Past research indicates that self-control relies on some sort of limited energy source. This review suggests that blood glucose is one important part of the energy source of self-control. Acts of self-control deplete relatively large amounts of glucose. Self-control failures are more likely when glucose is low or cannot be mobilized effectively to the brain (i.e., when insulin is low or insensitive). Restoring glucose to a sufficient level typically improves self-control. Numerous self-control behaviors fit this pattern, including controlling attention, regulating emotions, quitting smoking, coping with stress, resisting impulsivity, and refraining from criminal and aggressive behavior. Alcohol reduces glucose throughout the brain and body and likewise impairs many forms of self-control. Furthermore, self-control failure is most likely during times of the day when glucose is used least effectively. Self-control thus appears highly susceptible to glucose. Self-control benefits numerous social and interpersonal processes. Glucose might therefore be related to a broad range of social behavior.

The current work is a review of recent findings on energy. Ego depletion, or decreases in self-control caused by prior use, has been found in the areas of sex, aggression, helping, death thought, social norms, crime, emotion regulation, self-views, and passivity. Hunger impaired self-control, and eating restored it. Self-control uses large amounts of bloodstream glucose and brain glycogen and is impaired when these metabolites are low. Minor reductions in oxygen use reduced the number of conscious thoughts that people had. Energy is limited, and energy use by one process can divert it from others.

Three studies supported the hypothesis that low glucose increases reliance on heuristic thought. In Study 1, lower levels of glucose in the bloodstream predicted a larger correspondence bias, or the tendency to attribute the cause of a woman’s behavior to her personality rather than the environment. In Study 2, participants who completed a task found to deplete glucose showed increased primacy in impression formation, compared to participants who completed a nondepleting task. In Study 3, consuming a glucose drink (vs. a placebo) reduced the tendency to ignore base rate information when estimating probability and assume probability based on the ease with which relevant examples come to mind.

Personality – enduring traits describing how people tend to think and behave – often is described by the Big 5 model. Everything people do and think can be described as representing 1 of 5 more general traits. Though the Big 5 model has been posited to describe actual thought and behavior, the current work tested the hypothesis that personality ratings would fit the Big 5 model even when the target being rated does not have a personality in any meaningful sense. Supporting this hypothesis, the Big 5 model showed acceptable fit for describing a person (consistent with past work), but also a straight line drawn on paper, something that should not have personality in any meaningful sense. The Big 5 model thus does not necessarily describe actual thought and behavior but instead the structure of personality perception.

The capacity for action may be directly proportional to the amount of its available energy. After having used self-control, participants showed reduced action, or increased passivity, in the form of reduced activity during a social interaction (Studies 1 and 2) and less talking during a group discussion (Study 3). This effect occurred only among people who typically are highly active in such situations those with low anxieties and high extraversion. A final study suggested that the effect may be mediated by metabolism, showing that people with diabetes tend to watch more television than do people without. Action might rely on the same energy as self-control and on that which is disrupted during diabetes, indicating metabolic energy as underlying a broad capacity for action.

The current work examined whether greater alcohol consumption at night would predict less effortful fatigue the next morning. The theory is that effortful thought and behavior benefit from additional stored metabolites, and that drinking alcohol temporarily reduces metabolites but later increases them. Participants attended a drinking, social event at night. The next morning, they completed an effortful task (a breath-blowing task requiring forceful exertion and persistence) before and after a mentally fatiguing task (controlling attention). Consuming more alcohol during the event predicted less fatigue on the effortful breath-blowing task, computed as the difference between performance on the task before and after the attention control task. Alcohol consumption might be one strategy for reducing later fatigue on effortful tasks.

High self-esteem is associated with biases in which the person overestimates their positivity, whereas low self-esteem is associated with underestimations of one’s positivity. The current study examined whether these biases emerge more strongly when self-regulation is impaired. Participants first completed a task that either did or did not require self-regulation. They later interacted with another participant and indicated the extent to which they viewed themselves as having behaved positively during the interaction and to which the other participant viewed them positively. Higher self-esteem predicted a greater bias in overestimating the extent to which the other person viewed one positively, but this relationship was the strongest among participants who had completed the self-regulatory task. Past work has found that self-regulating impairs self-regulation later on. These findings therefore suggest that self-regulation is a mechanism through which personal biases are avoided and moderate views are maintained.

