The Different Effects Of Emotional And Cognitive Depletion On Inhibitory Control And Aggressive Behavior

Teenagers are in the accelerated stage of physical and psychological development,and it is often difficult for them to control their cognition and emotions when facing difficulties and conflicts.All these will cause certain depletion of psychological resources and lead to many abnormal behaviors.The timely recovery after the depletion of psychological resources is crucial to the individual's physiological and psychological development.Based on ego depletion theory,this study mainly explored whether there was a difference between the resource recovery effect of positive emotion and glucose on emotional depletion and cognitive depletion,so as to verify whether the emotional depletion and cognitive depletion represented by anger rumination consume psychological resources in the same field.This study was conducted on adolescent students,including three experiments.Study 1 used a single-factor between-participant design.We induced the anger of the participants by anger videos,and then randomly divided the participants into anger-rumination group,low-cognitive depletion group,and high-cognitive group through writing tasks and difficult / easy multiplication tasks.The aim of study 1 was to investigate the effects of 97 adolescents with different depletion types on inhibitory control reduction(the correct inhibition rate of NoGo stimulus in the pre-test-the correct inhibition rate in the post-test in the GNG paradigm)and the effect of aggressive behavior(the average duration of noise selected by participants in the CRT task).The results showed that,compared with the low-cognitive depletion group,the reduction of inhibitory control in the anger-rumination group and the high-cognitive depletion group were significantly larger,the aggressive behavior was significantly more,and there was no significant difference between the later two groups.Study 2used a 2(depletion types: anger-rumination,high-cognitive depletion)×2(positive emotion: yes,no)two factors between-participant design.We induced the anger of the participants by anger videos,and then randomly divided the participants into 4 groups to investigate the effects of positive emotion and depletion types on inhibitory control and aggressive behavior in 135 adolescents.The results found that positive emotions could effectively restore the psychological resources of the depletion,the ability ofinhibitory control and reduce the aggressive behavior,and it had a better effect of resource recovery on the high-cognitive depletion group.Study 3 used a 2(depletion types: anger-rumination,high-cognitive depletion)×2(drinks: glucose,placebo)two factors between-participant design.We induced the anger of the participants by anger videos,and then randomly divided the participants into 4 groups to investigate the effects of glucose and depletion types on inhibitory control and aggressive behavior in116 adolescents.The results showed that after the depletion,glucose could effectively restore the psychological resources and the ability of inhibitory control,and it had a better effect on the high-cognitive depletion group.However,there was no significant difference in the reduction of the aggressive behavior of glucose to the participants with different depletion types.Based on the above 3 studies,the following conclusions could be drawn:(1)Emotional depletion and cognitive depletion may consume psychological resources in different areas;(2)Both positive emotion and glucose can effectively recover the psychological resources of individuals,and compared with cognitive depletion,emotional depletion caused by anger-rumination may be more difficult to recover.