Does state self-control depletion predict relationship functioning and partner aggression? An ecological momentary assessment study of community couples.

Intimate relationship functioning depends upon the ability to accommodate one's partner and to inhibit retaliatory and aggressive impulses when disagreements arise. However, accommodation and inhibition may be difficult when self-control strength is weak or depleted by prior exertion of self-control. The present study considered whether state self-control depletion prospectively predicts male and female self-reports of anger with partner and arguing with partner. Consistent with the I3 Model (Finkel, 2014, Adv Exp Soc Psychol, 49, 1-104), we also considered whether the association between elevated anger and arguing (i.e., instigation) and partner aggression was stronger when state self-control (i.e., inhibition) was depleted or among people high in negative urgency. In this ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, heavy drinking married and cohabiting heterosexual couples (N = 191) responded to three randomly signaled reports each day for 30 days. Depletion predicted anger and arguing with partners both cross-sectionally and prospectively for men and women. However, after controlling for prior levels of anger and arguing, these effects were diminished, and supplemental analyses revealed that anger and arguing with partner predicted subsequent depletion. Anger and arguing were strongly associated with concurrent reports of partner aggression perpetration and victimization (verbal and/or physical). However, neither state self-control depletion nor negative urgency moderated these effects. Overall, results suggest a modest impact of depletion on daily couple functioning as well as a potential cyclical effect of arguing on depletion.

The Role of Past and Current Medical Use on Nonmedical Use of Prescription Drugs among College Students: Exploring Same-Drug and Cross-Drug Class Associations.

Background: Understanding the role that medical use of prescription drugs plays in nonmedical use of prescription drugs can inform prevention efforts. In order to understand fully the potential risk that medical use of prescription drugs conveys for nonmedical use of prescription drugs, the current study explored (a) the simultaneous associations between the medical use of several classes of prescription drugs with current nonmedical use of the same and other prescription drug classes, and (b) whether the associations depended upon past or current medical use. Methods: Data came from a cross-sectional survey of 1686 college students, which assessed past and current medical use and current nonmedical use of stimulants, sedatives/anxiolytics, and opioid analgesics. Results: Logistic regression analyses revealed that both past and current medical use of sedatives/anxiolytics and opioid analgesics predicted the current nonmedical use of the same drug class, whereas past medical use of stimulants predicted the current nonmedical use of stimulants. In addition, current medical use of stimulants predicted current nonmedical use of sedatives/anxiolytics and past medical use of sedatives/anxiolytics predicted current nonmedical use of opioid analgesics. Conclusions: This study provides a broader examination than past research of simultaneous same-drug class and cross-drug class associations between medical and nonmedical prescription drug use, as well as the role of past and current medical use in these associations. Overall, the results suggest that efforts to prevent nonmedical use of a prescription drug class should move beyond targeting only those who have or who are using the same drug class medically.

Mental Work Requires Physical Energy: Self-Control Is Neither Exception nor Exceptional.

The brain's reliance on glucose as a primary fuel source is well established, but psychological models of cognitive processing that take energy supply into account remain uncommon. One exception is research on self-control depletion, where debate continues over a limited-resource model. This model argues that a transient reduction in self-control after the exertion of prior self-control is caused by the depletion of brain glucose, and that self-control processes are special, perhaps unique, in this regard. This model has been argued to be physiologically implausible in several recent reviews. This paper attempts to correct some inaccuracies that have occurred during debate over the physiological plausibility of this model. We contend that not only is such limitation of cognition by constraints on glucose supply plausible, it is well established in the neuroscience literature across several cognitive domains. Conversely, we argue that there is no evidence that self-control is special in regard to its metabolic cost. Mental processes require physical energy, and the body is limited in its ability to supply the brain with sufficient energy to fuel mental processes. This article reviews current findings in brain metabolism and seeks to resolve the current conflict in the field regarding the physiological plausibility of the self-control glucose-depletion hypothesis.

University student perceptions about the motives for and consequences of nonmedical use of prescription drugs (NMUPD).

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the current study was to increase qualitative understanding of student motives for and consequences associated with nonmedical use of prescription drugs. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty-one students participated in eight focus groups between April and November 2013. METHODS: Students described prescription drugs commonly used for nonmedical reasons, as well as the motives for and consequences associated with their use. Data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. RESULTS: Students reported stimulants as the most commonly used prescription drug for nonmedical reasons, least expensive, and easiest to obtain on campus, followed by benzodiazepines. Opioids were less commonly used, more expensive, and difficult to acquire. Motives and consequences varied by prescription drug class. CONCLUSIONS: Our qualitative findings extend previous research by suggesting differences in students' perceived motives for using and consequences associated with the different classes of prescription drugs. These findings provide implications for the development of preventive interventions.

