Self-Control 2023 with verified questions and answers

Self-Control Definition - The self's ability to override unwanted thoughts, emotions, impulses, and automatic or habitual behaviours - Resolves inner motivational conflict: short-term benefits of acting on impulse vs. longer term costs Willpower Definition - Ability to deliberately exert control over one's thoughts, feelings and actions Why is it important? - Self-control is vital to success in life and is regarded as one of the most important parts of the self (eg. Baumeister, 1998; Higgins, 1996) - Research indicates that people with good self-control do better in work and social life, and they have fewer psychopathological problems than other people with poor self-control Eg. Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Mischel et al (1988); Shoda et al (1990); Tangney et al (2004) Encodings Cognitive affective units that play a role in self-control - Categories for the self, people, events and situations (external and internal) Expectations and beliefs Cognitive affective units that play a role in self-control - About the social world, about outcomes for behaviour, about one's self-efficacy Affects Cognitive affective units that play a role in self-control - Feelings, emotions and affective responses (including physiological reactions) Goals Cognitive affective units that play a role in self-control - Desirable outcomes and affective states, aversive outcomes and affective states, goals and life projcts Competencies and self-regulatory plans Cognitive affective units that play a role in self-control - Potential behaviours and scripts that one can do and plans and strategies for organising action and for affecting outcomes and one's own behaviour and internal states Processes in self-control - Internal: strength of self-control fluctuates Motivational factors Ability factors Eg. how motivated and able you are to resist something - External: strength of impulse also fluctuates Situations How much you want something/how attractive something is to you Marshmallow Task Delay Gratification - Children given a marshmallow - Told if they wait several minutes they will be given another, but they must not eat the one they have currently Goal Activation Motivational Factors 1) - Is the situation personally relevant? - Is it meaningful and does it warrant further attention? Self-efficacy Motivational Factors 2) - Can I successfully exert self-control? - How well ppts feel they can perform determines whether or not they chose to try for the more difficult but preferred reward - Dweck (1986), Seligman (1975): Ppts who feel they have less control over situations choose not to engage in self-regulation Subjective Value of Rewards Motivational Factors 3) - Temporal discounting mchanisms - Rewards that are delayed have less value than equivalent rewards that are immediately available Mischel (1966) Motivational Factors: subjective value of rewards - Temporal discounting mechanisms - Goal commitment in delay of gratification is enhanced with the relative magnitude of the delayed reward and decreases as the required time it takes to attain the reward increases Motivational Factors - A person must value the delayed reward enough to commit to pursuing it - A person must believe that they have the ability to exert self-control - A person must trust that they will receive the value reward upon fulfilling their goal Attentional and Cognitive mechanisms Ability Factors 1) - Sample experiment Condition A: children waited with both the immediately available and the delayed reward in full view Condition B: both conditions concealed Children waited more than 11 minutes when none of the rewards were exposed but only a few minutes when any of the rewards were visible - Focusing on a desired stimulus decreases ability to delay gratification Attention Ability factors 2) - Diverting attention away from appetitive features of a stimulus helps children delay gratification - The distractions need to be appealing and reinforcing in order to work Reconstrual processes Ability factors 3) - Mental representations play a critical role in the outcome of self-regulation efforts - Replace mental representations of rewards that are 'hot' and difficult to resist with representations that are 'cool' and did not elicit impulsive trigger reactions - Ie. imagine a marshmallow as a puffy white cloud rather than a gooey sweet treat Cool System: Know Hot/Cool Systems - Attuned to the informational, cognitive and spatial aspects of stimuli - Generate rational, reflective and strategic behaviour - Basis of self-regulation and self-control Brain systems - Associated with prefrontal and cingulate systems involved in cognitive control and executive function Hot system: Go Hot/cool systems - Emotional, simple, reflexive and fast - Tuned to stimuli that elicit automatic, aversive, fear and flight reactions or appetitive and sexual approach reactions - Undermines rational attempts at self control Brain systems - Associated with the limbic system Interactions between systems - Cognition and affect operate in continuous interaction with one another - Hot spots and cool nodes are directly connected to one another - Hot representations can be cooled through cool system of cognitive processing (attention switching, reconstrual) - Cold representations can be heated by hot processing (attention to