Articles lecture 1 (12/11)
Wagner & Heather (2015) – Chapter 26: Self-Regulation and its failure: the
seven deadly threats to self-regulation
Self-regulation (self-control): effortful and voluntary control of external behaviour and of internal
thoughts, emotions and attention, all in the service of meeting long-term goals. Either initiation f a
behaviour or inhibition of one.
Various forms of mental control whereby people regulate their thoughts and emotions
without necessarily exhibiting any outward behaviour.
Overlaps/subsumes the concept of executive function focus of attention and contents of
working memory.
Host of nonconscious self-regulatory processes that can be automatically triggered and often
don’t require effort.
Function: bring thoughts and behaviour in line with goals and intentions. Implicit in this
process is a self that sets goals and standards, is aware of its own thoughts and behaviours
and has the capacity to change them.
Study of self-regulation = multidisciplinary developmental psychology, drug addiction & health
psychology.
Western thought has been preoccupied with issues of will and self-control.
19th century education (especially in US): it was thought that by teaching children self-control
and moral values early, virtuous and lawful behaviour would eventually become habitual so
that as adults people could not but do good.
James (1890): need to continually practice little bouts of self-control = effort, to be
sufficiently trained to resist real temptations when they arise.
Bain & Sully: interdependence of mental and emotional control, suggest that these 2 forms
of self-control rely on the same inhibitory mechanisms in the brain.
o Sully: self-control is subject to failure not only when one is faced with overwhelming
impulses and emotions but also, echoing modern-day implicit psychology, when
faced with ‘inseparable associations’ of thought, such as when thinking of a cigarette
necessarily evokes thought of how pleasurable it is to smoke a cigarette.
Also argued that self-control may fail from impairments in the higher brain
centres, as a result of overwork, alcohol and mental illness.
Carpenter: emotion regulation techniques to teach ‘hysterical’ patients involving the use of
attention control and distraction. Also discussed the role of alcohol in diminishing volitional
control, thereby leaving the ‘automatic activity of the cerebrum’ unchecked.
Clouston (1883) – elementary theory of self-control: similar to contemporary limited-capacity
theories and developmental theories based on individual differences in self-control self-
control exists in every possible degree of strength, with those who are mentally ill possessing
th least amount.
o Drew parallels between motor control failures in disorders such as chorea and the
mental control failures ‘may take place from a loss of controlling power in the higher
regions of the brain or from an over-development of energy in certain portions of the
brain which the normal power of inhibition cannot control’.
Dark age of self-regulation research during first half of 20 th century simultaneous dominance of
Freudian psychology & American behaviourism not much room for the voluntary regulation of
thoughts and behaviours.
The mental machinery that people rely on to stay in control is itself susceptible to impairment by
fatigue or emotions.
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,Threats to successful self-regulation include environmental triggers and internal causes that impair
the capacity to engage in self-regulation (emotional distress or self-regulatory exhaustion), failures to
monitor one’s behaviour for signs of self-regulation failure, such as can occur when self-awareness is
low or even undesired. These traits often conspire together to bring about self-regulatory collapse.
Seven deadly threats to self-regulation
1. Cue exposure and impulse control
Impulses: cravings or desires to perform a given behaviour or consume a particular
temptation. Not only appetitive and compulsive behaviours but also more general hedonic
behaviours (relax, watch TV). Pleasurable, inherently rewarding activities.
o Capture attention and require effort to ignore or override; psychologically and
emotionally hot.
o Controlling impulses is thought to be the most common form of self-regulation in
which people engage composing 90% of people’s daily acts of self-regulation.
o Most common way to arise = activating stimulus (exposure to food, alcohol or drug
cues). Impulses may also arise of internal physiological states, but it is usually only in
states of extreme deprivation that such internal cues dominate over external ones.
Schachter – internality – externality theory of obesity: obese individuals are less aware of
internal physiological cues indicating hunger and satiety and are simultaneously more
susceptible to being controlled by external environmental influences.
o Experimental evidence that external food cues can trigger eating behaviour.
Among chronic dieters’ exposure to food cues frequently leads to increased
craving, hedonic thoughts & greater food consumption and it’s the most
often cited reason for diet failure.
Even satiated normal-weight individuals are susceptible to the
influence of strong food cues, showing increased desire for and
consumption of appetizing foods after a brief taste.
o Patients with severe anterograde amnesia can be made to consume multiple
successive meals simply by removing the previous meal and presenting a new one.
o Cue exposure has been shown to increase physiological indicators of arousal (heart
rate and salivary response) in smokers and alcoholics and in dieters exposed to food
cues.
Herman: nicotine-deprived light smokers showed a greater propensity to smoke after
exposure to salient cigarette cues.
However, under certain circumstances, being exposed to tempting cues may actually activate
self-regulatory goals, thereby decreasing the likelihood of self-control failure.
o Trope & Fisbach (2000) = counteractive control theory: if an individual has a history
of regulating his/her behaviour in the face of temptation, then exposure to the
tempting item may activate self-regulatory goals.
Strongest in individuals who indicated both that dieting was important to
them and that they were successful in maintaining their weight. Individuals
for whom dieting was not important/who were unsuccessful at regulating
their weight didn’t show increased activation of dieting goals after tempting
primes.
