Inhibition is a major form of self-regulation. As such, it depends on self-awareness and comparing oneself to standards and is also susceptible to fluctuations in willpower resources. Ego depletion ...is the state of reduced willpower caused by prior exertion of self-control. Ego depletion undermines inhibition both because restraints are weaker and because urges are felt more intensely than usual. Conscious inhibition of desires is a pervasive feature of everyday life and may be a requirement of life in civilized, cultural society, and in that sense it goes to the evolved core of human nature. Intentional inhibition not only restrains antisocial impulses but can also facilitate optimal performance, such as during test taking. Self-regulation and ego depletion— may also affect less intentional forms of inhibition, even chronic tendencies to inhibit. Broadly stated, inhibition is necessary for human social life and nearly all societies encourage and enforce it.
•Inhibition is crucial for human social life. Both automatic and intentional forms are common.•Self-regulation depends on limited energy. Depleted willpower fosters disinhibited behavior.•Inhibition can facilitate performance, such as among test anxious students.•Desires feel stronger when willpower is depleted, suggesting that chronic inhibition is weakened.•Despite challenges and updates, the limited energy model of self-regulation remains the best fit.
The capacity for self-control may underlie successful labor-force entry and job retention, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. Analyzing unemployment data from two nationally ...representative British cohorts (N = 16,780), we found that low self-control in childhood was associated with the emergence and persistence of unemployment across four decades. On average, a 1-SD increase in self-control was associated with a reduction in the probability of unemployment of 1.4 percentage points after adjustment for intelligence, social class, and gender. From labor-market entry to middle age, individuals with low self-control experienced 1.6 times as many months of unemployment as those with high self-control. Analysis of monthly unemployment data before and during the 1980s recession showed that individuals with low self-control experienced the greatest increases in unemployment during the recession. Our results underscore the critical role of self-control in shaping life-span trajectories of occupational success and in affecting how macroeconomic conditions affect unemployment levels in the population.
Social psychology's current crisis has prompted calls for larger samples and more replications. Building on Sakaluk's (in this issue) distinction between exploration and confirmation, I argue that ...this shift will increase correctness of findings, but at the expense of exploration and discovery. The likely effects on the field include aversion to risk, increased difficulty in building careers and hence more capricious hiring and promotion policies, loss of interdisciplinary influence, and rising interest in small, weak findings. Winners (who stand to gain from the mooted changes) include researchers with the patience and requisite resources to assemble large samples; incompetent experimenters; destructive iconoclasts; competing subfields of psychology; and lower-ranked journals, insofar as they publish creative work with small samples. The losers are young researchers; writers of literature reviews and textbooks; flamboyant, creative researchers with lesser levels of patience; and researchers at small colleges. My position is that the field has actually done quite well in recent decades, and improvement should be undertaken as further refinement of a successful approach, in contrast to the Cassandrian view that the field's body of knowledge is hopelessly flawed and radical, revolutionary change is needed. I recommend we retain the exploratory research approach alongside the new, large-sample confirmatory work.
Motivation theories have tended to focus on specific motivations, leaving open the intellectually and scientifically challenging problem of how to construct a general theory of motivation. The ...requirements for such a theory are presented here. The primacy of motivation emphasizes that cognition, emotion, agency, and other psychological processes exist to serve motivation. Both state (impulses) and trait (basic drives) forms of motivation must be explained, and their relationship must be illuminated. Not all motivations are the same, and indeed it is necessary to explain how motivation evolved from the simple desires of simple animals into the complex, multifaceted forms of human motivation. Motivation responds to the local environment but may also adapt to it, such as when desires increase after satiation or diminish when satisfaction is chronically unavailable. Addiction may be a special case of motivation—but perhaps it is much less special or different than prevailing cultural stereotypes suggest. The relationship between liking and wanting, and the self-regulatory management of motivational conflict, also require explanation by an integrative theory.
Many researchers report that people have an optimistic bias when making predictions, but sometimes cautious realism is found. One resolution is that future thinking has two steps: The desired outcome ...is imagined first, followed by a sobering reflection on potential difficulty of getting there. Five experiments supported this two-step model (USA and Norway; N = 3213; 10,433 judgments), showing that intuitive predictions are more optimistic than reflective predictions. Participants were randomly assigned to rely on fast intuition under time-pressure or slow reflection after time-delay. In Experiment 1, participants in both conditions thought positive events were more likely to happen to them than to other people and that negative events were less likely, replicating the classic finding of “unrealistic optimism”. Crucially, this optimistic tendency was significantly stronger in the intuitive condition. Participants in the intuitive condition also relied more on heuristic problem-solving (CRT). Experiments 2–3 found that participants in the intuitive condition thought they were at lower health risk than participants in the reflective condition. Experiment 4 provided a direct replication, with the additional finding that intuitive predictions were more optimistic only for oneself (and not about the average person). Experiment 5 failed to identify any intuitive difference in perceived reasons for success versus failure, but observed intuitive optimism in binary prediction of a future exercise habit. Experiment 5 also found suggestive evidence for a moderating role of social knowledge: Reflective predictions about oneself became more realistic than intuitive predictions only when the person's base-rate beliefs about other people were fairly accurate.
