The Effect Of Different Disturbing Factors On College Students' Self-control Resource

The motivation of self-control is the strongest among all the motivations ofhumankind. As an individual, one is always doing his best to overcome the feeling ofbeing out of control, and enhancing his ability to forecast and control things.Self-control, in Kopp(1982)'s opinion, is the ability to obey social expectation whenlack of outer supervision. In other words, is to actively adjust one's behavior to makeit match the social expectation and one's self value. Self-control can trigger or inhibita particular behavior, including inhibiting impulse, resisting temptation, delayingsatisfaction, making and completing plan and adapt ting behavior in social situations.Self-control is closely related to inhibitory control, executive function and so on.Limited energy theory believes that self-control can be divided into state self-controland characteristics self-control. The study of the mechanism college students'self-control can help them to resist undesirable temptations and to make a long-termlife planning, therefore promoting individual growth and personal improvement.Besides, this study will make achievement which can be applied to education andclinical practice.This study is based on limited energy theory and executive function theory ofBaumeiste and Maruave, using a combination of questionnaires and experiments toexplore self-control. First, using self-control questionnaire prepared by Tangney (2004)to investigate self-control of college students, and then selected high and low groupsbased on scores. In empirical study, a two-stage task paradigm is adopted. In fist stage,the subjects did some mathematics judgment, so their self-control is consumed; int themiddle, the condensed state of mind scale (POMS) test was tested after the loss ofself-control resources, to test their emotional state. Experiment1is2(high and lowgroup of self-control) x2(whether or not to control oneself) between subjects design.Experiment2is2(high, low self-control) x3(weak, moderate, strong interference).Experiment1preliminarily explore whether or not self-control resource is consumedin successively task, and to what degree it is consumed. Experiment2brings in interference strength variable, and reveals that how much the self-control of subjectswas consumed under the effect of self-control level and interference strength,.The main conclusions are listed below:(1)The self-control level of college students is a bit below the middle level ingeneral, and all dimensions are relatively balanced. Self-control is irrelevant to sexand discipline, and increase with the grade.(2)Self-control has little spreading activation, but should be more dimmed aslimited resource, and will be consumed after self-control is used. Such consumptionwill weaken executive function.(3)Self-control resource is different from attention resource. The former ismainly reflected in successively tasks while the latter is mainly reflected indistribution of tasks.(4)Self-control is different among individuals more or less, and such differencelies in both characteristics and states. One with high level self-control has sense ofresisting interference automatically and spontaneously, while low self-control levelindividuals have little sense of self-control. Different self-control level individualshave little difference in themselves, but after some consumptions of self-control, highlevel self-control individuals will have strong executive function than low levelself-control individuals. At the same time, consumption of self-control can lead toemotional changes.(5) Different interference strength has different effect in the consumption ofself-control resource. Generally speaking, interference affects low level self-controlindividuals more than those of high level, but when the strength of interferencesexceed a certain point, self-control becomes invalid. That is to say, whether or not onecan resist temptation is not only related to one's self-control level, but is also relatedto temptation.