Often exposure to multiple cues that can elicit competing goals and desires.
o Presence of competing dieting cue eliminated the ability of food cues to elicit
subsequent eating in dieters.
Impulses have a strength some are easier to override than others.
o Tempting cues: rewarding properties, may lead to activation of positive hedonic
thoughts about the tempting item, have been shown to capture attention.
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, Individual differences in this attentional bias have been shown to predict
craving.
Smokers show increased attention to/representation of motor actions
associated with smoking.
Activate motor schemas for consuming the forbidden item through a
prolonged period of conditioned associations with the rewarding substance.
Evidence: increased approach behaviour towards food for dieters
and towards cigarettes for smokers.
o Appetizing cues may also promote self-regulation failure by occupying memory and
inhibiting regulatory goals.
2. Emotional and social distress
Negative affect
o Relapse typically preceded by periods of negative emotion.
o Plays a role in appetitive behaviours but also in precipitating self-regulation failure
for more general types of behaviour.
Increased degree to which people procrastinate when faced with a tedious
task.
Accepting immediate rewards over larger delayed ones.
o Social rejection
o Embarrassment
o Feelings of loneliness and humiliation
o Stereotype threats
Reduction in working memory capacity, particularly verbal working memory
due to the load incurred by attempts to regulate anxiety.
Reduced task persistence and increased difficulty inhibiting prepotent
responses.
One of the hypothesized mechanisms: being reminded of negative
stereotypes about one’s social group impairs working memory, possibly
because of attempts to regulate affect.
o Negative causes people to consider only the immediate and superficial aspects of a
situation, making it less likely that they will consider the future consequences of their
decisions.
o Negative affect increases attention to local, fine-grained information at the expense
of more global information.
o Addiction negative affect may potentiatie drug-seeking behaviour through a
conditioned association with drug use. Belief that indulging will relief negative affect
even in the absence of an external activating stimulus, such as the smell of
cigarette smoke, negative affect acts as an internal cue that elicits drug-seeking
behaviour.
o Disinhibiting power of negative affect emotional distress increases an animal’s
susceptibility to rewards, such as food or drugs. Is the result of distress-induced
release of glucocorticoids that sensitize the mesolimbic dopamine system to drugs of
abuse and food and to their predictive cues.
Rewards take on a larger reward value, thereby strengthening the impulse
to consume them.
Evidence in humans generally restricted to behavioural self-reports.
However, recent studies suggested that experiencing stress or negative
affect can increase the subjective amount of reward smokers experience
when smoking a cigarette.
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, o Role distress plays in potentiating substance use appears to be different in substance
abusers than in dieters.
Simple stress inductions increase desires for substances in substance
abusers.
Non-emotional stress doesn’t lead to disinhibited eating in dieters. Stress
alone isn’t enough to lead to disinhibited behaviour; rather negative
emotional distress, particularly when it affects self-esteem (social rejection,
negative performance feedback) is required theory: they generally have a
negative self-view, hence reminders of this self-view particularly are aversive
and promote the desire to escape self-awareness through eating.
Important difference: for the most part, substance abusers aren’t currently attempting to
quit.
3. Lapse-activated patterns and abstinence violations: implicit in having a self-regulatory goal, is
a set of standards describing the behaviour of the optimal self-regulator. When they are
momentarily violated, the rational thing to do is to shrug it off, apologize and pretend it
never happened. However, people don’t always act rationally and after a single slip they may
no longer see any reason to hold back giving in to one temptation leads to total
disinhibition (Herman & Mack).
Temporary violations of one’s standards can elicit a wholesale abandonment of self-
regulatory goals. This lapse-activated disinhibition is primarily a cognitive phenomenon.
Anticipation of a future diet-breaking preload later in the day leads to disinhibition and
overeating, even though the preload has not yet been consumed.
Proposed mechanisms
o People set too high a standard for self-regulatory success, adopting a zero-tolerance
policy whereby a single slip is believed to indicate complete failure and thus all
further attempts at regulation are seen as futile.
o Relapse in alcoholics and substance users simple lapses may lead to disinhibited
behaviours. When individuals indulge in a forbidden temptation, they experience an
abstinence violation effect, the size of which predicts whether they will return to
abstinence of proceed to relapse.
Cognitive and emotional reaction to a lapse in self-control that consists of a
sense of despair and guilt after the failure to maintain control, combined
with the personal attribution that one’s lapse is due to personal failings (lack
of willpower, inability to resist temptations) that are outside of one’s control.
Combination of negative affect & the belief that you are incapable of
resisting urges full-blown relapse becomes likely.
Minimizing sense of guilt overindulgences and attribute causes of relapse to
situational factors return to abstinence is possible.
4. Impairments of self-monitoring and self-awareness:
Monitoring: people keep track of their thoughts and behaviours with reference to their
standards and long-term goals. Factors that impinge on people’s ability to monitor their own
behaviour tend to interfere with self-regulation. Manipulations that increase self-awareness
tend to increase the degree to which people abide by their personal standards and attitudes.
o Some theorists have suggested that the primary purpose of self-awareness is to
enable self-regulation.
o Monitoring for conflicts between intended goals and behaviour requires maintaining
an active representation of current goals and standards in memory, a process
hypothesized to rely on working memory capacity. Consequently, manipulations that
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