Weakening self-control biases the emotional evaluation of appetitive cues
January
Weakening self-control biases the emotional evaluation of appetitive cues
Christian Dirk Wiesner 0 1
Christoph Lindner 1
0 Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Center for Integrative Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Christian-Albrechts University , Kiel, Germany , 2 Leibniz-Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) and Christian-Albrechts University , Kiel , Germany
1 Editor: Ruud van den Bos , Radboud Universiteit , NETHERLANDS
Exerting self-control in a first task weakens self-control in a second completely unrelated task (ego-depletion). It has been proposed that ego-depletion increases approach motivation which would amplify positive emotions to appetitive cues. Here we investigated the effect of the depletion of cognitive self-control on the subsequent emotional evaluation of appetitive cues. Participants of the depletion group copied a text omitting frequent letters and thereby exerting self-control to inhibit automated writing habits. Participants of the control group just copied the text. In a subsequent task participants had to rate valence and arousal of their responses to neutral vs. positive pictures of humans, animals, food, or sceneries. Ego-depletion caused more positive valence ratings of neutral pictures and lower arousal ratings of positive pictures. The findings do not support the notion that ego-depletion increases approach motivation in general. Rather they suggest thatÐwithout a specific motivational contextÐdepletion of cognitive self-control differentially alters the immediate emotional evaluation of appetitive cues.
Introduction
Self-control is the ability to override thoughts, emotions, or impulses, thus enabling humans to
adapt their behavior to external demands like social norms or long-term goals [
1
].
Baumeister's popular strength-model captures two striking features of self-control: Self-control seems
to be domain general and to rely on a limited resource [
1
]. These features would explain the
phenomenon of so called ªego-depletionº: Exerting self-control in a first task weakens
selfcontrol in a second completely unrelated task [
2
]. For example suppressing emotional
reactions while watching an emotional video can weaken the ability to persist in solving anagrams
[
3
]. Likewise, suppressing specific thoughts during writing can weaken the ability to suppress
emotional reactions while watching a movie [
4
]. Moreover, in most studies the negative effects
of ego-depletion on performance in subsequent self-control demanding tasks is not mediated
by changes in mood [2±5]. In connection to recent discussions that the development of
egodepletion effects might be more complex and fragile than expected [
6
], several authors (e.g.
had any role in the design of the study, in the
collection, analysis, or interpretation of data, in the
writing of the paper, or in the decision to submit
the paper for publication.
[
6, 7
]) have suggested that the ego-depletion phenomenon needs to be explored in greater
detail.
In specific, it has been criticized that the strength-model does not specify the underlying
processes [
7
]. Accordingly, in their process-model Inzlicht et al. [
7
] propose that apparent
failures of self-control after ego-depletion reflect a motivated shift of task priorities. This shift
would enable people to balance cognitive labor to pursue `have-to' goals versus cognitive
leisure to pursue `want to' goals [
7
]. One specific hypothesis about an underlying process of
egodepletion is that exerting self-control increases approach motivation [
8
]. This in turn should
increase emotional reactions to appetitive cues like positive pictures [
9
]. Indeed, Wagner and
colleagues report that ego-depletion increases the emotional reactivity of the amygdala to
pictures [10] and the neural response to reward cues in the orbitofrontal cortex [11]. However,
they do not report behavioral data of the emotional responses and the results of the first study
were restricted to negative pictures. Furthermore, most behavioral studies have investigated
the effect of ego-depletion on subsequent intentional suppression of emotional reactions but
not on the incidental emotional reaction to stimuli (e.g. [
4, 12
]).
In our study we test whether the depletion of cognitive self-control increases the emotional
reaction to appetitive cues. The between-subject factor (depletion vs. control) was manipulated
using a text copying task. Since weak ego-depletion effects on performance might be due to
unfulfilled requirements for overriding habits during the ego-depletion manipulation task
[
6, 13
], we applied a text copying task as a well-established and valid ego-depletion
manipulation [
14, 15
]. The emotional evaluation of appetitive cues was assessed using a picture
evaluation task. We presented positive pictures of delicious food, social interactions, young animals,
or beautiful sceneries as well as neutral control pictur (...truncated)