When you have to climb downhill to reach the top: the effect of action versus state orientation on solvinga goal-subgoal conflict in the Tower of Hanoi task

Ego-depletion or invigoration in solving the tower of Hanoi? Action orientation helps overcome planning deficits

Personality systems interaction (PSI) theory postulates two executive control modes: Self-control and self-regulation. Self-control, typical of state oriented persons, should result in “ego depletion” whereas self-regulation, typical of action oriented persons, should result in invigoration. State- and action-oriented participants performed the Plan-a-Day and the 5-disk Tower-of-Hanoi tasks. There were no differences between them on the first task, but action had better performance than state oriented in terms of number of moves and solution time on the second task, independently of differences in self-determination. Better performance in the Tower of Hanoi correlated positively with activation, and negatively with apathy. We conclude that whereas self-control is associated with depletion, self-regulation is associated with invigoration in performing the Tower of Hanoi task.

Personality, Stress, and Intuition: Emotion Regulation Abilities Moderate the Effect of Stress-Dependent Cortisol Increase on Coherence Judgments

Objective

Findings on the relationship between hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity and cognitive performance are inconsistent. We investigated whether personality in terms of emotion regulation abilities (ERA) moderates the relationship between stress-contingent HPA activity and accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments.

Method

ERA and cortisol responses to social-evaluative stress as induced by a variant of the Trier Social Stress Test were measured in N = 49 participants (32 female, aged 18 to 33 years, M = 22.48, SD = 3.33). Subsequently, in a Remote Associates Task they provided intuitive judgments on whether word triples, primed by either stress-reminding or neutral words, are coherent or not.

Results

Under relative cortisol increase participants low in ERA showed reduced performance whereas individuals high in ERA showed increased performance. By contrast, under conditions of low cortisol change, individuals low in ERA outperformed those high in ERA.

Conclusion

Personality can moderate the link between stress and cognition such as accurate intuition. This can happen to a degree that existing effects may not be become apparent in the main effect (i.e. without considering personality), which highlights the necessity to consider personality in stress research, ERA in particular. We discuss the findings with respect to individual differences in neurobehavioral mechanisms potentially underlying ERA and corresponding interactions with cognitive processing.