After-effects of self-control: The reward responsivity hypothesis

Effort expenditure modulates feedback evaluations involving self-other agreement: evidence from brain potentials and neural oscillations

The influence of effort expenditure on the subjective value in feedback involving material reward has been the focus of previous research. However, little is known about the impact of effort expenditure on subjective value evaluations when feedback involves reward that is produced in the context of social interaction (e.g. self-other agreement). Moreover, how effort expenditure influences confidence (second-order subjective value) in feedback evaluations remains unclear. Using electroencephalography, this study aimed to address these questions. Event-related potentials showed that, after exerting high effort, participants exhibited increased reward positivity difference in response to self-other (dis)agreement feedback. After exerting low effort, participants reported high confidence, and the self-other disagreement feedback evoked a larger P3a. Time-frequency analysis showed that the high-effort task evoked increased frontal midline theta power. In the low (vs. high)-effort task, the frontal midline delta power for self-other disagreement feedback was enhanced. These findings suggest that, at the early feedback evaluation stage, after exerting high effort, individuals exhibit an increased sensitivity of subjective value evaluation in response to self-other agreement feedback. At the later feedback evaluation stage, after completing the low-effort task, the self-other disagreement feedback violates the individuals'high confidence and leads to a metacognitive mismatch.

Effort Expenditure Increases Risk-Taking for Improbable Rewards

Previous studies have found that exerting effort can lead people to engage in risk-taking behaviors. While effort can be either cognitive or physical, risk-taking can take place in either a risky context with known outcome probabilities or an ambiguous context with unknown outcome probabilities. The goal of the current research is to investigate how effort type and decision context influence risk-taking after effort exertion. Across three experiments, we find evidence that investing effort increases risk-taking at a short timescale. Importantly, this effect is particularly noticeable when the chance of winning is low, rather than when it is uncertain. Furthermore, the increase in risk-taking happens regardless of whether the effort is cognitive or physical. These findings suggest the existence of a cost-invariant but decision context-variant mechanism for the risk-taking after-effect of effort expenditure, which helps to bring the negative emotions caused by effort exertion back to a state of emotional homeostasis.

The Role of Motivation Systems, Anxiety, and Low Self-Control in Smartphone Addiction among Smartphone-Based Social Networking Service (SNS) Users

Given that Social Networking Service (SNS) has emerged as the most influential platform, which can lead users to addictive smartphone use, it is necessary to investigate which psychological variables lead smartphone-based SNS users to addictive smartphone use. Still, studies on the relationship between psychological variables and addictive smartphone use among smartphone-based SNS users remain to be explored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the role of psychological factors on smartphone addiction proneness (SAP). A total of 433 smartphone-based SNS users were collected from 5003 adults in Korea. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and path analysis using SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 23.0. The results of a parallel-mediation path analysis demonstrated that Behavioral Inhibition (BIS), Behavioral activation (BAS) drive, anxiety, and low self-control directly influenced SAP, separately. BIS and BAS _drive also had significant indirect effects on SAP through the effect of anxiety. BIS and BAS_fun had significant indirect effects on SAP through the effect of low self-control. The study variables accounted for 38.4 of the total variances of SAP. Thus, when establishing interventions to reduce the users' addictive smartphone use, these interactive relationships of the variables should be considered.

Because you had a bad day: the role of negative affect and justification in self-control failure

Justification thinking (using excuses to "allow" giving into temptation) has been identified as a potential link between negative affect and self-control failure. We hypothesised that negative affect would prompt greater justification thinking, specifically deservingness thinking (i.e. "I deserve a treat"), and tested this for both inhibitory (temptation is to approach reward; self-control is to inhibit) and initiatory (temptation is to refrain from action, self-control is to initiate action) hypothetical self-control dilemmas. We found that only for inhibitory self-control (Study 1; N = 105) but not initiatory (Study 2; N = 116), negative affect resulted in greater deservingness thinking compared to neutral affect. We also hypothesised that negative mood coupled with justification would prompt greater likelihood of imagined self-control failure. We found that for inhibitory self-control (Study 3; N = 569), participants in negative affect (vs. neutral) and justification (vs. no justification) conditions were independently more likely to report they would fail at self-control. For initiatory self-control (Study 4; N = 321), we found an effect of negative affect on hypothetical self-control failure but no effect of justification. Overall, these studies confirm the role of negative affect in self-control processes and highlight differences between inhibitory and initiatory self-control situations.

