Almost every one of us knows the experience of falling short of one's own resolutions,
despite having the intention to behave differently. In dual-process models human behavior is
proposed to be a result of reciprocal activity of an impulsive and a reflective system with
the impulsive system being fast, associative, and mostly unconscious, while the activity of
the reflective system is slow, rule-based and relies on cognitive resources. Hence, people
are more prone to rely on the associative system if cognitive resources are diminished or
temporarily unavailable. Such a state of low mental resources has been linked to various
detrimental effects such as impulse buying, stereotyping, unhealthy food choices, aggression,
as well as impaired cognitive performance in general and is referred to as ego-depletion.
According to ego-depletion theory self-control functions like a muscle and activities that
heavily rely on the exertion of self-control successively exhaust this limited resource.
Lately, some critical concerns questioning the magnitude of ego-depletion effects or its
existence altogether have been raised. Most recent meta-analytical findings resolved most of
the uncertainty, however, and stressed the importance of the paradigm used to deplete
cognitive resources with emotion suppression videos being best suited to induce a state of
ego-depletion.
Therefore, an emotional video, showing sequences of a surgery will be used in the present
research in order to manipulate the amount of cognitive resources available. While
participants in the experimental group are asked to suppress any emotions while watching the
video, the control group is requested to simply watch the video attentively.
The word-stem completion task is an implicit aggression measure that asks participants to
complement word-stems with the assumption being that the more aggressive solutions a person
generates the more aggressive that person is.
The experiment will use a sequential-task paradigm with half of the 60 participants being
randomly assigned to the ego-depletion condition. After watching the emotional video,
participants in both groups will be requested to complete the word-stem completion task, an
aggression implicit association test, as well as a multi-source interference task.
Furthermore, trait aggression and the amount of subjective emotion, experienced while
watching the video, will be assessed as potential moderators.
It is expected that participants in the ego-depletion group will score higher on implicit
aggression measures (word-stem completion task and implicit association task) and perform
worse on the multi-source interference task, which measures cognitive performance.
Participants will be told that the experiment seeks to understand the relationship between
emotional videos and cognition and creativity. At the end of the study, participants will be
debriefed about the actual goal of the study and will receive monetary compensation for their
participation.