Guilty pleasures and grim necessities: affective attitudes in dilemmas of self-control.
Do self-control situations pit controlled reason against impulsive emotion, or do some emotions support the controlled choice? A pilot study of self-control attitudes found ambivalence between hedonic affect associated with short-term perspectives and self-conscious affect associated with the long term. In Study 1, negative self-conscious affect accompanied higher self-control among delayed-cost dilemmas ("guilty pleasures") but not delayed-benefit dilemmas ("grim necessities"). Study 2 showed that hedonic affect was more accessible than was self-conscious affect, but this difference was less among high self-control dilemmas. In Study 3, unobtrusively primed self-conscious emotion words caused dieters to eat less if the emotions were negative, more if positive. Hedonic positive and negative emotion words had the opposite effect. Self-conscious emotional associations, then, can support self-control if brought to mind before the chance to act.
Giner-Sorolla
R
R
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, USA. rginer1@swarthmore.edu
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005260:Female; D006167:Guilt; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011930:Reaction Time; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012649:Self Concept; D012919:Social Behavior; D014768:Virginia