The Influence of Ego-depletion on Implicit Aggression and Cognitive Performance

The aim of the planned online study is twofold. First, it opts to deliver further evidence for the existence of the construct ego-depletion. Second, it tries to further validate the German version of the word-stem completion task as a measure of implicit aggression. The psychological assessment of aggression is not a trivial aspect, however. In general, explicit measures of aggression have a higher face validity than their implicit counterparts. However, even implicit measures, such as the implicit association test for aggression, have a certain amount of face validity, since participants might be able to infer that the task is related to aggression. Another implicit aggression measure is the word-stem completion task, which asks participants to complement word-stems in order to build words. Lately, we have developed a German version of this task and found some promising first results, i.e., a factor analysis indicated that the word-stem completion task explained unique variance in aggression. The present study aims to further validate the German version of the word-stem completion task by experimentally manipulating aggression through an ego-depletion paradigm, in which cognitive resources are depleted. It is expected that participants in the ego-depletion condition build more aggressive solutions on the word-stem completion task than participants in the control group.

Almost every one of us knows the experience of falling short of one's own resolutions, despite having the intention to behave differently. In dual-process models human behavior is proposed to be a result of reciprocal activity of an impulsive and a reflective system with the impulsive system being fast, associative, and mostly unconscious, while the activity of the reflective system is slow, rule-based and relies on cognitive resources. Hence, people are more prone to rely on the associative system if cognitive resources are diminished or temporarily unavailable. Such a state of low mental resources has been linked to various detrimental effects such as impulse buying, stereotyping, unhealthy food choices, aggression, as well as impaired cognitive performance in general and is referred to as ego-depletion. According to ego-depletion theory self-control functions like a muscle and activities that heavily rely on the exertion of self-control successively exhaust this limited resource. Lately, some critical concerns questioning the magnitude of ego-depletion effects or its existence altogether have been raised. Most recent meta-analytical findings resolved most of the uncertainty, however, and stressed the importance of the paradigm used to deplete cognitive resources with emotion suppression videos being best suited to induce a state of ego-depletion.

Therefore, an emotional video, showing sequences of a surgery will be used in the present research in order to manipulate the amount of cognitive resources available. While participants in the experimental group are asked to suppress any emotions while watching the video, the control group is requested to simply watch the video attentively.

The word-stem completion task is an implicit aggression measure that asks participants to complement word-stems with the assumption being that the more aggressive solutions a person generates the more aggressive that person is.

The experiment will use a sequential-task paradigm with half of the 60 participants being randomly assigned to the ego-depletion condition. After watching the emotional video, participants in both groups will be requested to complete the word-stem completion task, an aggression implicit association test, as well as a multi-source interference task. Furthermore, trait aggression and the amount of subjective emotion, experienced while watching the video, will be assessed as potential moderators.

It is expected that participants in the ego-depletion group will score higher on implicit aggression measures (word-stem completion task and implicit association task) and perform worse on the multi-source interference task, which measures cognitive performance.

Participants will be told that the experiment seeks to understand the relationship between emotional videos and cognition and creativity. At the end of the study, participants will be debriefed about the actual goal of the study and will receive monetary compensation for their participation.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* being mentally healthy
* German as native language
* being between 18-55 years in age

Exclusion Criteria:

* working in a medical profession