Four experiments, three cross-sectional and one longitudinal, tested the hypothesis that contemplating one’s own death produces a shift toward the use of positive emotion words. Participants who wrote about their own death, compared with those who wrote about dental pain, uncertainty, and meaningless, used more positive emotions words in their narratives (Experiments 1a and 1b). Experiment 2 found that contemplating one’s own death enhanced positive emotional word use across different mortality salience manipulations and remained consistent over the course of a 6-day study. Experiment 3 showed that the more positive emotion words participants used when contemplating their mortality, the greater worldview defense they showed. These results suggest that word use offers insight into how the mind responds to the salience of mortality. 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The current study examined whether using self-control causes subsequent increases in attentional adhesion to food. Participants first either did or did not use self-control by controlling their attention while watching a video. Participants next completed a dot probe attention task, designed to measure attentional adhesion to images of junk food, healthy food, and non-food items. Completing a self-control task increased attentional adhesion to food (both junk and healthy food) among people with high trait self-control. This suggests that the attentional bias is functional – food replenishes both glucose and self-control, thereby suggesting that a bias to food benefits self-control. The selfcontrol task also increased attentional adhesion to primarily junk food among people with bulimic symptoms of overeating, people who may seek to avoid food. This suggests that the attentional bias is caused also by impairments to the self-controlled avoidance of food.

Four studies tested and confirmed the hypothesis that having used self-control reduces subsequent emotion regulation.Participants first completed a task that either did or did not require selfcontrol (attention control, overriding one's accustomed writing style, or breaking a habit).They later encountered situations designed to activate emotions that typically are downregulated.Participants either met someone new (anxiety), anticipated speaking publicly (anxiety), or recalled times when they felt sad or romantically jealous.Compared to participants who had not completed a self-control task, those who had used self-control task reported feeling of the target emotion to a greater extent.The results from a final study supported the idea that having used self-control reduces emotion regulation rather than increasing the strength of emotion generally.

Evidence indicates that self-regulation relies on glucose as a limited energy source, such that self-regulation is impaired when glucose is lower and is improved when glucose is higher. Two studies examined whether levels of oxygen, the other primary energy for the brain, also influences self-regulation. While completing the Stroop task, participants breathed through a paper bag that either did or did not reduce oxygen levels (Study 1) or, while completing a measure of prejudice, participants breathed through a paper bag that either did or did not reduce oxygen levels and that either did or did not have increased oxygen flowing through it (Study 2). Results indicated that these manipulations of oxygen levels did not influence Stroop performance or prejudice. Minor fluctuations in oxygen levels thus do not appear to influence self-regulation. Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis Vol. 11, No. 3 Copyright 2015 by Reysen Group. 1539-8714 www.jasnh.com

Ten studies link hunger to reduced self-control. Higher levels of hunger-as assessed by self-report, time since last eating, or physiology-predicted reduced self-control, as indicated by increased racial prejudice, (hypothetical) sexual infidelity, passivity, accessibility of death thoughts and perceptions of task difficulty, as well as impaired Stroop performance and decreased self-monitoring. Increased rates of hunger across 200 countries predicted increased war killings, suggestive of reduced aggressive restraint. In a final experiment, self-reported hunger mediated the effect of hungry (v fed) participants performing worse on the Stroop task, suggesting a causal relationship of hunger reducing self-control.

Five studies supported the hypothesis that preclusion of air metabolite availability reduces conscious thought. Participants reported having fewer thoughts while having breathed through a bag without, rather than with, a hole at its end (Study 1). Participants who held their breath for 10 seconds reported having had fewer conscious thoughts than did participants who breathed normally (Study 2). Consistent with economic theories of resource scarcity increasing value, ratings of importance for a potpourri of items increased among participants who held their breath while rating those items, relative to ratings made by participants who breathed normally (Study 3), an effect that is mediated partly by effort expenditure, as suggested by selfreports of hiccup riddance (Study 4). Self-reported hunger correlated positively with ratings of importance of thought content (Study 5), raising plausibility of metabolite resource availability as an explanatory mechanism.

