The Effects Of Emotion Induced By Music On Ego Depletion

Self-control represents a kind of capacity that individuals inhibit instinctual impulses, desires and emotions, and replace these unconscious impulses using a rational way. Self-control and human lives are closely related. Individuals with good self-control ability can often succeed in their lives and careers. However, self-control failures could also cause a lot of individual and social problems. Baumeister(1998)presented energy model on self-control to explain the reason for the failure.This model believes that self-control relies on and consumes a finite energy resource. When individuals complete a self-control task, self-control energy will decrease and be in a state of deprivation, which is called "ego depletion" by Baumeister, leading to individuals’ poor performance of subsequent self-control tasks. Focus of current research is how to overcome the negative effect of ego depletion. On the basis of previous research, this study tries to inspect influences of different emotions on ego depletion.The first research is focused on effects of different types of emotions on ego depletion. First of all, all testers are asked to complete “crossing the ‘e’ task” and “writing with non-dominat hand” task, by which testers’ failure level could be under control. Then use music to induce different emotion states. Result showed that under the state of failure, difference on twice handgrip stamina tasks of positive emotion group was significantly less than that of negative emotion group and resting group. However, under non-failure state, all three groups showed no significant differences on difference of twice handgrip stamina tasks, indicating that, only under failure state can positive emotions reduce effects brought by ego depletion, while it is not able to enhance the ability of individual self-control.In addition,this research also from the angle of energy failure level of emotion induced by music and self control to study. The second research takes failure level and emotion state as independent variables, and reaction time on incongruent trails in Stroop task as dependent variables, then it does investigation of regulation of positive emotions on ego depletion under different failure levels. Result found that under moderate failure level positive emotion group performed significantly better than resting group. Under serious failure level, there were no significant difference between two groups. As a conclusion, energy is the key to self-control. With serious lack of energy, decline of self-control performance is inevitable.In short, through two research this paper systematically and in detail discussed the validity of the emotion inducing way of music, directly proved the influence of music-evoked emotions and the limitation of the effects of positive emotion to ego depletion. Again these studies provide favorable support for energy model of self-control, and bring new thoughts and ideas for the future improvement for negative impact by ego depletion.