How Does Mindfulness Improve Self-Control? (from Greater Good)

This excellent article, from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, looks at recent research (by talking with the author of the research) that suggests a mindfulness practice can increase our sense of self-control. This is part of the Mindful Monday series from Greater Good.

How Does Mindfulness Improve Self-Control? 

By Emily Nauman | March 24, 2014

In a new installment of our Mindful Monday series, we talk with researcher Rimma Teper about how mindfulness helps improve executive function. 

We have emotions for a reason. Anger in response to injustice can signal that the situation needs to change; sadness in response to loss can signal that we’d like to keep the people we love in our lives.

Our Mindful Mondays series provides ongoing coverage of the exploding field of mindfulness research. Dan Archer

It’s when we ruminate, or get caught up in our emotions, that they might become maladaptive. That’s when emotion regulation can be helpful and healthy.

Previous research has shown that mindfulness can be an effective tool to help regulate our emotions. But why? A new model suggests that the ability to control one’s behavior—a concept that researchers call executive control—may play a role.

In a recent paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researcher Rimma Teper and her colleagues at the University of Toronto write that, despite the common misconception that meditation “empties our head” of emotions, mindfulness actually helps us become more aware and accepting of emotional signals—which helps us to control our behavior.

I talked with Rimma Teper about how mindfulness relates to emotion regulation, and how executive control fits into the picture.

Emily Nauman: In your paper, you write that mindfulness helps us change our attitude toward an emotion, rather than focusing on changing an emotion itself. What is the difference between changing our relationship to an emotion and changing the emotion itself? What’s beneficial about the former?

Rimma Teper: I should start off by saying that I am of the view that emotional experiences are mostly a good thing! We, as humans, evolved to have emotional responses to certain situations that actually help us in our everyday lives.

For instance, feeling fear when you see a snake signals that you should stay away. Feeling love for your family and friends promotes behaviors that foster close relationships. Of course, there are cases where emotional responses may be overblown, or maladaptive—and this is where emotion regulation becomes a necessary tool. Mindfulness is just one strategy that can help with emotion regulation.

As you mentioned, most emotion regulation strategies that people engage in change the nature of the emotion. These strategies may include reevaluating the situation that elicited the emotion, or suppressing the emotion altogether through distraction or some other means. Mindfulness, on the other hand, encourages people to observe their emotional experiences without trying to change them.

I think that one benefit of this approach is that it discards the tendency of “labeling” one’s emotions as good or bad. It encourages people to simply observe the contents of their mind. In this way, I think that mindfulness allows for greater self-insight.

So for instance, if I feel angry, I might try to observe my thoughts without getting caught up in them. I would also pay attention to the bodily sensations that accompany that emotion, like my heart beating quickly. By paying attention to way in which the emotion unfolds in your body, step-by-step, mindful people are able delay and dampen the rumination or overblown reaction that often accompanies it.



EN: What is executive control, and why did you suspect that executive control plays a role in the link between mindfulness and emotion regulation?

RT: Executive control can often be equated with willpower. There are a number of skills that fall under the umbrella of executive control, but the one that is specifically related to mindfulness is the ability to inhibit one’s impulses.

Previous research, including some of our own, has suggested that mindfulness may help to improve executive control. In addition, a lot of previous research has also linked mindfulness to improvements in emotion regulation.

But no one really knew exactly how mindfulness improved emotion regulation. This “gap” in the research made us wonder whether executive control might be the pathway through which mindful people are better able to regulate their emotions.

After all, executive control involves the inhibition of automatic or impulsive behaviors. And for most of us, getting carried away with our emotions is something we do automatically and without notice. When we feel sad or angry, we often let our emotions snowball. We also often ruminate about negative things that have happened to us. So to us, it made sense that executive control would be involved in curbing these maladaptive patterns.

EN: How have people thought about mindfulness and emotion regulation in the past, and what insights does your model bring to our understanding of how mindfulness and emotion regulation are related?

RT: The link between mindfulness and improved emotion regulation is certainly not a new one. What our model does is examine the nature of this relationship and helps to understand how mindfulness may improve emotion regulation.

There is often a misconception that mindfulness simply leads to less emotionality, or that mindful people experience less emotion.

Our model proposes that this is not the case. Specifically, we suggest that mindfulness leads to improvements in emotion regulation not by eliminating or reducing emotional experience, but rather through a present-moment awareness and acceptance of emotional experience. This sort of attentive and open stance towards one’s own emotions and thoughts allows the individual to still experience emotion, but also to detect emotions early on and stop them from spiraling out of control.

