Attention Control, Memory Updating, and Emotion Regulation Temporarily Reduce the Capacity for Self-Control

Abstract:
This research tested the hypothesis that initial efforts at executive control temporarily undermine subsequent efforts at executive control. Four experiments revealed that controlling the focus of visual attention (Experiment 1), inhibiting predominant writing tendencies (Experiment 2), taking a working memory test (Experiment 3), or exaggerating emotional expressions (Experiment 4) undermined performance on subsequent tests of working memory span, reverse digit span, and response inhibition, respectively. The results supported a limited resource model of executive control and cast doubt on competing accounts based on mood, motivation, or task difficulty. Prior efforts at executive control are a significant contextual determinant of the operation of executive processes.

There has been much discussion around a self-regulation model which claims that effortful control of attention diminishes the ability to perform future tasks. This point has implications for task/work performance across the course of the day, how you manage your behaviour to best conserve and utilise this resource and how one can go about protecting and renewing it. From a developmental perspective the emergence of traits such as the Big Five is likely to be largely determined by the ability to manage,monitor and over time manipulate ones natural levels of reactivity through self-regulation. This process has an analogue in the cognitive neuropsychology literature in the functioning of executive attention which is the overarching process managing a group of executive functions such as attention shifting, inhibition, planning, working memory etc. What this study shows is that exercising executive control- a process analagous to self-regulation- has knock on effects on essential capacities such as working memory and inhibition.

In the last post the relationship between inhibition on the Go-NoGo task and delay discounting was demonstrated. Following on from this and incorporating this finding we can say that engaging in self-regulation is likely to diminish our capacity to inhibit our behaviour on a subsequent task and that our current level of this resource is likely to impact on our judgements in regard to valuing the future. We are likely to become more myopic in the scenario where such resources are diminished. Loewenstein and O'Donoghue have been working for a number of years on a sophisticated model of behaviour which incorporates such insights.

Several posts have pointed to glucose regulation as a process which may be the physiological concomitant of this 'ego' or regulatory resource depletion. Oxygen and other chemicals have been proposed to fluctuate in time with this metaphorical willpower resource but evidence demonstrating this is not yet available, and preliminary analyses (PhD work) would indicate oxygen is not promising in this regard. However, what this study provides is an integration of the work on self-regulation aforemention and what is an obvious observation to anyone who has given participants a battery of neuropsychological tests in that the tests must be counterbalanced to remove the effect of a gradient of decreased performance across the tasks as they progress. These task ordering and also time on task effects are accounted for using the self-regulatory resource model which is useful as it provides a frame within which individual baseline differences and factors which promote resilience or vulnerability of this resource can be examined. The current model suggests that it acts 'as a muscle' and becomes more efficitent over time. The idea that our daily work and also our ability to regulate moods and present ourselves well is dependent on a resource which can be manipulated in various ways also opens the possibility for a lot of crosstalk between economics and psychology.

Schmeichel et al. (2007)

Adolescents’ performance on delay and probability discounting tasks: Age, intelligence, executive functioning, externalising behaviour

This study reflects the attempt to integrate delay discounting into existing psychological models around executive functioning, intelligence, and emotional regulation.

Abstract:
Healthy adolescents, ages 9–23, completed delay and probability discounting tasks and measures of verbal and non-verbal intelligence, executive functioning, and self-reported internalizing and externalizing behavior. Delay but not probability discounting decreased with age. Delay discounting was also associated with verbal intelligence and Go–NoGo and Iowa Gambling Task performance. Probability discounting was associated only with externalizing behavior. Findings conform to an accumulation of evidence that while delay and probability discounting may have some overlapping components, they also reflect some fundamentally different processes in this age group.

They found a nice correlation of .35 between delay discounting and errors of commission (responding on a no-go trial) indicating that the ability to inhibit a response is very much central to delay discounting. The authors are pointing to IQ as the main variable in accounting for differences in delay discounting as this is in line with the de Wit et al (2007) study which had a larger sample. For parsimony and methodological reasons I would have liked to have seen the Go-NoGo variable put into the regression before IQ as it was correlated to a greater extent with delay discounting and it is possible that it is tapping into a fundamental process which is central to the development and operation of intelligence. The discussion was framed completely around this contribution of IQ which may have been an artefact of what looked to me a biased regression procedure.

The finding in regard to IQ echoes some recent larger scale retrospective epidemiological studies showing that lower childhood IQ increases the chance of mortality in middle-age and that this is largely due to an increased likelihood of engaging persistently in health risk behaviours: Childhood IQ in relation to risk factors for premature mortality in middle-aged persons: the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s study. I wonder will Go-NoGo performance predict mortality in 40 years.. It's a terribly tedious task to complete for anyone who's had the opportunity but you have to consider the benefits of examining such a basic process in comparison to something like IQ which is such a broad concept that doesn't translate easily to theory-related neuronal processes unless you go through the medium of executive function..

Olson et al. (2007). Adolescents’ performance on delay and probabilitydiscounting tasks: Contributions of age, intelligence, executive functioning, and self-reported externalizing behavior