Ego-Depletion And Its Elimination: The Function Of Positive Emotion

Self-regulation is centrally involved in many activities that hold the possibility to make people successful in life. Yet human self-regulation remains limited and sometimes ineffective. A broad range of human problems are often linked to self-regulatory failure. According to ego-depletion model, Baumeister and his colleagues proposed that self-regulation operates as a limited energy. The energy, which is akin to muscle strength, will become depleted after use and result in the further self-regulation breakdown. In recent years, Baumeister et al founded that the concept of regulatory depletion seemed too narrow. In the new formulation, self-regulation was grouped under the broader category of the self's executive function, and this limited resource was needed not only for self-regulation but also for all the self's executive function.At present, most of the researches which were based on the ego-depletion model merely focused on the issues of self-regulation in the field of personality and social psychology. However, the study about ego-depletion model in the field of cognition is rare. In addition, adult subjects were selected in most of previous researches, then what about the smaller children?Based on these considerations, 6-year primary school children subjects were used in the present study. In experiment 1, a dual-task paradigm was used to examination the impact of initial depletion task on the subsequent performance of working memory task.If ego-depletion will undermine the individual's working memory, then can this negative effect be counteracted by inducing positive emotion? Based on experiment 1, experiment 2 A aimed to investigate whether the negative effect of ego-depletion on working memory can be overcome by positive emotion induced through watching a comedy video.It is possible that positive emotion induced by different methods may produce different effect. Then, the purpose of experiments 2 B was to investigate the possibility that whether different positive emotion inducing methods have different beneficial effect.If positive emotions can counteract the ego-depletion effect on working memory, then what is the inner process? This question was the main concern in experiment 3. The results showed that:(1) Ego-depletion had a negative influence on working memory. At the state of ego-depletion, the individual's working memory capacity declined significantly. To the effect of ego-depletion on working memory, there was no remarkable gender difference.(2) The negative effect of ego-depletion on working memory could be counteracted by positive emotion induced by watching a comedy video or autobiographical memory.(3) The beneficial effect of positive emotion induced by different methods was equivalent.(4) The underlying mechanism by which positive emotion counteract ego-depletion was positive emotion replenished the resource that had been depleted by the initial task, rather than merely making individuals more motivated to continue self-regulating despite their depleted state.