Understanding maladaptive responses to rejection: Aggression with an audience.

Logically, responding aggressively to rejection is maladaptive because one is unlikely to seek a relationship with an aggressor. We predict that when concealed, the illogical aggressive response to rejection is more likely, whereas when the rejected individuals' aggressive responses are perceived as public, the aggressive acts may be reduced. Participants were rejected by others (Experiment 1) or were either accepted or rejected during an online ball-tossing game (Experiment 2) and were then given an opportunity to aggress publicly or privately. Across experiments, when the opportunity to aggress was made public, rejected participants exhibited less aggressive behavior. When concerned about the perception of their public aggressive responses by others, rejected individuals' aggressive responses diminished compared with those whose actions were private. Crucially, this extended to aggression visible only to neutral others, suggesting that effects cannot solely be due to fear of retribution.

Nonmedical use of prescription drugs and related negative sexual events: Prevalence estimates and correlates in college students.

The present study of college students investigated (a) the prevalence of nonmedical use of three classes of prescription drugs (stimulants, anxiolytics/sedatives, analgesics), (b) the prevalence of negative sexual events (NSE) associated with any nonmedical use of prescription drugs (NMUPD), and (c) a set of correlates of NSE. The specific NSE were sexual aggression victimization and perpetration, and regretted sex. The correlates of the NSE were sex, race/ethnicity, year in school, psychological symptoms, alcohol use, illegal drug use, and NMUPD. Participants were 509 (254 females, 255 males) randomly-selected college students who reported any NMUPD. The majority (76.2%) of the sample reported ever using stimulants, 38.9% reported ever using anxiolytics/sedatives, and 40.9% reported using analgesics. During NMUPD, 14.3% of the students reported regretted sex, 7.1% of female students reported sexual victimization, and 6.3% of male students reported perpetrating sexual aggression. Multiple logistic regression analyses indicated that anxiolytic/sedative use (Adj. OR=1.99; 95% CI=1.51-2.62) was positively associated with regretted sex, whereas anxiolytic/sedative use (Adj. OR=1.79; 95% CI=1.01-3.16) and psychological symptoms (Adj. OR=1.06; 95% CI=1.02-1.10) were positively associated with sexual victimization. Illegal drug use was positively associated with perpetrating sexual aggression (Adj. OR=4.10; 95% CI=1.21-13.86). These findings suggest that among these college students, NMUPD-associated NSE were not uncommon, and primarily associated with anxiolytic/sedative use. Given the academic, physical, and psychological implications associated with NSE, research needs to further explore the causal nature of these relations.

The role of implicit affective responses and trait self-control in ego resource management.

Exertion of self-control requires reliance on ego resources. Impaired performance typically results once those resources have been depleted by previous use. Yet the mechanism behind the depletion processes is little understood. Beliefs, motivation, and physiological changes have been implicated, yet the source behind these remains unknown. We propose that implicit may form the fundamental building blocks that these processes rely upon to operate. Implicit affective responses to energy may trigger management of ego resources after depletion. Findings suggest that inhibitory trait self-control may interact with the depletion effect, indicating the importance of taking individual differences in chronic availability of ego-resources into account. After depletion, individuals high in trait self-control may be less motivated to conserve remaining resources than those low in self-control. This mechanism may also help explain the conservation of resources observed when expecting multiple tasks requiring self-control.

Rude and inappropriate: the role of self-control in following social norms.

Following social norms to avoid deviant or socially inappropriate behavior may require self-control. This was tested in two experiments that experimentally manipulated individuals' level of self-control strength. In the first experiment, individuals whose self-control capacity was depleted were more likely to misrepresent how many problems they solved and work after being told to stop while working on a timed test. These same results were found in individuals low in trait self-control. This was especially true when the certainty of getting caught was low. In the second experiment, depleted individuals were ruder to the experimenter than nondepleted participants. The results have implications for understanding how self-control contributes to normative behavior.

Practicing self-control lowers the risk of smoking lapse.

Recent research has suggested that practicing small acts of self-control can lead to an improvement in self-control performance. Because smoking cessation requires self-control, it was hypothesized that a treatment that builds self-control should help in quitting smoking. A total of 122 smokers either practiced small acts of self-control for 2 weeks before quitting smoking or practiced a task that increased their awareness of self-control or feelings of confidence, without exercising self-control. Their smoking status was assessed using daily telephone calls and biochemically verified. Individuals who practiced self-control remained abstinent longer than those who practiced tasks that did not require self-control. Supplemental analyses suggested that the increased survival times were a product of building self-control strength and were not produced by changes in feelings that practicing should help in cessation, effort exerted on the practice task, or thinking more about self-control while practicing.