EN: How can we apply the insights of this model to our daily lives? What’s useful about understanding that mindfulness helps us become aware of and accept emotions, rather than “emptying our head” of emotions?

RT: As I mentioned before, emotions are usually a good thing! But there are also cases when they can be disruptive and maladaptive.

So rather than getting rid of emotional experience altogether, our model provides insight into the ways in which we can prevent or limit the disruptive aspects of emotions, like rumination. And this can be done by monitoring your thoughts and sensations, but also by adopting a non-judgmental attitude towards them.

CNN posted this interesting article about the neuroscience of self-control and the research being done to find the "magic pill" that will allow me to refuse of piece of blueberry cheesecake.

Hmmmmm . . . cheesecake . . . .

But I digress.

It turns out that one of the best ways to ensure results to a commitment, such as losing weight or exercising regularly (two of the biggest challenges for most people), or even giving up smoking, is to have a consequence for not following through. Seems simple, but it works.

In Psychosynthesis, there is an exercise they use to help build willpower. Take a dollar worth of pennies and spread them on the table in front of you. Now, one penny at a time, stack them into 20 stacks of five pennies, or 10 stacks of ten pennies. Then spread them out again, and repeat several times. If you can make yourself do this for 10 minutes or so, they suggest you have the willpower to do anything you set your mind to (I suspect addictions are exempt from this).

Anyway, interesting article.

Where is self-control in the brain?

Scientists are investigating brain areas associated with turning down temptations

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
September 14, 2013

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Our intentions often don't match our actions
• Brain imaging reveals clues about the biology of self-control
• Commitments that carry consequences help people stick to their goals

Boston (CNN) -- Mmmm, a hot fudge sundae. The diet is supposed to start today, but surely it can wait until tomorrow -- or maybe the next day.

Many people know what's good for them and choose to do the exact opposite, especially when it comes to diet and exercise. Researchers are turning to the brain to find out what's behind this lack of self-control, a topic discussed in length at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston earlier this year.

In the future, there may be brain-based solutions to help you avoid that sundae; for now, researchers say, we can shape our environments to help us avoid temptation, and make firm commitments to change.

Value judgments and willpower  

Pinpointing complex behaviors in the brain isn't simple; we weren't born with the words "impulsivity" and "willpower" etched into particular places on our heads. Scientists are still in the early stages of figuring out how billions of cells called neurons generate particular outcomes, and which circuits do what. But some clues have emerged from recent experiments.

When people who are trying to lose weight are confronted with meal choices, it appears there are two major factors in their decision: taste and health, said Todd Hare, assistant professor of neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich.

Hare's research shows that dieters who successfully turn down fatty temptations such as ice cream put more emphasis on the healthiness of food and relatively less emphasis on the taste.

It is the opposite for dieters who can't say "no" to sweets, he said. They say they're trying to eat healthy, but "they seem unable to shift away from the more automatic, stronger representation of taste," Hare said.

By using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scientists can see how a brain region called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex becomes active in valuing options in predicaments like this.

The ventral medial prefrontal cortex also appears to get involved in certain monetary decisions -- for instance, when researchers present participants with the choice of accepting a large reward later or a smaller reward immediately. Hare's research on this is not yet published, but the phenomenon was described in a 2011 research review.

Scientists have also located a second important brain area for these kinds of decisions: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There is more activity in this region when participants choose options that appear better for them in the long run -- the healthy food item or the larger monetary reward that will arrive later.

The interaction between these two brain regions -- the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- is stronger for people who show greater self control with either money or food, Hare said.

"They're working together to shape the way you're going to make your choices."

Scientists are also investigating brain areas associated with turning down temptations.

University of Cambridge neuroscientist Molly Crockett and her colleagues suggested in a study earlier this year that "precommitment" -- voluntarily restricting one's access to temptation -- is more effective at promoting self control than willpower.

In the experiment, men viewed erotic images that they rated according to personal preference. Then, in one task, they could decide in advance that they would not have the option to see the images they rated poorly. In exchange, they could see the higher-rated images after a greater time delay. This is called "precommitment."

In a different task, men were challenged to use willpower to actively resist viewing the lower-rated images while they waited for the higher-rated images. Precommitment appeared to be a better strategy on average.

In impulsive participants in particular, researchers saw more activation in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex areas during precommitment. These relationships between brain activation patterns and impulsive tendencies suggest that people in general may have some self-awareness about their own self-control abilities.

