Rebuilding Self-Control After Ego Depletion: The Role of Positive Emotions

Abstract

Ego depletion appears to exhaust individual’s psychological resources, resulting in reduced self-control on subsequent tasks. Extrapolating from the relevant studies on positive emotions, we hypothesize that positive emotions would contribute to the replenishment of individual’s psychological resources and rebuild self-control after ego depletion. We test this hypothesis in a lab experiment. After an ego depletion task, individuals were induced positive, neutral or negative emotions respectively by different movie clips, and then undertook a self-control task. The results show that, compared to neutral emotions, positive emotions could effectively reduce the impact of ego depletion. Individuals primed by positive emotions show higher level of self-control. On the contrary, negative emotions restrain the replenishment of individual’s psychological resource. Individuals primed by negative emotions show lower level of self-control.