Self-Regulation

Question 1

Do people keep their New Years resolution?

Answer 1

On average, people only keep them till half way through Feb - most have to make lots of attempts before behaviour changes
52% say they don’t think they will succeed at doing it

Question 2

What is self-regulation?

Answer 2

Controlling your thoughts, feelings and behaviours in order to achieve your goals - successfully pursuing your goals
Involved many processes, such as deciding which goals to pursue in the first place, managing conflict between goals, and resting temptations

Question 3

What does self-regulation affect?

Answer 3

Lots of real world problems: obesity, sexually impulsive behaviour, alcohol, smoking, crime, gambling, pregnancy etc

Question 4

What is the marshmallow test?

Answer 4

Walter Mischel - measured 700 3-5 year olds, given marshmallow and left alone for 15 mins, if they left it, they got another one
1/3 children waited

Question 5

What did the marshmallow test predict?

Answer 5

Ones who couldn’t wait
As teenagers: worse academic achievement, social outcomes, behaviour problems
As adults: lower income, self-esteem ,take drugs, be obese, get divorced
Ability to defer gratification is the key for success in life

Question 6

How can self-control be measured?

Answer 6

Asking people to rate themselves on items - measure trait self-control

Question 7

What has the self-control scale showed?

Answer 7

There is a normal distribution, some people have very high and some very low

Question 8

What do scores on the self-control scale predict?

Answer 8

Success across all of their measures, but strongest for school and work but worst for weight - seems to be overwhelmingly beneficial and an adaptive trait, with no downside - but people give you more work as you seem more competent, over controlling will be bad but need to know when is best to use it

Question 9

What is the model of action phases?

Answer 9

Believes you have to come up with desires and wishes, and then there are 3 things you have to do: decision, action initiation and action outcomes
there are 4 phases involved:
pre decisional (decide)
precautional (plan)
action (do it)
postactional outcomes (did it work etc)
understand the stags involved in successful self-regulation

Question 10

What possible failures can be made when setting the goals?

Answer 10

Making faulty predictions about future emotions - we often make errors when performing affective forecasting - we over predict the impact of negative events and underestimate our ability to cope with things of importance. If we can’t accurately predict what will make us happy, we may make the wrong choices about what goals to pursue or how to pursue them

Question 11

Which option makes people happier?

Answer 11

Spending money on others
Buying experiences
Buying lots of small things
this is the opposite to what was predicted, people make poor decisions if they think the wrong thing will make them happy

Question 12

What possible failures can occur when coming up during the preactional phase?

Answer 12

Underestimating how long things take - planning fallacy - tendency to hold a confident belief that ones own project will go ahead as planned, even when knowing that similar projects have run late in the past

Question 13

Why does the planning fallacy occur?

Answer 13

People tend to focus on their future plans rather than their past actions - better to ask friends

Question 14

Evidence of the planning fallacy

Answer 14

Buechler et al asked 37 psychology students about their research project:
said it would take about 33.9 days, whereas it took 55.5 days - bad at making predictions about outcomes

Question 15

What possible failures can occur during the actional phase?

Answer 15

Giving in to temptation - there are always things which conflict with our goals, such as trying to eat healthy but really wanting chocolate

Question 16

Evidence for giving into temptation

Answer 16

Hoffman et al texted ppts 7 times a day for 1 week and asked if they were experiencing a desire - ppts reported currently experiencing a current or recent desire over three quarters of the time, and half conflicted with the ppts goals

Question 17

What is the strength model?

Answer 17

Self-control depends on a limited resource which is depleted when they exert self-control, leaving fewer resources available for subsequent self-control - when you use it, can run out but build it up over time

Question 18

Testing the strength model

Answer 18

Ecodepletion test - ask people to do a self-control task and then asked them to do a difficult task - measured how long it took them
people who exerted self-control in the first task performed more poorly on a subsequent task, compared to people who did not exert any self-control on the first task

Question 19

What is the eco depletion effect?

Answer 19

Self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion - this is controversial, lots of studies have seen it but some have failed to replicate it

Question 20

Why do we fail at self-regulation?

Answer 20

Lack of willpower, not planning to achieving a goal because you didn’t plan effectively
Planning fallacy
Making faulty predictions about emotions

Question 21

Can self-regulation be improved?

Answer 21

Some people have interpreted studies like the marshmallow set as evidence it is predetermined - but the existence of trait difference doesn’t mean people can’t improve the ability - it involves a set of skills that can be taught and learned - they’re acquirable

Question 22

How can self-regulation be improved through training?

Answer 22

Some people say through brain training which can be generalised to other tasks - but most of the skills that we acquire are specific to a particular task or domain, the idea that we can train a general cognitive ability in a way that will generalise to multiple domains in not supported by evidence

Question 23

What are the ways of improving self-regulation?

Answer 23

Precommitment

Selfcompassion

Question 24

What is precommitment?

Answer 24

Talking steps now to restrict options to have in the future - for example, not buying unhealthy foods. Doing future self a favour

Question 25

Evidence of precommitment

Answer 25

Students perform better when deadlines are every spaced out, they tested whether allowing students to set earlier deadlines would help them self-regulate - most set earlier deadlines but tended to cluster them at the end of term, and ended up with worse grades - shows we don’t recommit optimally

Question 26

What is self-compassion?

Answer 26

If you give yourself compassion, you will do better - the what the hell effect - negative effect to failure, think you may as well just failure, if you don’t be hard on yourself you will do better

Question 27

Evidence of self-compassion

Answer 27

Given a difficult test - self-esteem condition, control condition and self-compassion (don’t be too hard on yourself). then had an opportunity to study for test 2, and did another difficult test - students in the self-compassion conditions chose to spend longer studying for the second test, so did better

Question 28

What works for you?

Answer 28

Our beliefs about whether particular strategies are helpful may not be accurate; we have a strong incentive to rationalise our behaviour it occurs - we might justify procrastination by telling ourselves we do our best work at the last minute