Are self control problems, such as overeating and overspending, the result of poor willpower or impaired ability to precommit, or both? Further research on these issues could help the development of behavioral or pharmacological interventions, according to the study.

Can we alter brain function for the better?

Currently, we don't have drugs designed to target such brain impairments associated with lack of self control.

But, in theory, a drug of the future could stimulate key brain areas to help people with self-control problems diet or save money, according to David Laibson, professor of economics at Harvard University.

If that sounds too much like science fiction, consider that many drugs are already on the market to alter brain function for the better -- for example, methylphenidate (Ritalin) for attention deficit disorder and anti-depressants for depression.

Outside the pharmacy, there is a drug to combat exhaustion and enhance attention, used by millions of Americans every day: caffeine. Laibson argued that if these substances are widely accepted, why shouldn't there be options for people who want better control of their food decisions?

The practical realities for a self-control drug are complex, however. Hare cautioned that these brain areas would be hard to target with medicine because a lot of other brain areas would be hit at the same time. No drug could selectively increase activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex alone, for example.

A different approach, which has not been tried, would be to use transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily enhance the activity of regions of the brain near the skull. This technique -- in which magnetic fields generate small electrical currents, activating cells in a specified part of the brain -- is being explored for depression patients who don't respond to medication.

A 2010 Nature Neuroscience study used transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily inhibit the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, and showed that this led to participants making more impatient decisions.

Theoretically, this technology could be applied in the opposite way -- to train relevant brain circuitry to come online during problematic food choices among dieters, so that eventually the person's brain would respond naturally in this way, Hare said.

"If there's enough success with this in conditions such as depression, then I could see that that would be the logical next step," Hare said.

Scientists may also be able to develop behavioral interventions based on brain research -- i.e. how to train and promote self-control. Psychologists, for example, may be able to derive behavioral therapies from the "brain circuit differences that we see in people with different kinds of self control problems," said Joshua Buckholtz, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Buckholtz has unpublished research suggesting that people with high BMIs and non-obese impulsive people have similar brain chemistry patterns.

Committing to change

To recap: We're bad at self control. Scientists are looking at the brain to figure out how self control breaks down at the neurological level. Such insights could directly lead to interventions in the form of pharmaceuticals or brain stimulation.

In the meantime, what can we do to help ourselves behave more in line with our good intentions, even in the face of temptations?

"The more we recognize the commonality of this problem, the more prepared we'll be to develop solutions to solve a problem, because the solutions end up being the same across all the different domains," Laibson said.

The basis of nonpharmaceutical solutions is the big C-word: commitment. To some extent, most of us are already entrenched in a system of commitments that keep us in line. It's called the workplace.

Journalists publish articles, cashiers scan groceries and teachers grade papers because of systems built into our society that commits them to perform certain tasks, with the threat of punishment -- or not getting paid -- looming over their heads, Laibson said. Managerial structures ensure that employees at every level do what they're supposed to be doing.

"We built this system that is actually well tuned to who we are psychologically," he said. "We're not relying completely on our willpower to do everything. We are letting the system take care of us."

When it comes to money, for instance, many companies offer savings plans that automatically place a fixed percentage of your paycheck into a 401(k) account, with strict penalties if you try to access that money before retirement. Once you sign up, you don't have to think about making the choice every week; it just happens in the background.

"We don't want people to tell us what to do so that we have no freedom, but we do need a little bit of help so that we actually get to work and have a productive day instead of rolling in at 11 a.m.," Laibson said.

Applying that method to food is a lot trickier. Your boss can make you go to a 9 a.m. meeting, but you don't have a Food Manager who prods you to avoid potato chips and count calories at every single meal. Even if your workplace's cafeteria has reasonably sized portions, including small desserts, no one will stop you from buying two or three cookies.

To encourage healthy habits in an already structured workplace, companies could instead institute standing desks and hold standing or even "walking meetings," in which people move around while they discuss business instead of sit in a conference room. These interventions should, however, be tested scientifically before being widely promoted, Laibson said.

Government intervention is another way that self control could be imposed, but a controversial one. The city of New York tried to limit sugary drinks sold to 16 ounces each last year, but an appeals court ruled in July that this was "arbitrary and capricious." In Laibson's view, such a policy needs scientific evidence that it has positive health outcomes before being broadly enacted.

