Ego-depletion, a psychological phenomenon in which participants are less able to engage in self-control after prior exertion of self-control, has become widely popular in the scientific community as well as in the media. However, considerable debate exists among researchers as to the nature of the ego-depletion effect, and growing evidence suggests the effect may not be as strong or robust as t...

Research on ego-depletion suggests that the ability to self-regulate one s behavior is limited: Exerting self-control on an initial task reduces performance on a subsequent task that also requires self-control. Two experiments tested whether forming implementation intentions could prevent ego-depletion and/or offset the effects of ego-depletion. Experiment 1 found that participants who formed i...

Research has shown that repeated exercise of self-control leads to impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, a phenomenon labelled ego depletion. The current research investigates the influence of automatic processes on self-control performance. Study 1 shows that activation of persistence leads to stable self-control performance and may help to overcome effects of ego depletion. I...

This study investigated the effect of ego–depletion on the automatic and controlled components of stereotype–based responses. Participants engaged in a depleting task for either a short or a long period of time. They then performed a weapon identification task, which served as a measure of race stereotyping. Analyses guided by the L.L. Jacoby’s (1991) process dissociation procedure indicated th...

One important line of self-control research concerns the phenomenon known as ego-depletion, the negative effect of performing a self-control task (Task 1) on performance on a subsequent self-control task (Task 2). Although a 2010 meta-analysis reported a moderate effect size (d = 0.62) for this phenomenon (Hagger et al., 2010), its replicability has since come under scrutiny with the publicatio...

Self-control is defined as individuals' capacity to alter, modify, change, or override impulses, desires, and habitual responses (Baumeister, 2002; Muraven et al., 2005). Capacity for self-control is important and adaptive. Without it, we would be " slaves " to habits and impulses and unable to engage in sustained, goal-directed behavior. Loss of self-control has been shown to be related to num...

Exerting self-control in a first task weakens self-control in a second completely unrelated task (ego-depletion). It has been proposed that ego-depletion increases approach motivation which would amplify positive emotions to appetitive cues. Here we investigated the effect of the depletion of cognitive self-control on the subsequent emotional evaluation of appetitive cues. Participants of the d...

Article history: Received 2 September 2015 Received in revised form 5 November 2015 Accepted 9 November 2015 Available online 11 November 2015 Our research aimed at disentangling the underlying processes of the adverse relationship between regulatory job stressors and ego depletion. Specifically, we analyzed whether state anxiety and self-control effort would mediate the within-person relations...

Implicit skill learning occurs incidentally and without conscious awareness of what is learned. However, the rate and effectiveness of learning may still be affected by decreased availability of central processing resources. Dual-task experiments have generally found impairments in implicit learning, however, these studies have also shown that certain characteristics of the secondary task (e.g....