Emotion differentiation as resilience against excessive alcohol use: an ecological momentary assessment in underage social drinkers.

Some people are adept at using discrete emotion categories (anxious, angry, sad) to capture their felt experience; other people merely communicate how good or bad they feel. We theorized that people who are better at describing their emotions might be less likely to self-medicate with alcohol. During a 3-week period, 106 underage social drinkers used handheld computers to self-monitor alcohol intake. From participants' reported experiences during random prompts, we created an individual difference measure of emotion differentiation. Results from a 30-day timeline follow-back revealed that people with intense negative emotions consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions and less reliant on global descriptions. Results from ecological momentary assessment procedures revealed that people with intense negative emotions prior to drinking episodes consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions. These findings provide support for a novel methodology and dimension for understanding the influence of emotions on substance-use patterns.

Building Self-Control Strength: Practicing Self-Control Leads to Improved Self-Control Performance.

Self-control performance may be improved by the regular practice of small acts of self-control. Ninety-two adults' self-control capacity was assessed using the stop signal paradigm before they started practicing self-control and again at the end of two weeks. Participants who practiced self-control by cutting back on sweets or squeezing a handgrip exhibited significant improvement in stop signal performance relative to those who practiced tasks that did not require self-control. Participants who did not practice self-control believed that the tasks should improved self-control, engaged in tasks that were effortful and made self-control salient, but did not actually require self-control. Supplemental analyses suggested that only practicing self-control built self-control capacity; the improved outcomes cannot be explained by self-fulfilling prophecies, increased self-efficacy or awareness of self-control. The results may have implications for understanding the development of self-control in both children and adults, as well as clinical implications for treating disorders that involve low self-control.

Autonomous Self-Control is Less Depleting.

Autonomously motivated self-control may be less depleting than extrinsically motivated self-control. Participants were asked to not eat cookies and their motivation orientation for resisting that temptation was assessed. Their self-control performance was assessed immediately before and after fighting the temptation. As compared to their baseline performance, participants who avoided eating the cookies for more autonomous performed better at the second measure relative to participants who did not eat for more extrinsic reasons. Mood, arousal, and demographic factors were not related to self-control performance and feelings of autonomy. Overall, it appears that feeling compelled to exert self-control may deplete more strength than having more freedom when exerting self-control. The results may increase our understanding of how self-control strength and feelings of autonomy interact.

Helpful Self-Control: Autonomy Support, Vitality, and Depletion.

Why someone exerts self-control may influence how depleting a task is. Feeling compelled to exert self-control require more self-control strength than exerting self-control for more autonomous reasons. Across three experiments, individuals whose autonomy was supported while exerting self-control performed better on a subsequent test of self-control as compared to individuals who had more pressure placed upon them while exerting self-control. The differences in self-control performance were not due to anxiety, stress, unpleasantness, or reduced motivation among the controlled participants. Additional analyses suggested that the decline in self-control performance was mediated by subjective vitality. Feelings of autonomy support lead to enhanced feelings of subjective vitality. This increased vitality may help replenish lost ego-strength, which lead to better self-control performance subsequently.

Conserving self-control strength.

Individuals may be motivated to limit their use of self-control resources, especially when they have depleted some of that resource. Expecting to need self-control strength in the future should heighten the motivation to conserve strength. In 4 experiments, it was found that depleted participants who anticipated exerting self-control in the future performed more poorly in an intervening test of self-control than participants who were not depleted, and more poorly than those who did not expect to exert self-control in the future. Conversely, those who conserved strength performed better on tasks that they conserved the strength for as compared with those who did not conserve. The underlying economic or conservation of resource model sheds some light on the operation of self-control strength.

The self-control costs of fighting the temptation to drink.

Being exposed to the sight and smell of an alcoholic beverage and not drinking it should require self-control. On the basis of the self-control strength model (M. Muraven & R. F. Baumeister, 2000), exerting self-control should lead to poorer performance on subsequent self-control tasks. Using a cue exposure paradigm, the authors had 160 social drinkers alternately sniff water and alcohol. After each trial, the drinkers engaged in 2 self-control tasks: squeezing a handgrip and a self-stopping task. Performance on these tasks was worse after sniffing alcohol than after sniffing water. Mood and arousal did not mediate the effects; urge to drink was negatively related to outcomes. The effects were stronger for individuals high in trait temptation to drink. Resisting the temptation of drinking appears to undermine self-control capacity.

