Effects of task switching and emotional stimuli on memory selectivity.

It is not always easy to attend to task-relevant information and ignore task-irrelevant distractions. We investigated the impact of task switching and emotional stimuli on goal-oriented selective attention and subsequent recognition memory. Results from two experiments with different stimulus materials (words and images) found that the memory advantage of task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information (i.e. memory selectivity) was attenuated on task switch trials and emotional distractor trials. In contrast, task repetitions and emotional targets improved memory selectivity. These results suggest that both task switching and emotional distractors divert limited cognitive resources needed for selective attention and selective encoding. Emotional targets likely supported selective encoding through the process of attentional prioritisation of emotional stimuli. The effects of task switching and emotional stimuli did not interact, suggesting distinct mechanisms, although this conclusion remains tentative.

Working memory capacity relates to reduced negative emotion in daily life.

Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the ability to maintain information in short-term memory while attending to the immediate environment, and has been associated with emotional states. Yet, research on the link between WMC and emotion in naturalistic settings is growing and inconsistencies have been observed. In the current study (N = 109), we directly replicated the procedures of a prior experience sampling study (Garrison & Schmeichel, 2022), which found that higher WMC attenuates the relationship between stressful events in daily life and negative affect. We measured WMC in the laboratory and then measured the occurrence of stressful events, momentary emotional states, and coping responses to stress several times a day for six days. Higher WMC was associated with reduced momentary negative emotion, but this relationship did not depend on the occurrence of a stressful event. Exploratory analyses found that higher WMC was associated with a greater likelihood of planning as a coping response to stress and greater number of coping strategies reported per stressful event. However, coping did not mediate the link between WMC and momentary negative emotion. Our results contribute to the robustness and ecological validity of the link between WMC and reduced negative emotion in daily life.

Electrocortical Effects of Acetaminophen during Emotional Picture Viewing, Cognitive Control, and Negative Feedback.

Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may have psychological effects, such as reducing social and emotional pain. The current study (N = 173) used electroencephalography (EEG) to extend past research on acetaminophen. Healthy undergraduate students (64.7% women, age M = 18.15, SD = 3.33) were randomly assigned to ingest 1,000 mg of acetaminophen or placebo before completing emotional picture viewing (n = 143), a flanker task (n = 69), and a probabilistic learning task (n = 143) while EEG was recorded. (Sample sizes used for the analyses of each task differ from the total N due to data loss.) We observed standard event-related potentials (ERPs), including emotion-modulated late positive potentials during picture viewing and feedback-related negativity during feedback on the probabilistic learning task. We also observed standard error-related and conflict-related ERPs in the flanker task but could not adequately assess acetaminophen's effect on flanker ERPs due to excessive data loss. Acetaminophen did not alter any of the ERPs, in contrast to predictions based on prior research. Exploratory analyses revealed that acetaminophen reduced the relationship between trait behavioral inhibition system sensitivity and emotion-modulated late positive potentials. Together these findings suggest that a standard dose of acetaminophen did not reliably alter neural indicators of emotional or feedback processing. Instead, preliminary findings from our study suggested that a more nuanced relationship may exist between acetaminophen and individual differences in emotional processing, although this latter finding calls for further replication.

A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect.

We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project (k = 36; N = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result (d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4 times more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically significant effect (d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.

Correction to: After-effects of self-control: The reward responsivity hypothesis.

The article After-effects of self-control: The reward responsivity hypothesis, written by Nicholas J. Kelley, Anna J. Finley, Brandon J. Schmeichel was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 23 January 2019 with open access.

After-effects of self-control: The reward responsivity hypothesis.

Exercising self-control can be phenomenologically aversive. Insofar as individuals strive to maintain a positive emotional state, one consequence of exercising self-control may thus be a temporarily tuning toward or amplification of reward-related impulses (perhaps arising to countermand the aversive feelings that stem from self-control). Reward-relevant after-effects are relatively underappreciated in self-control research. In the current paper, we review theory and research pertaining to the idea that exercising self-control increases reward responsivity. First, we review theoretical models of self-control focusing on the relationship between control systems and reward systems. Second, we review behavioral studies regarding the effects of exercising self-control on subsequent reactivity to food, money, drugs, and positive emotional images. Third, we review findings from functional neuroimaging and electroencephalographic research pertaining to the reward responsivity hypothesis. We then call for additional research to integrate how, when, and under what circumstances self-control exertion influences reward processing. Such an endeavor will help to advance research and theory on self-control by offering a more precise characterization of the dynamic interactions between control systems and reward systems.

Effects of emotional content on working memory capacity.

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity (WMC), which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We tested competing hypotheses in a preregistered experiment (N = 297). The emotional enhancement hypothesis predicts that emotional stimuli attract attention and additional processing resources relative to neutral stimuli, thereby making it easier to encode and store emotional information in WMC. The emotional impairment hypothesis, by contrast, predicts that emotional stimuli interfere with attention control and the active maintenance of information in working memory. Participants completed a common measure of WMC (the operation span task; Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. [1989]. Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127-154) that included either emotional or neutral words. Results revealed that WMC was reduced for emotional words relative to neutral words, consistent with the emotional impairment hypothesis.

