animal behavior that can be linked to delay discounting, ecological factors, individual fitness, and neurobiological mechanisms. Research for this behavior has been conducted with animals such as capuchin monkeys, tamarins, marmosets, rats, and pigeons.

### Delay discounting

When animals are faced with a choice to either wait for a reward, or receive a reward right away, the discounting of the reward is hyperbolic. As the length of time of waiting for a reward increases, the reward is discounted at a gradual rate. Empirical data have suggested that exponential discounting, rewards discounting at a constant rate per unit of waiting time, only occurs when there are random interruptions in foraging. Discounting can also be related to the risk sensitivity of animals. Rather than relating risk to delay, risk sensitivity acts as a function of delay discounting.

In a study conducted by Haden and Platt, macaque monkeys were given the choice of a medium reward that they knew they would receive, versus a more risky choice. The riskier choice would reward the monkey with a large reward fifty percent of the time, and a small reward the other fifty percent. The ultimate payoff was the same, but the monkeys preferred the riskier choice. They speculated that the monkeys did not see their action as risky, but rather as a large, delayed reward. They reasoned that the monkeys viewed the large reward as certain: if they did not get the large reward the first time around, they would eventually get it, but at a longer delay.

To test for this theory, they gave the same test while varying the time between the opportunities to choose a reward. They found that as the interval increased, the number of times that the monkeys chose the more risky reward decreased. While this occurred in macaque monkeys, the varying interval time did not affect pigeons' choices in another study. This suggests that research looking into varying risk sensitivity of different species is needed. When provided a choice between a small, short delay reward, and a large, long delay reward, there is an impulsive preference for the former. Additionally, as the delay time for the small/short and large/long reward increases, there is a shift in preference toward the larger, delayed reward. This evidence only supports hyperbolic discounting, not exponential.

### Ecological factors

Although predicting reward preference seems simple when using empirical models, there are a number of ecological factors that seem to affect the delayed gratification behavior of animals. In real world situations, "discounting makes sense because of the inherent uncertainty of future payoffs".

One study looked at how reward discounting is context specific. By differing the time and space between small and large rewards, they were able to test how these factors affected the decision making in tamarins and marmosets. They showed that tamarins will travel longer distances for larger food rewards, but will not wait as long as marmosets. Conversely, marmosets will wait longer, but will not travel as far. They then concluded that this discounting behavior directly correlates to the normal feeding behavior of species. The tamarins feed over large distances, looking for insects. Capturing and eating insects requires a quick and impulsive decision and action. The marmosets, on the other hand, eat tree sap, which takes more time to secrete, but does not require that the marmosets to cover large distances.

The physiological similarities between humans and other animals, especially primates, have led to more comparative research between the two groups. Future research with animal models then can expand our own understanding of how people make decisions about instant versus delayed gratification in the real world.

## See also

- Time preference – the economic analysis of delayed gratification preferences

Resistance of an immediate reward in return for a later reward