Capturing the moment: innovative approaches to daily alcohol assessment.

This article is a summary of a symposium presented at the 2005 Research Society on Alcoholism annual conference organized by Dan J. Neal and chaired by William R. Corbin. Event-level data, wherein each "event" (e.g., day) is captured as its own data point, capture the complex patterns of drinking and other high-risk behaviors in ways that the typical aggregate approach cannot. Because of their richness, methodologies that incorporate event-level data are becoming more common in alcohol research. At least 3 distinct forms of event-level data can be gathered: retrospective data (those collected on a single occasion, using memory aids to help each participant reconstruct all drinking events over a specific period of time), daily monitoring data (reporting on all events for that day), and momentary assessment (those recorded immediately following a drinking event or in response to a prompt from researchers). The goal of this symposium was to address many issues associated with event-level methodology, as well as demonstrate projects that are currently implementing such innovative data collection. The 4 presentations included in this symposium were "Realizing the Promise and Avoiding the Pitfalls of Retrospective Daily Estimation Assessments of Alcohol Use" by Frances K. Del Boca; "Using Interactive Voice Response Technology to Assess the Alcohol-Victimization Link" by Kathleen Parks, Linda King, and Ann Pardi; "Methodological Issues in Using Personal Data Assistants to Self-monitor Alcohol Consumption" by R. Lorraine Collins, Mark Muraven, and Charlene Vetter; and "Collecting Event-level Data Using the World Wide Web" by Dan J. Neal and Kim Fromme.

The morning after: limit violations and the self-regulation of alcohol consumption.

The authors examined whether the reciprocal relationship between alcohol consumption and distress unfolded over time in 2 samples of social drinkers. Participants monitored their alcohol intake and their cognitive and emotional responses to that drinking on hand-held computers. On mornings after drinking, those who had violated their self-imposed limits the day before reported more guilt, even after controlling for acute negative symptoms of drinking and amount consumed. Reciprocally, guilt led to poorer self-regulation of alcohol intake: Greater distress over alcohol consumption was linked to more intake, intoxication, and more limit violations. Individual differences moderated the relationships among limit violations, distress, and drinking. Consistent with the limit violation effect, violating a limit produced distress over consumption among social drinkers, and they responded to that distress by drinking more.

Daily fluctuations in self-control demands and alcohol intake.

Predictions made by the self-control strength model were tested in a sample of underage social drinkers using ecological momentary assessment methodology. On days that participants experienced more self-control demands than average, they were more likely to violate their self-imposed drinking limit after controlling for mood and urge to drink. There was no relationship between self-control demands and urge or intention to drink, nor were self-control demands related to plans to limit drinking. When individuals planned to limit their alcohol intake, they were more affected by self-control demands than when they did not plan to limit their alcohol intake. Trait self-control moderated these relationships. Consistent with the self-control strength model, it appears that exerting self-control in nondrinking areas undermines individuals' capacity to exert self-control of drinking in daily life.

One too many: predicting future alcohol consumption following heavy drinking.

Adult social drinkers used handheld computers to monitor alcohol intake as well as the precursors and consequences of drinking over a 2-week period. The within-person relationship between mood and amount of alcohol consumed was examined, as well as the role of individual differences. When individuals made internal attributions for their greater than average consumption, they were in a more negative mood after drinking. Individuals who experienced a negative mood after drinking consumed more subsequently. This dysregulatory process may help explain the progression from social drinking to more problematic drinking; indeed, the relationship between mood and alcohol intake was stronger for heavier drinkers. Likewise, gender and trait temptation and restriction moderated this process. The results are consistent with the Limit Violation Effect model (R. L. Collins, 1993) of mood and regulation of alcohol intake.

Mechanisms of self-control failure: motivation and limited resources.

Research has found that individuals who are lower in self-control strength because of previous self-control exertions perform more poorly on subsequent tests of self-control. The present studies suggest that this effect may be moderated by motivation. In particular, depletion and motivation jointly determine self-control performance. Individuals who were depleted and believed that the task would help others (Experiment 1) or believed that their efforts could benefit them (Experiment 2) performed better on a subsequent test of self-control than individuals who were depleted and lower in motivation. The results of Experiment 3 replicated these findings and suggested that depletion only affects performance on tasks that require self-control; tasks that are difficult but do not require self-control are immune to the effects of depletion. Hence, depleted individuals may compensate for their lack of self-control resources when sufficiently motivated. The results may help explain the nature of self-control strength.