The Role Of Savoring In Eliminating Ego-depletion Effect

Self-control is an indispensable factor for all individuals who want to be successful.How to help individual to improve their ability of self-control in recent research.The study found that all the behaviors which require self-control should share the same limited resources.Once the resources are consumed,people will enter the state of ego-depletion and out of control at the same time.Only the resources recover can people control themselves successfully.As a consequence,with the purpose of helping people accomplish the subsequent task which require self-control better,researchers had investigated some methods to eliminate ego depletion from different point of view,for example,glucose supplement,positive emotion induction,motivation increase,exemplar priming and so on.From the perspective of positive psychology,this research proposed savoring(positive focus)can eliminate ego depletion by means of changing the cognitive and promoting positive emotion when people are engaging the task which require self-control.This research had two sections:First,validating whether the "sub-dominant hand" writing task can induce the ego depletion effect.Second,investigating whether savoring can eliminate the ego depletion effect.In study 1,Using the dual-task paradigm,participants in experiment condition were asked to coping the specified article with their "sub-dominant hands"(left hands),meanwhile participants in control condition were asked to coping the same article with their dominant hands(right hands).Then,all the participants were asked to finish the same Stroop task.The result showed that relative to the participants in control condition,participants in experiment condition perform better in the Stroop task.This illustrated that the "sub-dominant hand" writing task will consume the self-control resource so that individuals can’t do well in the subsequent task.This result validated the "sub-dominant hand" writing task can induce the ego depletion effect.Based on the study 1,study 2 insert savoring(positive focus)before(study 2A)or after(study 2B)the "sub-dominant hand" writing task.The results indicate that:In the study 2A,there is no significant difference in Stroop task performance between the savoring group and the control group.In the study 2B,the accuracy of Stroop task among participants in savoring condition was higher than that among participants in control condition.This illustrated that inserting savoring before the "sub-dominant hand" writing task do not work,whereas inserting savoring after the "sub-dominant hand" writing task can compensate the consumed self-control resources.In the other words,savoring can compensate the ego-depletion.