Research on authenticity frequently invokes notions of true self, but is there such thing? The question must be answered twice, given frequent confusion and conflation of self with self-concept. ...Summarizing and integrating themes from authenticity research as evident in this special issue, I draw these conclusions. True self-concepts are more plausible than genuinely true selves, if the latter are independent entities distinct from actual behavior and experience. Yet rather than a single true self-concept, people have multiple nonfalse ones, none of which is entirely true. Among these, the pragmatically most important is the desired reputation, given the social-cultural orientation of humankind. Desired reputation is more a guide and goal than a reality, but successes and failures at achieving that reputation will produce welcome and unwelcome feelings that are likely reported as feeling authentic and inauthentic (respectively). Understanding authenticity in this way solves some of the perennial problems that beset research and theory on authenticity, especially positive distortion and external rather than internal orientation.
How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control to resist their ...desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual framework integrating desire strength, conflict, resistance (use of self-control), and behavior enactment. A sample of 205 adults wore beepers for a week. They furnished 7,827 reports of desire episodes and completed personality measures of behavioral inhibition system/behavior activation system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity, trait self-control, perfectionism, and narcissistic entitlement. Results suggest that desires are frequent, variable in intensity, and largely unproblematic. Those urges that do conflict with other goals tend to elicit resistance, with uneven success. Desire strength, conflict, resistance, and self-regulatory success were moderated in multiple ways by personality variables as well as by situational and interpersonal factors such as alcohol consumption, the mere presence of others, and the presence of others who already had enacted the desire in question. Whereas personality generally had a stronger impact on the dimensions of desire that emerged early in its course (desire strength and conflict), situational factors showed relatively more influence on components later in the process (resistance and behavior enactment). In total, these findings offer a novel and detailed perspective on the nature of everyday desires and associated self-regulatory successes and failures.
In the present study, we used experience sampling to measure desires and desire regulation in everyday life. Our analysis included data from 205 adults, who furnished a total of 7,827 reports of ...their desires over the course of a week. Across various desire domains, results revealed substantial differences in desire frequency and strength, the degree of conflict between desires and other goals, and the likelihood of resisting desire and the success of this resistance. Desires for sleep and sex were experienced most intensively, whereas desires for tobacco and alcohol had the lowest average strength, despite the fact that these substances are thought of as addictive. Desires for leisure and sleep conflicted the most with other goals, and desires for media use and work brought about the most self-control failure. In addition, we observed support for a limited-resource model of self-control employing a novel operationalization of cumulative resource depletion: The frequency and recency of engaging in prior self-control negatively predicted people's success at resisting subsequent desires on the same day.
•The prevalence rate of clinically significant depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms for hospital discharged patients are respectively 19%, 10.4%, and 12.4%.•Disease severity, living with children, ...death of family member, and perceived discrimination are risk factors for PTSD.•Disease severity, living with children, death of family member from COVID, higher total number of symptoms after discharge, and perceiving self has having been target of discrimination are risk factors for clinically significant anxiety.•Higher educational level, living with children, smoking, higher disease severity, higher total number of symptoms after discharge, and perceived discrimination are risk factors for clinically significant depression.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic can have a profound impact on the mental health of patients who survived the illness. However, little is known about the prevalence rate of mental health disorders among hospital discharged COVID-19 patients and its associated factors. A cross-sectional survey of hospital discharged patients was conducted April 11–22, 2020 in Wuhan, China (where the pandemic began). 675 participants completed the survey, including 90 (13.3%) medical staff (physicians and nurses who had been ill). We used Fisher's exact test and multivariable logistic regression methods to explore the risk factors associated with mental health problems (anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms associated with COVID-19 hospitalization). Adverse mental health effects of COVID-19 are evident after discharge from the hospital, with sleep difficulties highlighted as a central issue. As we found that perceived discrimination was a central predictor of mental illness, preventing and addressing social stigma associated with COVID-19 may be crucial for improving mental health for recovered patients.
The Strength Model of Self-Control Baumeister, Roy F.; Vohs, Kathleen D.; Tice, Dianne M.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
12/2007, Letnik:
16, Številka:
6
Journal Article
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Self-control is a central function of the self and an important key to success in life. The exertion of self-control appears to depend on a limited resource. Just as a muscle gets tired from ...exertion, acts of self-control cause short-term impairments (ego depletion) in subsequent self-control, even on unrelated tasks. Research has supported the strength model in the domains of eating, drinking, spending, sexuality, intelligent thought, making choices, and interpersonal behavior. Motivational or framing factors can temporarily block the deleterious effects of being in a state of ego depletion. Blood glucose is an important component of the energy.
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