Thursday, 18 June 2009
Mental effort as a finite resource is a fascinatingly useful idea in psychology and a great deal of my work relies on the depletion model. We have a limited amount of mental energy that is used up when we perform mental tasks and after a while our focus wanes, with that our performance decreases. What's more, it appears to take a long while to replenish this energy. There is a near perfect analogy with physical effort and fatigue: after an intensive football game I'm a sweaty and exhausted mess in dire need of a nice sit down. After a rest though, I'm right as rain.
Self-regulation, such as suppressing emotions, resisting an impulse, or trying not to think of a white bear, is a resource intensive mental activity. There's a wealth of literature to suggest that self-regulation results in physical changes in the body (increased blood pressure, faster pulse, general arousal increases) suggesting that it may even be physically demanding.
Once that resource dries up, what happens? Surely we can't indefinitely self-regulate any more than we can indefinitely exercise?
Muraven et al. hypothesise that 'after self-regulation in one sphere, self-regulation in other domains may not be as effective, because regulatory capacity is reduced.''
Their four studies in the paper support this:
1. Higher effort spent regulating emotions during an upsetting film predicted poorer handgrip duration (a physical self-regulation task)
2. People engaging in thought suppression (don't think of a white bear) give up in a following task of solving impossible anagrams quicker than those who haven't suppressed thoughts.
3. A check for study 2 to make sure that thought suppressors didn't give up because they found the anagrams harder due to interrupting thoughts of white bears (rebound effect). Thought suppressors couldn't hide expression enjoyment of SNL as effectively as another group having done maths problems. The rebound effect would suggest that thought suppressors would be distracted and so better perform on the task.
4. In autobiographical stories participants report regulation failure is more likely to occur when other regulation demands exist or while drunk. Expending high effort was associated with regulation success. There's no indication that any story about successful regulation involved alcohol...
They generally conclude that the results support the depletion model and further suggest that many different capacities; emotion control, thought suppression, physical endurance, and task persistence all draw from the same pool. Further to this, this pool is very limited as even quick experiments are enough to significantly deplete resources for a temporary time period. This is a real problem as Muraven et al. state:
Self-regulation, such as suppressing emotions, resisting an impulse, or trying not to think of a white bear, is a resource intensive mental activity. There's a wealth of literature to suggest that self-regulation results in physical changes in the body (increased blood pressure, faster pulse, general arousal increases) suggesting that it may even be physically demanding.
Once that resource dries up, what happens? Surely we can't indefinitely self-regulate any more than we can indefinitely exercise?
Muraven et al. hypothesise that 'after self-regulation in one sphere, self-regulation in other domains may not be as effective, because regulatory capacity is reduced.''
Their four studies in the paper support this:
1. Higher effort spent regulating emotions during an upsetting film predicted poorer handgrip duration (a physical self-regulation task)
2. People engaging in thought suppression (don't think of a white bear) give up in a following task of solving impossible anagrams quicker than those who haven't suppressed thoughts.
3. A check for study 2 to make sure that thought suppressors didn't give up because they found the anagrams harder due to interrupting thoughts of white bears (rebound effect). Thought suppressors couldn't hide expression enjoyment of SNL as effectively as another group having done maths problems. The rebound effect would suggest that thought suppressors would be distracted and so better perform on the task.
4. In autobiographical stories participants report regulation failure is more likely to occur when other regulation demands exist or while drunk. Expending high effort was associated with regulation success. There's no indication that any story about successful regulation involved alcohol...
They generally conclude that the results support the depletion model and further suggest that many different capacities; emotion control, thought suppression, physical endurance, and task persistence all draw from the same pool. Further to this, this pool is very limited as even quick experiments are enough to significantly deplete resources for a temporary time period. This is a real problem as Muraven et al. state:
'Many of the problems facing both individuals and society today, ranging from unprotected sexual behaviour to addiction to school underachievement, involve regulatory behaviour.'
Muraven, M., Tice, D.M., & Baumeister, R.F. (1998) Self control as a limited resource: Regulatory Depeltion Patterns. J. personality & social psychology 74(3), p774-789
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