Clinical trial NCT04879719: The Influence of Ego-depletion on Implicit Aggression and Cognitive Performance
Official title: The Influence of Ego-depletion on Implicit Aggression and Cognitive Performance
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Aggression
Keywords: ego-depletion
implicit aggression
word-stem completion task
implicit association task
Lead sponsor: Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2021-05-10
Enrollment: 60
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 55
Standard ages: ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: Participants are randomly assigned to either a ego-depletion- or a control group.
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: 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.

Detailed description: 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

Primary outcomes:
measure: Word-stem completion task
timeFrame: All measures will be taken on a single occasion in a sequential-task paradigm, which is standard in ego-depletion research. Completion of all tasks takes 6 minutes
measure: Implicit Association Test (IAT) for aggression
timeFrame: All measures will be taken on a single occasion in a sequential-task paradigm, which is standard in ego-depletion research. Completion of this task takes about 5 minutes.
measure: Multi-source interference task (MSIT)
timeFrame: All measures will be taken on a single occasion in a sequential-task paradigm, which is standard in ego-depletion research. Completion of this task takes about 5 minutes.
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Hamburg
country: Germany
facility: University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf
Study officials:
affiliation: Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
name: Simone Kühn, Prof. Dr.
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Baumeister RF, Bratslavsky E, Muraven M, Tice DM. Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998 May;74(5):1252-65. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.74.5.1252.
citation: Dang J. An updated meta-analysis of the ego depletion effect. Psychol Res. 2018 Jul;82(4):645-651. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0862-x. Epub 2017 Apr 8.
citation: Hagger MS, Wood C, Stiff C, Chatzisarantis NL. Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull. 2010 Jul;136(4):495-525. doi: 10.1037/a0019486.
citation: Strack F, Deutsch R. Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2004;8(3):220-47. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0803_1.