| The current project examined the relationship between attention and both transient and chronic self-control. In two experiments, depletion of self-control resources was manipulated with a demanding attentional control task, and then both depleted and non-depleted participants completed a semantic priming task and a self-report measure of self-control. The priming task assessed both automatic priming effects (spreading of activation) driven by semantic relatedness of primes and targets and strategic priming effects driven by the expectedness of targets. Further, strategic priming effects were separated into facilitation of expected targets and inhibition of unexpected targets. The amount of time between the onset of the prime and the onset of the target (stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA) also was manipulated to assess the timecourse of these processes. Experiment 1 included SOA's of 250ms and 2000ms; Experiment 2 included SOA's of 400, 700, and 1000ms. This design and range of SOA's allowed an assessment of how individual differences in self-control and depletion manipulations influence the operation of various aspects of attention (spreading activation, strategic facilitation, and strategic inhibition). Across two studies, depletion did not impair any attentional processes, as measured by the priming effects. However, the self-control measure was associated positively with strategic facilitation effects, and this correlation was limited to 2000ms SOA trials. At shorter SOA's, self-control had no impact on strategic facilitation effects. The results thus suggest that, at an individual differences level, self-control is closely tied to the ability to maintain strategic facilitation across relatively long periods of time, not the ability to initiate strategic facilitation, per se. Implications for self-control theory are discussed as well as the potential bearing these results could have on interventions of self-control. |