But you don't necessarily need a boss or government official threatening to punish you for breaking rules you already want to follow for the sake of your health. You can set up a system in which you discipline yourself.

Through the Internet, you can wager your own money to commit yourself to your own diet and exercise aspirations. A website called StickK allows you to put your own money on the line in support of whatever goal you may have; if you don't fulfill it, you lose the money. As Yale economist Dean Karlan, co-founder of StickK, told CNN in 2008, "It's a contract to make slothfulness more expensive."

Would you lose weight if money were at stake?

So, think how much money your health-conscious self would offer your sweet-tooth self to keep the ice cream in the freezer, or not buy it at all.

Change can start today.

Follow Elizabeth Landau on Twitter at @lizlandau and on Google+.

Maria Konnikova - How to Improve Self-Control: Freedom from Your Hot Triggers

Nice post - I often how much time I waste being on the internet when I am supposed to be writing or editing. But if we know our triggers, we can learn to bind them and work around them.

How to Improve Self-Control: Freedom from Your Hot Triggers

Maria Konnikova on July 4, 2011

Self-control: we could all use more of it. Even those of us who are best at exercising self-control on a daily basis have so-called hot triggers, the special circumstances that would make us, too, lose our cool and start to behave less than rationally.

One of the examples Walter Mischel (the father of delay of gratification studies) likes to use to illustrate this point is Bill Clinton. So collected with Arafat one minute, embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal the next. Someone close to the former president is even purported to have remarked upon hearing Lewinsky’s physical description, “Yup, he’s guilty. That’s just his type.” Voluptuous brunette: hot trigger. Otherwise, just the kind of calm and collected leader you’d hope for.

Self-binding: a strategy for enforced self-control

But that need not be the case. I’ve written before on strategies to increase self-control, and will likely do so again, but today I want to focus on one in particular: self-binding. Removing an easy way to act on the trigger. Making it that much more difficult for you to lose control. It’s a strategy with wide precedence in diplomacy, to control the actions of a given international player, but less so when it comes to controlling our own actions.

1. Identify your hot trigger(s)

When you find yourself failing to reach an important goal, there is likely something standing in your way – and that something is, more likely than not, related to self-control. The obvious first step is to identify what the hot trigger, or that thing standing between you and your aim, happens to be in your case. For instance, if you want to lose weight, it’s all the food that you can’t help but eat, no matter how hard you try. If you want to save money, it’s that store you just can’t help but enter every time you walk by, or that item you seem to “add to cart” every time you spot it on your e-retailer of choice. In my case, it happens to be the internet.

When I should be writing, I find myself tempted to check a fact (and check my email, while I’m at it, and perhaps the New York Times, and why not Facebook, just while I’m here anyway…) every time I pause for the next thought. I study self-control. I study how to enhance it, how to prevent yourself from giving in to hot conditions, how to focus on your goal. And yet, somehow, time and time again, I find myself wasting precious minutes (hours?) in a less than productive manner.

2. Find an external mechanism that prevents you from giving in

Luckily, in one of my recent “research” excursions, I came across Dani Shapiro’s piece in n +1. There, I found just what I was looking for: a way to self-bind. It’s called Freedom, and what more appropriate day to write about it than Independence Day itself. For, with Freedom, that’s exactly what I got. Independence from myself, or that part of me that was keeping me from achieving what I so desperately wanted to achieve. No internet, for as long as I could take it, up to eight hours at a time. My productivity shot up. Exponentially. It was the best thing that happened to me in a long time.

Know your limits, and when willpower alone just won’t cut it

Why should you care, unless, like me, you find yourself in the throngs of internet addiction? Because it illustrates an important point about self-control: you need to know your own limits. And one of the best ways of ensuring that you don’t overstep those limits is to forcibly prevent yourself from doing so, with an external mechanism over which you don’t have any control. Even if you think (like I did), I don’t need it; I can do this on my own; I have WILLPOWER.

If you remove the hot trigger, you can’t act on it

Everyone has a hot trigger. And everyone comes to a moment when willpower, no matter how strong or all-caps it might be, will no longer cut it. So take a second to self-assess; and if you have a goal that is important to you, be it losing weight, saving money, writing more, reading more, seeing friends more often, ask: what’s standing in my way? And how do I create—or find, as the case may be—an external enforcer (that’s crucial; it can’t rely solely on you) that will eliminate that obstacle? It can mean not buying the foods that you can’t resist in the first place, so that they aren't ever there to entice you at home; changing the way you walk to work so that you don’t pass that tempting store; unplugging your cable box so that you can’t flip on the TV when you get home: in short, it can mean anything that will help you avoid your hot trigger altogether. Anything that binds your hands, so to speak, so that the choice to lose control is no longer yours to make.