Two pilot and six studies indicated that poor self-control causes people to violate social norms and rules that are effortful to follow. Lower trait self-control was associated with a greater willingness to take ethical risks and use curse words. Participants who completed an initial self-control task that reduced the capacity for self-control used more curse words and were more willing to take ethical risks than participants who completed a neutral task. Poor self-control was also associated with violating explicit rules given by the experimenter. Depleting self-control resources in a self-control exercise caused participants subsequently to talk when they had been instructed to remain silent. Low trait self-control and poor performance on a behavioral measure of self-control (the Stroop task) predicted poor compliance following experimental instructions over a 2-week span. Poor self-control thus undermines adherence to some social rules and regulations, therefore possibly contributing to a broad variety of social ills.

The current work tested the hypothesis that a glucose drink would reduce worldview defense following mortality salience. Participants consumed either a glucose drink or placebo, wrote about either death or dental pain, and then completed a measure of worldview defense (viewing positively someone with pro-US views and viewing negatively someone with anti-US views). Mortality salience increased world- view defense among participants who consumed a placebo but not among participants who consumed a glucose drink. Glucose might reduce defensiveness after mortality salience by increasing the effectiveness of the self-controlled suppression of death-related thought, by providing resources to cope with mortality salience and reducing its threatening nature, or by distancing the individual from actual physical death.

This paper presents a literature review that indicate happiness as a state of freely available or surplus energy. Happiness is associated with good metabolism and glucose levels, fewer demands (from parenting, work, difficult social relationships, or personal threats), and goal achievement, as well as increased ease of processing, mental resources, social support, and monetary wealth. Each of these either provide or help conserve energy.

A growing body of research demonstrates that power promotes a fundamental orientation toward approach and agency. The current studies suggest that this tendency is moderated by dispositional anxiety. In two experiments, high levels of dispositional anxiety blocked the psychological effects of power. Although people low in anxiety responded to a power prime with greater willingness to take risks, those high in anxiety did not (Experiment 1). Similarly, whereas those low in social anxiety responded to power with increased sexual attraction toward a confederate, individuals high in social anxiety failed to show the same effect (Experiment 2). In both studies, the interaction between power and anxiety was statistically mediated by perceptions of reward. Although power enhanced people’s perceptions of reward, this effect was eliminated by high levels of dispositional anxiety. This research provides insight into how, and in whom, power promotes approach and agentic behavior.

The current study examined whether changes in glucose during a self-control task would predict changes in self-control performance later on. Participants attended two experimental sessions, spaced two weeks apart. During each session, they had their glucose measured, completed the Stroop task as a measure of self-control, and then had their glucose measured again. Larger decreases in glucose (from before to after the Stroop task) during the first session predicted larger increases in improvement on the Stroop task dur- ing the second session, in the form of increased speed. Learning self-controlmight benefit from using lar- ger amounts of glucose. Learning self-control is metabolically expensive. These findings raise the possi- bility that self-control fatigue occurs because metabolic energy is depleted during the learning of self- control.

Aggressive and violent behaviors are restrained by self-control. Self-control consumes a lot of glucose in the brain, suggesting that low glucose and poor glucose metabolism are linked to aggression and violence. Four studies tested this hypothesis. Study 1 found that participants who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than did participants who consumed a placebo beverage. Study 2 found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels and poor glucose metabolism) and aggressiveness through low self-control. Study 3 found that states with high diabetes rates also had high violent crime rates. Study 4 found that countries with high rates of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (a metabolic disorder related to low glucose levels) also had higher killings rates, both war related and non-war related. All four studies suggest that a spoonful of sugar helps aggressive and violent behaviors go down.

Numerous studies suggest that premenstrual syndrome (PMS) may be linked to impaired self-control since many of the symptoms of PMS are indicative of impaired self-control Evidence links PMS to increased difficulty controlling emotions, attention, and fine motor movements, increased intake of alcohol, drugs, nicotine, caffeine, and food, impaired work performance. and increased stress, aggression, criminal behavior. interpersonal conflicts, and passivity Empirical research demonstrates that self-control Is metabolically expensive and, as such, can be impaired when metabolic energy (i e, glucose) is low or processed ineffectively The expression of PMS is tightly linked to the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. a time in which considerable metabolic energy is allocated to the ovaries This increased ovarian metabolic demand could, therefore. divert energy away from. and thereby impair. other processes during this phase of the menstrual cycle Here. we propose a novel theory in which PMS symptoms are partly attributable to the diversion of metabolic energy to the ovaries and away from processes that benefit self-control