The Effect Of Anxiety On Inhibition And Shifting Function:The Moderating Effect Of Ego Depletion

In the field of competitive sports,high anxiety has become an invisible killer for athletes' performance.According to the attentional control theory(attentional control theory,Eysenck,Derakshan,Santos,& Calvo,2007),anxiety interferes with an individual's attention control ability,and then affects the operation performance.And a recent study(Englert,Zwenmer,Bertram,2015)found that enough self-control resources can act as a buffer and have moderating effects.Such research also provides a new way of thinking for this study.With the combination of attentional control theory and self-control strength model(Baumeister,Vohs,Tice,2007),we can predict that state anxiety interferes with inhibition and shifting function,and self-control resources have moderating effects.The pilot study explored the ego-depletion method of E-crossing for Chinese participants,which was rearranged from the classic English E-crossing task and required participants to remove the most commonly used stroke "horizontal" in Chinese characters to induce the ego-depletion state of suppressing habitual reaction.The results showed that the ego-depletion group had higher levels of perceived task difficulty,degree of efforts and self-control.Experiment 1 examined the effects of state anxiety on inhibition function of attentional control,and the moderating effects of self-control resources.We used noise,electric shock and task performance to set high pressure conditions and induce the high state of anxiety.Participants were randomly assigned into depletion group and non-depletion group.After the depletion manipulation,participants completed antisaccade tasks in different state anxiety conditions to obtain inhibition function indicators: latency of first correct saccade and error rate.The results showed that state anxiety interfered with inhibition function(Under the high state anxiety,the latency of saccade was higher).When self-control resources were abundant,the negative effects of anxiety on inhibition function were reduced(In ego-depletion group,the latency of saccade was higher under high anxiety condition).Experiment 2 examined the effects of state anxiety on shifting function of attention control,and the moderating effects of self-control resources.We used noise,electric shock and task performance to set high pressure conditions and induce the high state of anxiety.Participants were randomly assigned into depletion group and non-depletion group.After depletion manipulation,participants completed mixed anti-saccade tasks in different state anxiety conditions to obtain switching function indicators: saccade latency and error rate switch cost.The results showed that state anxiety interfered with shifting function(Under the high state anxiety condition,the switch cost of latency was higher than that in the low anxiety condition).When self-control resources were abundant,the negative impact of anxiety on shifting function was reduced(In ego-depletion group,the switch cost of latency was higher under the high anxiety condition).Conclusions: 1)The results supported the hypothesis of attentional control theory.State anxiety interferes with inhibition and shifting function.Therefore,the high level of anxiety interferes with attention control ability of athletes.2)The results supported the prediction of the integration of attentional control theory and self-control strength model.Ego-depletion has moderating effect between anxiety and attention control function.3)This study suggested that athletes should not only pay attention to the anxiety level,but also pay more attention to the prevention or compensation of self-control resources in daily training and competition to ensure that the normal performance of athletes in the game.