Preventive effect of implicit priming of self-awareness on self-control depletion / 中国心理卫生杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To explore whether implicit priming of self-awareness can prevent self-control depletion.Methods:Totally 60 college students volunteers were recruited,and were allocated pseudo-randomly and equally into the control group,the non-self-awareness priming group,and the self-awareness priming group,20 volunteers in each group.The scrambled sentence task was applied in implicit priming,the mental calculation task was used to induce self-control depletion indexed by task difficulty,the impulse to write down the intermediate answers,the number of response items and correct items,the handgrip test was used to measure self-control performance,and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) was used to measure affect.The self-control depletion,the handgrip time and the PANAS scores were compared among three groups.Results:There was no significant difference in task difficulty score,impulse score,the number of response items and correct items among the three groups (Ps ＞0.05).The group differences of the change of positive and negative affect before and after depletion were also not significant (Ps ＞0.05).After controlling the effect of the first handgrip time before depletion,the difference of the handgrip time after depletion between the control group and the non-self-awareness priming group was not significant (P ＞ 0.05).However,the handgrip time in the controI group and in the non-self-awareness group were both shorter than that in the self-awareness priming group [(69.2 ± 3.6) s,(71.1 ± 3.6) s vs.(81.9 ± 3.6) s,Ps ＜0.05].Conclusions:It suggests that implicit priming of self-awareness might hold promise in preventing self-control depletion.