The Influence of Agreeableness and Ego Depletion on Emotional Responding.

OBJECTIVE: Agreeable individuals report more intense withdrawal-oriented negative emotions across aversive situations. Two studies tested the hypothesis that self-regulatory depletion (i.e., ego depletion) moderates the relationship between trait Agreeableness and negative emotional responding. METHOD: Ego depletion was manipulated using a writing task. Emotional responding was measured with startle eye-blink responses (Study 1, N = 71) and self-reported valence, arousal, and empathic concern (Study 2, N = 256) during emotional picture viewing. Trait Agreeableness was measured using a questionnaire. RESULTS: In Study 1, Agreeableness predicted especially large startle responses during aversive images and especially small startles during appetitive images. After exercising self-control, the relationship between startle magnitudes and Agreeableness decreased. In Study 2, Agreeableness predicted more empathic concern for aversive images, which in turn predicted heightened self-reported negative emotions. After exercising self-control, the relationship between Agreeableness and empathic concern decreased. CONCLUSIONS: Agreeable individuals exhibit heightened negative emotional responding. Ego depletion reduced the link between Agreeableness and negative emotional responding in Study 1 and moderated the indirect effect of Agreeableness on negative emotional responding via empathic concern in Study 2. Empathic concern appears to be a resource-intensive process underlying heightened responding to aversive stimuli among agreeable persons.

Approach motivation and cognitive resources combine to influence memory for positive emotional stimuli.

Inspired by the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, the current research tested the hypothesis that persons higher in trait approach motivation process positive stimuli deeply, which enhances memory for them. Ninety-four undergraduates completed a measure of trait approach motivation, viewed positive or negative image slideshows in the presence or absence of a cognitive load, and one week later completed an image memory test. Higher trait approach motivation predicted better memory for the positive slideshow, but this memory boost disappeared under cognitive load. Approach motivation did not influence memory for the negative slideshow. The current findings support the idea that individuals higher in approach motivation spontaneously devote limited resources to processing positive stimuli.

Stopping anger and anxiety: evidence that inhibitory ability predicts negative emotional responding.

Research has begun to suggest that cognitive ability contributes to emotional processes and responses. The present study sought novel evidence for this hypothesis by examining the relationship between individual differences in the capacity for inhibitory control and responses to a common emotion-induction procedure involving autobiographical memories. Participants first completed a stop-signal task to measure inhibitory control and then underwent an anger, anxiety, or neutral emotion induction. Performance on the stop-signal task predicted emotional responses such that participants with poorer inhibitory control reported larger increases in anger following the anger induction and larger increases in anxiety across emotion induction conditions, relative to better inhibitors. These results suggest that individual differences in cognitive ability may influence the intensity of emotional states induced by common laboratory methods of emotion induction.

Mortality salience biases attention to positive versus negative images among individuals higher in trait self-control.

Death is inevitable. One way people cope with awareness of death is to focus on the positive things in life. Consistent with this idea, reminders of personal mortality have been found to increase optimism and tune attention towards positive information. The current research tested the hypothesis that persons higher in trait self-control are especially likely to attend to positive (versus negative) stimuli under mortality salience (MS). Participants completed a measure of trait self-control, contemplated their own mortality or a control topic, and then viewed positive and negative affective images while their gaze patterns were recorded. MS increased the attention to positive (versus negative) images among participants higher in trait self-control, whereas those lower in trait self-control exhibited a non-significant trend in the opposite direction. Thus, participants higher in trait self-control showed a positivity bias after contemplating death, which may help explain why they tend to enjoy more positive outcomes in life.

The Self Choice Effect When Choosing for Others.

People tend to remember information from which they chose better than information assigned to them-a pattern known as the self-choice effect. The present studies tested the hypothesis that choosing for another person also improves memory. Studies 1a and 1b found that choosing for self and choosing for others both enhance memory compared with having no choice. Study 2 found that choosing for others boosts memory regardless of the closeness of the other. Study 3 found no memory benefit of making easy or difficult choices for others, contrary to predictions. And in Study 4 choosing for others enhanced memory only for chosen items. A mini meta-analysis combining all studies supported the conclusion that choosing for others enhances memory on a par with choosing for oneself. These results suggest that the effects of choice on memory signify something other than self-reference, which we presume to be substantially reduced when choosing for others.

Beyond simple utility in predicting self-control fatigue: a proximate alternative to the opportunity cost model.

The opportunity cost model offers an ultimate explanation of ego depletion that helps to move the field beyond biologically improbable resource accounts. The model's more proximate explanation, however, falls short of accounting for much data and is based on an outdated view of human rationality. We suggest that our own process model offers a better proximate account of self-control fatigue.

Authentic for Thee But Not for Me: Perceived Authenticity in Self-Control Conflicts.

