Lihua Mao

Adapting to an initial self-regulatory task cancels the ego depletion effect

The resource-based model of self-regulation provides a pessimistic view of self-regulation that people are destined to lose their self-control after having engaged in any act of self-regulation because these acts deplete the limited resource that people need for successful self-regulation. The cognitive control theory, however, offers an alternative explanation and suggests that the depletion effect reflects switch costs between different cognitive control processes recruited to deal with demanding tasks. This account implies that the depletion effect will not occur once people have had the opportunity to adapt to the self-regulatory task initially engaged in. Consistent with this idea, the present study showed that engaging in a demanding task led to performance deficits on a subsequent self-regulatory task (i.e. the depletion effect) only when the initial demanding task was relatively short but not when it was long enough for participants to adapt. Our results were unrelated to self-efficacy, mood, and motivation.

Action orientation overcomes the ego depletion effect

It has been consistently demonstrated that initial exertion of self-control had negative influence on peoples performance on subsequent self-control tasks. This phenomenon is referred to as the ego depletion effect. Based on action control theory, the current research investigated whether the ego depletion effect could be moderated by individuals action versus state orientation. Our results showed that only state-oriented individuals exhibited ego depletion. For individuals with action orientation, however, their performance was not influenced by initial exertion of self-control. The beneficial effect of action orientation against ego depletion in our experiment results from its facilitation for adapting to the depleting task.

The ego could be depleted, providing initial exertion is depleting : A preregistered experiment of the ego depletion effect

The ego depletion effect has been examined by over 300 independent studies during the past two decades. Despite its pervasive influence, recently this effect has been severely challenged and asserted to be a fake. Based on an up-to-date meta-analysis that examined the effectiveness of each frequently used depleting task, we preregistered the current experiment with the aim to examine whether there would be an ego depletion effect when the Stroop task is used as the depleting task. The results demonstrated a significant ego depletion effect. The current research highlights the importance of the depleting task’s effectiveness. That is to say, the “ego” could be “depleted,” but only when initial exertion is “depleting.”

Individual differences in dopamine level modulate the ego depletion effect.

Initial exertion of self-control impairs subsequent self-regulatory performance, which is referred to as the ego depletion effect. The current study examined how individual differences in dopamine level, as indexed by eye blink rate (EBR), would moderate ego depletion. An inverted-U-shaped relationship between EBR and subsequent self-regulatory performance was found when participants initially engaged in self-control but such relationship was absent in the control condition where there was no initial exertion, suggesting individuals with a medium dopamine level may be protected from the typical ego depletion effect. These findings are consistent with a cognitive explanation which considers ego depletion as a phenomenon similar to switch costs that would be neutralized by factors promoting flexible switching.

When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning

Recent research has shown that poverty directly impeded cognitive functions because the poor could be easily distracted by monetary concerns. We argue that this effect may be limited to functions relying on working memory. For functions that rely on proceduralized processes however, monetary concerns elicited by reminding of financial demands would be conducive rather than harmful. Our results supported this hypothesis by showing that participants with lower income reached the learning criterion of the information-integration categorization task faster than their more affluent counterparts after reminding of financial demands.

Temporal perception in visual processing as a research tool

Accumulated evidence has shown that the subjective time in the sub-second range can be altered by different factors; some are related to stimulus features such as luminance contrast and spatial frequency, others are processes like perceptual grouping and contextual modulation. These findings indicate that temporal perception uses neural signals involved in non-temporal feature processes and that perceptual organization plays an important role in shaping the experience of elapsed time. We suggest that the temporal representation of objects can be treated as a feature of objects. This new concept implies that psychological time can serve as a tool to study the principles of neural codes in the perception of objects like “reaction time (RT).” Whereas “RT” usually reflects the state of transient signals crossing decision thresholds, “apparent time” in addition reveals the dynamics of sustained signals, thus providing complementary information of what has been obtained from “RT” studies.

A New Account of the Conditioning Bias to Out-Groups

Funding. This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program 2015CB351800).

Further Support for the Motivational Explanation of Self-Other Similarity Judgment Asymmetry

Self-other similarity judgment asymmetry refers to the tendency of people to judge others to be more similar to themselves than they judge themselves to be similar to others. This effect can be explained with both a cognitive model (Tversky, 1977) and a motivational explanation (Codol, 1987). Recent research has provided initial evidence for the core assumption of the motivational explanation and tested a hypothesis that can only be derived from the motivational explanation. The present study aims to provide further evidence for the motivational explanation by testing another hypothesis derived from it that goes beyond the cognitive model. Our results show that participants with a strong need for uniqueness tended to exhibit self-other asymmetry, but only with respect to attributes that were difficult to falsify.