C. Nathan DeWall

Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor.

The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and (c) initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments. Self-control requires a certain amount of glucose to operate unimpaired. A single act of self-control causes glucose to drop below optimal levels, thereby impairing subsequent attempts at self-control.

Social exclusion impairs self-regulation.

Six experiments showed that being excluded or rejected caused decrements in self-regulation. In Experiment 1, participants who were led to anticipate a lonely future life were less able to make themselves consume a healthy but bad-tasting beverage. In Experiment 2, some participants were told that no one else in their group wanted to work with them, and these participants later ate more cookies than other participants. In Experiment 3, excluded participants quit sooner on a frustrating task. In Experiments 4-6, exclusion led to impairment of attention regulation as measured with a dichotic listening task. Experiments 5 and 6 further showed that decrements in self-regulation can be eliminated by offering a cash incentive or increasing self-awareness. Thus, rejected people are capable of self-regulation but are normally disinclined to make the effort.

How Emotion Shapes Behavior: Feedback, Anticipation, and Reflection, Rather Than Direct Causation

Fear causes fleeing and thereby saves lives: this exemplifies a popular and common sense but increasingly untenable view that the direct causation of behavior is the primary function of emotion. Instead, the authors develop a theory of emotion as a feedback system whose influence on behavior is typically indirect. By providing feedback and stimulating retrospective appraisal of actions, conscious emotional states can promote learning and alter guidelines for future behavior. Behavior may also be chosen to pursue (or avoid) anticipated emotional outcomes. Rapid, automatic affective responses, in contrast to the full-blown conscious emotions, may inform cognition and behavioral choice and thereby help guide current behavior. The automatic affective responses may also remind the person of past emotional outcomes and provide useful guides as to what emotional outcomes may be anticipated in the present. To justify replacing the direct causation model with the feedback model, the authors review a large body of empirical findings.

Social exclusion decreases prosocial behavior.

In 7 experiments, the authors manipulated social exclusion by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. Social exclusion caused a substantial reduction in prosocial behavior. Socially excluded people donated less money to a student fund, were unwilling to volunteer for further lab experiments, were less helpful after a mishap, and cooperated less in a mixed-motive game with another student. The results did not vary by cost to the self or by recipient of the help, and results remained significant when the experimenter was unaware of condition. The effect was mediated by feelings of empathy for another person but was not mediated by mood, state self-esteem, belongingness, trust, control, or self-awareness. The implication is that rejection temporarily interferes with emotional responses, thereby impairing the capacity for empathic understanding of others, and as a result, any inclination to help or cooperate with them is undermined.

Does Social Exclusion Motivate Interpersonal Reconnection? Resolving the "Porcupine Problem"

Evidence from 6 experiments supports the social reconnection hypothesis, which posits that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds with new sources of potential affiliation. Threat of social exclusion led participants to express greater interest in making new friends, to increase their desire to work with others, to form more positive impressions of novel social targets, and to assign greater rewards to new interaction partners. Findings also suggest potential boundary conditions to the social reconnection hypothesis. Excluded individuals did not seem to seek reconnection with the specific perpetrators of exclusion or with novel partners with whom no face-to-face interaction was anticipated. Furthermore, fear of negative evaluation moderated responses to exclusion such that participants low in fear of negative evaluation responded to new interaction partners in an affiliative fashion, whereas participants high in fear of negative evaluation did not.

Alone but feeling no pain : Effects of social exclusion on physical pain tolerance and pain threshold, affective forecasting, and interpersonal empathy

Prior findings of emotional numbness (rather than distress) among socially excluded persons led the authors to investigate whether exclusion causes a far-reaching insensitivity to both physical and emotional pain. Experiments 1-4 showed that receiving an ostensibly diagnostic forecast of a lonesome future life reduced sensitivity to physical pain, as indicated by both (higher) thresholds and tolerance. Exclusion also caused emotional insensitivity, as indicated by reductions in affective forecasting of joy or woe over a future football outcome (Experiment 3), as well as lesser empathizing with another persons suffering from either romantic breakup (Experiment 4) or a broken leg (Experiment 5). The insensitivities to pain and emotion were highly intercorrelated.

Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain Behavioral and Neural Evidence

Pain, whether caused by physical injury or social rejection, is an inevitable part of life. These two types of pain—physical and social—may rely on some of the same behavioral and neural mechanisms that register pain-related affect. To the extent that these pain processes overlap, acetaminophen, a physical pain suppressant that acts through central (rather than peripheral) neural mechanisms, may also reduce behavioral and neural responses to social rejection. In two experiments, participants took acetaminophen or placebo daily for 3 weeks. Doses of acetaminophen reduced reports of social pain on a daily basis (Experiment 1). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure participants’ brain activity (Experiment 2), and found that acetaminophen reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions previously associated with distress caused by social pain and the affective component of physical pain (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula). Thus, acetaminophen reduces behavioral and neural responses associated with the pain of social rejection, demonstrating substantial overlap between social and physical pain.

Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938-2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI☆

Two cross-temporal meta-analyses find large generational increases in psychopathology among American college students (N=63,706) between 1938 and 2007 on the MMPI and MMPI-2 and high school students (N=13,870) between 1951 and 2002 on the MMPI-A. The current generation of young people scores about a standard deviation higher (average d=1.05) on the clinical scales, including Pd (Psychopathic Deviation), Pa (Paranoia), Ma (Hypomania), and D (Depression). Five times as many now score above common cutoffs for psychopathology, including up to 40% on Ma. The birth cohort effects are still large and significant after controlling for the L and K validity scales, suggesting that the changes are not caused by response bias. The results best fit a model citing cultural shifts toward extrinsic goals, such as materialism and status and away from intrinsic goals, such as community, meaning in life, and affiliation.

Self-regulatory failure and intimate partner violence perpetration

Five studies tested the hypothesis that self-regulatory failure is an important predictor of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration. Study 1 participants were far more likely to experience a violent impulse during conflictual interaction with their romantic partner than they were to enact a violent behavior, suggesting that self-regulatory processes help individuals refrain from perpetrating IPV when they experience a violent impulse. Study 2 participants high in dispositional self-control were less likely to perpetrate IPV, in both cross-sectional and residualized-lagged analyses, than were participants low in dispositional self-control. Study 3 participants verbalized more IPV-related cognitions if they responded immediately to partner provocations than if they responded after a 10-s delay. Study 4 participants whose self-regulatory resources were experimentally depleted were more violent in response to partner provocation (but not when unprovoked) than were nondepleted participants. Finally, Study 5 participants whose self-regulatory resources were experimentally bolstered via a 2-week training regimen exhibited less violent inclinations than did participants whose self-regulatory resources had not been bolstered. These findings hint at the power of incorporating self-regulation dynamics into predictive models of IPV perpetration.

Depletion Makes the Heart Grow Less Helpful: Helping as a Function of Self-Regulatory Energy and Genetic Relatedness

Often people are faced with conflict between prosocial motivations for helping and selfish impulses that favor not helping. Three studies tested the hypothesis that self-regulation is useful for managing such motivational conflicts. In each study, depleted self-regulatory energy reduced willingness to help others. Participants who broke a habit, relative to participants who followed a habit, later reported reduced willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios (e.g., donating food or money; Studies 1 and 3). Controlling attention while watching a video, relative to watching it normally, reduced volunteering efforts to help a victim of a recent tragedy— but drinking a glucose drink undid this effect (Study 2). Depleted energy reduced helping toward strangers but it did not reduce helping toward family members (Study 3). Helping requires self-regulatory energy to manage conflict between selfish and prosocial motivations—a metabolically expensive process—and thus depleted energy reduces helping and increased energy (glucose) increases helping.