Is self-control authentic? Across several hypothetical scenarios, participants perceived impulsive actions as more authentic for others (Study 1a) but self-control as more authentic for themselves (Study 1b). Study 2 partially replicated this asymmetry. Study 3 accounted for behavior positivity because self-control was typically the more positive action in the previous studies. Study 4 minimized the influence of positivity by framing the same behaviors as either impulsive or controlled; impulsive actions were deemed more authentic than self-control, but only for other people. An internal meta-analysis controlling for behavior positivity revealed that (a) more positive behaviors are more authentic, and (b) impulsive actions are more authentic than self-controlled actions, especially for others. This actor-observer asymmetry suggests that, even in the face of a strong tendency to perceive positive actions as authentic, there exists a competing tendency to view others' impulsive actions as more authentic than self-control.

Getting over it: Working memory capacity and affective responses to stressful events in daily life.

Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the capacity to maintain information in short-term storage while processing other information. WMC has been related to higher-order cognitive functions like language comprehension and goal maintenance, and a growing body of research implicates WMC in emotion processes as well. The current research tested the preregistered hypothesis that individual differences in WMC relate to affective states following daily stressors. We measured WMC in 92 participants using both neutral and emotional WMC tasks and assessed momentary affect, the occurrence of stressful events, and responses to those events using brief experience sampling surveys 5 times per day across 6 days. Results revealed that more stressful events related to higher momentary negative affect, but less so among participants higher in WMC. This result is consistent with the view that WMC plays a role in emotion regulation. Exploratory analyses yielded suggestive clues as to why individuals higher in WMC may experience reduced negative affect following daily stressors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of mental fatigue on effort allocation: Modeling and estimation.

Mental fatigue is usually accompanied by drops in task performance and reduced willingness for further exertion. A value-based theoretical account may help to explain such negative effects. In this view, mental fatigue influences perceived costs and rewards of exerting effort. However, no formal mathematical framework has yet been proposed to model and quantitatively estimate the effects of mental fatigue on subjective evaluations of effort expenditure, under possibly imperfect self-perceptions of internal fatigue states. We proposed a mathematical framework to model human cognitive effort allocations, assuming mental fatigue states are partially observable with semi-Markov dynamics. We modeled effort allocation decisions as a means to the goal of maximizing cumulative subjective values over a given time horizon. We developed an estimation method to identify subjective values and the hidden dynamics of mental fatigue, which can in future work be applied to self-reports, psychophysiological indices, and behavioral outcomes associated with fatigue. The modeling and estimation method was tested using a simulated n-back task under a free-choice paradigm, with model parameters fine-tuned from past studies. The proposed approach was able to recapitulate task performance and task engagement patterns observed under mental fatigue. This work advances a reward/cost trade-off account for explaining the exertion of mental effort and suggests new avenues for both theoretically and empirically relevant understandings of how cognitive operations are affected by mental fatigue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-affirmation and self-control: affirming core values counteracts ego depletion.

Research has established that acts of self-control deplete a resource required for subsequent self-control tasks. The present investigation revealed that a psychological intervention-self-affirmation-facilitates self-control when the resource has been depleted. Experiments 1 and 2 found beneficial effects of self-affirmation on self-control in a depleted state. Experiments 3 and 4 suggested that self-affirmation improves self-control by promoting higher levels (vs. lower levels) of mental construal. Self-affirmation therefore holds promise as a mental strategy that reduces the likelihood of self-control failure.

Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: the roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects.

Three studies tested the roles of implicit and/or explicit self-esteem in reactions to mortality salience. In Study 1, writing about death versus a control topic increased worldview defense among participants low in implicit self-esteem but not among those high in implicit self-esteem. In Study 2, a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In Study 3, mortality salience increased the endorsement of positive personality descriptions but only among participants with the combination of low implicit and high explicit self-esteem. These findings indicate that high implicit self-esteem confers resilience against the psychological threat of death, and therefore the findings provide direct support for a fundamental tenet of terror management theory regarding the anxiety-buffering role of self-esteem.

Aftereffects of Self-Control on Positive Emotional Reactivity.

According to the process model of ego depletion, exercising self-control causes shifts in motivation and attention that may increase positive emotional reactivity. In an initial study and a preregistered replication, participants exercised self-control (or not) on a writing task before reporting their emotional responses to positive, negative, and neutral images. In Study 1 ( N = 256), we found that exercising (vs. not exercising) self-control increased positive emotional responses to positive images among more extroverted individuals. In Study 2 ( N = 301), we found that exercising self-control increased positive reactivity independent of extroversion. These findings support the process model of ego depletion and suggest that exercising self-control may influence responding that does not entail self-control (i.e., positive emotional reactivity)-an outcome that is not anticipated by the limited resource model of self-control.

Ego Depletion Reduces Attention Control: Evidence From Two High-Powered Preregistered Experiments.

Two preregistered experiments with more than 1,000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors on Stroop tasks (Experiment 1) and the Attention Network Test (Experiment 2) compared with participants who did not exercise self-control on the initial writing task. The depletion effect on response times was nonsignificant. A mini meta-analysis of the two experiments found a small ( d = 0.20) but significant increase in error rates in the controlled writing condition, thereby providing evidence of poorer attention control under ego depletion. These results, which emerged from preregistered experiments in large samples of participants, represent some of the most rigorous evidence yet of the ego depletion effect.