Envy and Environmental Decision Making: The Mediating Role of Self-Control

Emotions have strong impacts on decision making, yet research on the association between social interpersonal emotion and environmental decisions is limited. The present study uses experimental manipulation and cross-sectional investigation to examine how envy state and personality trait envy influence environmental actions. In Study 1, participants were manipulated to elicit benign and malicious envy, and it was found that benign envy acts as an antecedent of pro-environmental behavior, while malicious envy could contribute to behavior harmful to the environment. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 and examined the mediator of self-control through a correlational study. Consequently, people who are high in malicious envy tend to engage in more environmentally harmful activities rather than living a sustainable life, while dispositional benign envy could significantly predict pro-environmental behavior. Moreover, the link between dispositional malicious envy and environmental behavior can be explained by trait self-control, while the mediating effect was silent in dispositional benign envy. The findings shed new light on the impact of social interpersonal emotion on making environmental decisions and its related psychological mechanisms.

Detours increase local knowledge-Exploring the hidden benefits of self-control failure

Self-control enables people to override momentary thoughts, emotions, or impulses in order to pursue long-term goals. Good self-control is a predictor for health, success, and subjective well-being, as bad self-control is for the opposite. Therefore, the question arises why evolution has not endowed us with perfect self-control. In this article, we draw some attention to the hidden benefits of self-control failure and present a new experimental paradigm that captures both costs and benefits of self-control failure. In an experiment, participants worked on three consecutive tasks: 1) In a transcription task, we manipulated how much effortful self-control two groups of participants had to exert. 2) In a number-comparison task, participants of both groups were asked to compare numbers and ignore distracting neutral versus reward-related pictures. 3) After a pause for recreation, participants were confronted with an unannounced recognition task measuring whether they had incidentally encoded the distracting pictures during the previous number-comparison task. The results showed that participants who exerted a high amount of effortful self-control during the first task shifted their priorities and attention toward the distractors during the second self-control demanding task: The cost of self-control failure was reflected in worse performance in the number-comparison task. Moreover, the group which had exerted a high amount of self-control during the first task and showed self-control failure during the second task was better in the unannounced third task. The benefit of self-control failure during number comparison was reflected in better performance during the recognition task. However, costs and benefits were not specific for reward-related distractors but also occurred with neutral pictures. We propose that the hidden benefit of self-control failure lies in the exploration of distractors present during goal pursuit, i.e. the collection of information about the environment and the potential discovery of new sources of reward. Detours increase local knowledge.

Stimulating Self-Regulation: A Review of Non-invasive Brain Stimulation Studies of Goal-Directed Behavior

Self-regulation enables individuals to guide their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a purposeful manner. Self-regulation is thus crucial for goal-directed behavior and contributes to many consequential outcomes in life including physical health, psychological well-being, ethical decision making, and strong interpersonal relationships. Neuroscientific research has revealed that the prefrontal cortex plays a central role in self-regulation, specifically by exerting top-down control over subcortical regions involved in reward (e.g., striatum) and emotion (e.g., amygdala). To orient readers, we first offer a methodological overview of tDCS and then review experiments using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques (especially transcranial direct current stimulation) to target prefrontal brain regions implicated in self-regulation. We focus on brain stimulation studies of self-regulatory behavior across three broad domains of response: persistence, delay behavior, and impulse control. We suggest that stimulating the prefrontal cortex promotes successful self-regulation by altering the balance in activity between the prefrontal cortex and subcortical regions involved in emotion and reward processing.