Freedom is glorious. It means that I don’t have to go to the extremes suggested by Stephen King and rip my television out of the wall in order to be productive. And maybe, you’ll be inspired to find your equivalent of freedom, too. It’s a wonderful feeling, enforced self-control. It means being free, if only for up to eight hours, of one of the biggest obstacles that stands between you and your goal: yourself.

Tags: Decision Making, freedom, goals, hot triggers, hot/cool system, Irrationality, limits, Self-Control, Walter Mischel, Willpower, Big Think, Maria Konnikova, How to Improve Self-Control, Freedom from Your Hot Triggers, time management, Self-binding

TEDx Duke- Dan Ariely on Self Control

Another Dan Ariely TED Talk - he's like the "house" speaker on behavioral economics. His topic here is Self Control: The Problem and How to Get Over It. You can read a selection of his research articles here.

• Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Economics Department and Senior Fellow in the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. As a behavioral economist, he studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. Dan recently wrote a general audience book on Behavioral Economics, “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.” He is also a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is currently working on a new book titled “Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Sink.”

Tags: TEDx, Duke, Dan Ariely, Self Control, TED Talks, behavioral economics, Psychology, behavior, economics, self-control, Predictably Irrational, Center for Advanced Hindsight

TEDxNCSU - Dr. Dan Ariely - Self Control - The Problem and How to Get Over It

Dr. Dan Ariely on the issue of self-control - interesting talk, as usual. You can read a selection of his research articles here.

• Dan Ariely
  Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Economics Department and Senior Fellow in the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. As a behavioral economist, he studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. Dan recently wrote a general audience book on Behavioral Economics, “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.” He is also a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is currently working on a new book titled “Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Sink.”

Tags: TEDx, NCSU, Dr. Dan Ariely, Self Control, The Problem and How to Get Over It, Dining Without Crumbs, The Art of Eating Over the Sink, Predictably Irrational, Hidden Forces, Decisions, Psychology, self-control, brain, decision-making, neuroscience, choice, intertemporal choice

TEDxWoodsHole - Dan Ariely - Temptations and Self-Control

Nice talk. Dan Ariely is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions and of The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work and at Home. Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.

Temptations and Self-Control
One of the challenges of human life is what's good for us in the long term often doesn't seem good for us right now. Dieting, for example, is not so much fun now, but good for the future; the same goes for saving money or submitting to preventive medical tests. When we face such tradeoffs, we often focus on the short term rather than our long-terms goals, and in the process we get ourselves into trouble. But wait! There is hope. By understanding where we fall short, there are methods we can use to overcome our natural (and less than desirable) inclinations.

Using simple experiments, Dan Ariely studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. His interests span a wide range of daily behaviors and his experiments are consistently interesting, amusing, and informative, demonstrating profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom.

Tags: TEDx, WoodsHole, TED Talks, Dan Ariely, Temptations and Self-Control, Psychology, self-reflection, self regulation, self-control, Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work and at Home

Three Recent Articles on Introspection and Self-Control

There has been more and more research in the last couple of years on the subjective elements of consciousness, especially mindfulness and introspection, and the related issue of self-control. It's about time - even if the research is being done in the cognitive neuroscience field - there really is no field for subjective neuroscience (this is usually called phenomenological philosophy).

Here are three recent articles.

Can We Train Ourselves to Be More Introspective?

Steve Fleming answers.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

This is a great question that at the moment we don’t have a clear answer to. In our recent study, we showed that the structure of the anterior prefrontal cortex, right at the front of the brain, was correlated with an individual’s ability to know when he or she was wrong. We determined this ability by asking 32 individuals to make difficult visual judgments and rate their confidence they were correct. People have good introspective ability if they tend to be confident when they’re right, and less confident when they’re wrong. We’re not testing the tendency to introspect here—we’re just saying that when asked to introspect, some people are better at it than others.

