Action orientation overcomes the ego depletion effect

Dang, Junhua; Xiao, Shanshan; Yu-cai, Shi; Mao, Li

doi:10.1111/sjop.12184

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Moreover, an experimental study showed that action‐oriented people—compared with state‐oriented people—were quicker to mentally disengage from the devitalizing impact of a demanding situation (Schlinkert & Koole, in press, Study 2). These findings fit with the idea that action‐oriented people can draw upon a superordinate process of volitional control to insulate themselves from the depleting effects of demanding conditions (see also Dang, Xiao, Shi, & Mao, ; Gröpel, Baumeister, & Beckmann, ; Jostmann & Koole, ; see Koole et al, , for a review).…”

Section: The Empirical Domains Of Internalization Vitality and Flowsupporting

confidence: 73%

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self‐determination theory and personality systems interactions theory

Koole

Schlinkert

Maldei

et al. 2018

Journal of Personality

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One of the enduring missions of personality science is to unravel what it takes to become a fully functioning person. In the present article, the authors address this matter from the perspectives of self-determination theory (SDT) and personality systems interactions (PSI) theory. SDT (a) is rooted in humanistic psychology; (b) has emphasized a first-person perspective on motivation and personality; (c) posits that the person, supported by the social environment, naturally moves toward growth through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. PSI theory (a) is rooted in German volition psychology; (b) has emphasized a third-person perspective on motivation and personality; and (c) posits that a fully functioning person can form and enact difficult intentions and integrate new experiences, and that such competencies are facilitated by affect regulation. The authors review empirical support for SDT and PSI theory, their convergences and divergences, and how the theories bear on recent empirical research on internalization, vitality, and achievement flow. The authors conclude that SDT and PSI theory offer complementary insights into developing a person's full potential.

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Section: The Empirical Domains Of Internalization Vitality and Flowsupporting

confidence: 73%

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self‐determination theory and personality systems interactions theory

Koole

Schlinkert

Maldei

et al. 2018

Journal of Personality

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“…Finally, the current analysis also sheds light on mechanisms underlying individual differences in vulnerability to ego depletion. For instance, recent studies found that action-oriented individuals (vs. state-oriented individuals) could successfully overcome ego depletion (Dang, Xiao, Shi & Mao, 2015;Gr€ opel, Baumeister & Beckmann, 2014). Action orientation has been linked to effective goal maintenance under demanding situations (Jostmann & Koole, 2007), and our results may be taken to suggest that actionoriented individuals get over ego depletion through a powerful goal maintenance mechanism.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self‐control depletion impairs goal maintenance: A meta‐analysis

Dang

Björklund

Bäckström

2017

Scandinavian J Psychology

Self Cite

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Initial exertion of self-control has been suggested to impair subsequent self-regulatory performance. The specific cognitive processes that underlie this ego depletion effect have rarely been examined. Drawing on the dual-process theory of executive control (Engle & Kane, ; Kane & Engle, ), the current meta-analysis revealed that initial self-control exertion impairs participants' capacities of maintaining the task goal but its effect on capacities of resolving response competition is in need of further investigation. Our results are more consistent with recent theoretical views that consider ego depletion as a switch cost and a result arising from reduced motivation to engage in further self-control.

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“…Self-control can also be regarded as the ability of higher-order functions to modulate the activity of lower-level functions, where higher-order functions manifest themselves externally in complex behavior, adjusted according to the environmental needs, while lower-level functions are manifested in simple and stereotyped behaviors, not adjusted according to the demands of the environment (Roskies, 2010a ). Everyone exhibits a different degree of self-control compared to other individuals, and for each person the degree of self-control varies over time (Baumeister et al, 2006 ; Casey et al, 2011 ; Dang et al, 2015 ). The variability of self-control that is manifested in behavior and can be measured with the test has its base in neuronal functioning, which in turn depends on education and habits, external circumstances and the internal neuronal noise.…”

Section: Operazionalizing Measuring and Verifying: From The Action Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It

Lavazza

2016

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life. For centuries people have wondered how freedom is possible in a world ruled by physical determinism; however, reflections on free will have been confined to philosophy until half a century ago, when the topic was also addressed by neuroscience. The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. (1983), which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions taking place in decisions regarded as free and voluntary. Libet’s interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) seems to favor a sort of deflation of freedom (Soon et al., 2008). However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors (Schurger et al., 2016). This interpretation seems to bridge the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it (Roskies, 2010b), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. The article therefore, proposes to start from an operationalizable concept of free will (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases. This new way to conceptualize free will should be linked to the idea of “capacity”: that is, the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without moment by moment conscious control. The capacity index, which is also able to take into account the differences of time scales in decisions, includes reasons-responsiveness and is related to internal control, understood as the agent’s ownership of the mechanisms that trigger the relevant behavior. Cognitive abilities, needed for one to have capacity, might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Subsequently, a free will index would allow for the search of the underlying neural correlates of the capacity exhibited by people and the limits in capacity exhibited by each individual.

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Action orientation overcomes the ego depletion effect

Cited by 16 publications

References 31 publications

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self‐determination theory and personality systems interactions theory

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self‐determination theory and personality systems interactions theory

Self‐control depletion impairs goal maintenance: A meta‐analysis

Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It

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