reward) Developmental level of the individual Factors influencing the hot/cool balance - Hot system dominates early in life, cool system develops later (by age 4) and becomes increasingly dominant over the course of development - Delay gratification is virtually impossible age 4 - By age 12, 60% manage to wait for up to 25 minutes Acute stress Factors influencing the hot/cool balance - High: hot system dominance - Low: complex thinking, planning and remembering are possible - When moving from low to high stress responding tends to be reflexive and automatic Chronic Stress Factors influencing the hot/cool balance - Bias processing towards hot systems - Direct implications for self-control ability - Severe and chronic stress: dominant activation of the hot system that is difficult to reverse - Eg. explains why it is harder to diet when you are stressed Individual Differences Factors influencing the hot/cool balance - Ability to flexibly suppress and enhance emotional expression were prospectively linked to adjustment across daily life Evidence from delay gratification studies - Number of seconds children can wait before eating the treat predicts in later life: Higher SAT scores Better personal and interpersonal competencies years later Higher cognitive control ability Protective buffer against negative consequences of dispositional vulnerabilities (Such as anxious rejection sensitivity) Negative Emotion Regulation - Interpersonal conflict Higher ability to delay reward Higher resiliency to rejection sensitivity In turn, less drug use, higher educational level, less aggression to peers Delay ability in preadolescent boys predicted reduced verbal and physical aggression Training self-control - Implementation strategies Connect general goals with specific implemention strategy: eg. rather than just 'I won't eat cookies', 'I won't buy cookies next time I go for coffee' - Distraction - Reconstrual (focus on 'cool' vs. 'hot' aspects of stimulus) - Identify type of psychological situation in which individuals experience difficulty in self-control - Extensive rehearsal, planning and generalisation strategies Limited model for self-control - Self-control allows people to achieve goals that they have set for themselves and to conform to rules and standards imposed by their social environment Ego Depletion - The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains - Depletion can occur after overriding prepotent responses, ignoring distractions and making choices - Theory assumes that we have a limited bank of self-control resources - Performing self-control diminishes these resources (like a fatigued muscle) - Has been demonstrated in: Decision-making Social rejection Executive functioning Ego Depletion Experiments - Sequential task paradigm Stage 1: ppts in depleting condition (performing self control task such as Stroop task) vs. control condition Stage 2: outcome task that requires self-control (working memory tasks, puzzles) - Worse performance generally found in depletion groups compared to control groups in the outcome task (stage 2) Baumeister et al (1998) Classical Ego depletion findings - Experiment 1: resist impulse to eat chocolate people gave up much faster in an impossible task afterwards - Experiment 2: deliberate choice to make a counterattitudinal speech people later gave up much faster in an impossible task - Experiment 3: affect regulation impaired performance on puzzles - Experiment 4: monitoring own behaviour and overriding rules led ppts to the default choice (instead of the active choice) - Eg. overall when people have to perform some task which depletes their self-control, they find it harder to exercise control on a later task Hagger et al (2010) Ego Depletion - Recent meta-analysis of 83 articles showed consistent and robust effects Preventing Ego Depletion Regular Training - Self-regulating regularly may reduce susceptibility to self-regulatory depletion Posture training (Muraven et al, 1998) Self-regulatory exercises (Gaillot et al, 2007) - These ppts persisted longer on a lab persistence task Challenges - Publication bias - Small study effects Majority of studies use small samples Inflated effect sizes - Potential p-hacking - Lack of clear understanding of potential moderator variables Lack of understanding of task characteristics and individual differences Lurquin et al (2016) Challenges to ego depletion theories - N = 200 (4 x the typical sample used in ego depletion experiments) - Depletion task: video viewing attention control (widely used, has shown effects in the past) - Outcome task: complex working memory span task (very demanding) - Preregisterd study hypotheses, detailed methods and procedures and the data analysis plan Results - No evidence of ego depletion - And no moderation by task difficulty - Ppts in the depletion condition were consistently the same as controls in performance, regardless of when the task was easier/harder Baumeister et al (1994) Important elements of successful self control - Standards Concepts of desired states Expectations, values, goals Standards need to be clear and well-defined Example: I want to exercise more vs. I want to exercise 30 mins per day Monitoring Important elements of successful self control - Monitoring of behaviour in relation to the set standard or goal - Keeping track helps exert self-control Example: keep an exercise or food log