We arranged the experiment so that the difficulty of the task remained stable for each person—if they were getting it right, the computer automatically made it harder; if they were getting it wrong, it was made easier. It would be very interesting to determine whether it’s possible to train people on knowing whether they’re right or wrong, despite their task performance remaining the same. In fact, Edward Titchener, one of the pioneers of experimental psychology around the turn of the 19th century, used to insist that students were trained for thousands of hours to attain unbiased assessments of their own mental states! We plan to carry out studies of how training affects introspective ability in the future, and it would be fascinating to determine whether the structure of the prefrontal cortex was also altered by such training. As to whether it’s possible, we already know that simply instructing people to use introspective strategies can have beneficial effects on their learning. And work being carried out at Janet Metcalfe’s lab at Columbia University is looking at whether metacognitive strategies can enhance children’s education.

Other studies have shown that the brain’s gray matter is remarkably “plastic”—for instance, after only a few weeks of learning to juggle, the gray matter associated with motor skills changes in shape and becomes larger. Whether this is also the case for higher cognitive skills, such as introspective ability, remains to be determined. But, in principle, there is no reason that it cannot be done.

Steve Fleming is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.

* * * * *

Could learning self-control be enjoyable?

September 20, 2010

When it comes to self-control, consumers in the United States are in trouble. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says there's hope; we just need a little help to see self-regulation as fun.

"Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun," write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).

According to the authors, approximately one in five U.S. citizens over the age of 12 admits to binge drinking at least once per month, and nearly 10 million people suffer from clinical eating disorders. These epidemics make it critical to examine what can be done to encourage people to regulate consumption.

In one study, the researchers asked participants to hold pieces of candy between their fingers, and put it in their mouths and then take it out. "The goal of this task was to let people perform tasks with the candy but not be able to actually eat the candy," the authors explain.

Once the participants completed the initial tasks they moved on to taking unrelated surveys. But the candy was left on their desks without instruction as to whether they could eat it or not. The researchers measured how much candy the participants consumed and measured how much self-control the participants usually exerted. "We found that participants who are usually high in self-control perceived the initial candy task—which involved touching, but not eating Skittles and M&Ms—as an opportunity to have fun (they were playing with candy)," the authors write. "Participants who are usually low in self-control, however, perceived the initial candy task as an obligation to work."

Both low and high self-control individuals showed self-control success in a similar study where the word "fun" was included in the instructions for the initial task. "These results show that low self-control people can be made to act like high self-control people and show regulatory success if tasks that involve exerting self-control are framed in a way that people will perceive it as fun and not work," the authors conclude.

More information: Juliano Laran and Chris Janiszewski. "Work or Fun? How Task Construal and Completion Influence Regulatory Behavior." Journal of Consumer Research: April 2011. A preprint of this article (to be officially published online soon) can be found at http://journals.uc … cago.edu/jcr

* * * * *

Inner Voice Plays Role in Self Control

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2010) — Talking to yourself might not be a bad thing, especially when it comes to exercising self control.

New research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough -- published in this month's edition of Acta Psychologica -- shows that using your inner voice plays an important role in controlling impulsive behaviour.

"We give ourselves messages all the time with the intent of controlling ourselves -- whether that's telling ourselves to keep running when we're tired, to stop eating even though we want one more slice of cake, or to refrain from blowing up on someone in an argument," says Alexa Tullett, PhD Candidate and lead author on the study. "We wanted to find out whether talking to ourselves in this 'inner voice' actually helps."

Tullett and Associate Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, both at UTSC, performed a series of self control tests on participants. In one example, participants performed a test on a computer. If they saw a particular symbol appear on the screen, they were told to press a button. If they saw a different symbol, they were told to refrain from pushing the button. The test measures self control because there are more "press" than "don't press" trials, making pressing the button an impulsive response.

The team then included measures to block participants from using their "inner voice" while performing the test, to see if it had an impact on their ability to perform. In order to block their "inner voice," participants were told to repeat one word over and over as they performed the test. This prevented them from talking to themselves while doing the test.

"Through a series of tests, we found that people acted more impulsively when they couldn't use their inner voice or talk themselves through the tasks," says Inzlicht. "Without being able to verbalize messages to themselves, they were not able to exercise the same amount of self control as when they could talk themselves through the process."

"It's always been known that people have internal dialogues with themselves, but until now, we've never known what an important function they serve," says Tullett. "This study shows that talking to ourselves in this 'inner voice' actually helps us exercise self control and prevents us from making impulsive decisions."

Tullett. The voice of self-control: Blocking the inner voice increases impulsive responding. Acta Psychologica, 2010 [link]

Tags: Psychology, introspection, self-control, consciousness, mental health, Big Questions Online, Science Daily, PhysOrg.com, inner voice, research, subjectivity, Steve Fleming, cognitive, neuroscience, phenomenology