The Effect Of Unconscious Ego-depletion On Risk Decision-making

Self-control ability not only play an important role on human survival and evolution but also has a significant meaning for the individual’s development and success.When people lack self-control resources will lead self depletion,thereby affecting people’s cognition,emotion and behavior.Combing through the literature we found that previous studies have two shortcomings:first, the research on self depletion mostly stay on the study of consciousness,there is little research to investigate the phenomenon and effects of unconscious material which brings ego depletion; Second,if the resource is diminished by a task involving self-control, achievement in subsequent self-control tasks will be impaired,but when the subsequent self-control task specific to the risk decision-making tasks,the relationship between self depletion and risk decision has failed to get the results consistent.Based on the above issues,this study choosing college students as subjects,using the behavior experiment as study carrier,using masked version Stroop priming task as the unconscious self-control task.firstly,we discussed the exists of unconscious self-control and unconscious self depletion(study 1);Then further to explore the effect of unconscious ego-depletion on risk decision-making,in order to clarify the relationship between unconscious ego-depletion and risk decision-making (study 2);Finally, we examined whether the positive emotion can overcome the negative influence of unconscious ego-depletion (study 3).The results showed that:(1) When the priming stimulus presentation time is 29ms, the same stimulus reaction time and error rate were significantly lower than the stimulus is not consistent,which expressed that in the unconscious condition, Stroop effect can be observed whether in the reaction time or the error rate,it showed the existence of unconscious control initiated self- depletion.(2) In unsolvable tracing puzzle tasks,persistence time on the task of conflict group is significantly less than the conflict free subjects, the results showed that the unconscious self-control initiated ego-depletion.(3) In the risk decision task, the main effect of framework is significantly on the risk decision making score,depletion group main effect is also significant,the interaction effect of them is not significant,namely under the framework of the benefit,the risk decision score was significantly lower than the depletion frame,risk decision score of depletion group were significantly lower than those of control group,illustrates the frame effect exists in risk decision;subjects of unconscious self depletion tend to be more risk averse; no moderating effect of unconscious self depletion on the framing effect was found.(4) In the unconscious self depletion conditions, positive emotion group was tested in the risk decision task were remarkably higher than neutral emotion group/which shows that positive emotion can relieve self depletion effect,and this effect isn’t influenced by different frame.