Weakening self-control biases the emotional evaluation of appetitive cues

Abstract

Exerting self-control in a first task weakens self-control in a second completely unrelated task (ego-depletion). It has been proposed that ego-depletion increases approach motivation which would amplify positive emotions to appetitive cues. Here we investigated the effect of the depletion of cognitive self-control on the subsequent emotional evaluation of appetitive cues. Participants of the depletion group copied a text omitting frequent letters and thereby exerting self-control to inhibit automated writing habits. Participants of the control group just copied the text. In a subsequent task participants had to rate valence and arousal of their responses to neutral vs. positive pictures of humans, animals, food, or sceneries. Ego-depletion caused more positive valence ratings of neutral pictures and lower arousal ratings of positive pictures. The findings do not support the notion that ego-depletion increases approach motivation in general. Rather they suggest that-without a specific motivational context-depletion of cognitive self-control differentially alters the immediate emotional evaluation of appetitive cues.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.