The Effect Of Acute Aerobic Exercise On Self-control And Its Brain Mechanism

Self-control is the ability to overcome innate desire,habit or dominant behaviors tendencies,and maintain adaptive behavioral responses in order to achieve the long-term goals of the individual(Baumeister,Vohs,& Tice,2007).In the field of exercise and exercise psychology,researchers applied sequence paradigm or concomitance paradigm to investigate the influence of acute aerobic exercise on self-control and its brain mechanism.The sequence paradigm is to allow an individual to perform an acute aerobic exercise,and then perform a self-control task,while parallel paradigm refers to the two tasks of an individual performing acute aerobic exercise and self-control simultaneously.However,whether in sequence paradigm or parallel paradigm,the results of previous studies on acute aerobic exercise have inconsistent effects on self-control.On the level of theory,researchers put forward the inverted U hypothesis(Mc Morris & Graydon,2000),the cognitive-energy model(Audiffren,2009;Sanders,1983),reticular-activating hypofrontality model(RAH)(Dietrich,2003;Dietrich & Audiffren,2011)and the strength model of self-control(Baumeister,Vohs,& Tice,2007)to explain the relationship between acute exercise and self-control.Unfortunately,there is no theoretical model can perfectly explain the complex relationship between acute aerobic exercise and self-control.For example,in the sequence paradigm,the inverted U hypothesis cannot further explain how the high intensity exercise reduces self-control.Under the parallel paradigm,the cognitive-energy model and RAH cannot explain the positive effect of acute aerobic exercise on self-control.More importantly,there are some deficiencies in the experimental research in this field.For instance,in the study content,the dose effect of the intensity of acute aerobic exercise on various types of self-control was hardly discussed before.In the study design,previous studies have been less investigates the influence of acute aerobic exercise on self-control using sequential paradigm and parallel paradigm at the same time.In the study of brain mechanism,the brain mechanism of the influence of exercise intensity and time on self-control task was less discussed.Therefore,in order to solve the existing problems in the field,we carried out three studies(including 5 experiments in total),systematically investigated the influence of acute aerobic exercise on self-control and its brain mechanism.In the first research,the sequence paradigm was used to investigate the effect of acute aerobic exercise on self-control.Three experiments were carried out to examine the effects of exercise intensity on three types of self-control of cognition,emotion and behavior.The subjects were all undergraduates,and the sample sizes of three experiments were 81,71 and 72 respectively.The results showned that moderate intensity and low intensity exercise positively improve three types of self-control.High intensity exercise not only impaired cognitive self-control,but also promoted emotional self-control,and even did not affect behavioral self-control.In the second research,the parallel paradigm was used to investigate the effect of different exercise intensity and exercise time on self-control through the fourth experiment.The subjects were 78 undergraduates.The results found that in the early stage of exercise,high,moderate and small intensity aerobic exercise can improve self-control.In the late exercise stage,high exercise can reduce self-control,and small and medium intensity exercise can improve self-control respectively.fNIRS technology was used in the third research,by using sequential paradigm and parallel paradigm at the same time in the fifth experiment,we investigate the brain mechanism of different exercise intensity and duration on self-control.The subjects were 14 undergraduates.The results of sequence paradigm showed that high intensity exercise did not affect self-control,while small intensity exercise enhanced self-control.This behavior displayed synchronous with L-DLPFC activation and R-DLPFC brain activation pattern in prefrontal cortex.Intensive exercise can improve self-control in the early stage of exercise,but it will damage self-control in the late exercise stage,which is synchronous with the activation mode of R-DLPFC and R-PFA in prefrontal lobe.Based on the experimental results above,we proposed the hypothesis recovery of self-control to explain the dose effect sequence under the paradigm of acute aerobic exercise on the impact of self-control,and self-control spillover hypothesis to explain the parallel paradigm of acute aerobic exercise promotion the role of self-control.These two hypotheses can complement the existing theoretical perspectives and thus form a more perfect integration perspective to explain the complex relationship between acute aerobic exercise and self-control.