Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Motivation And Positive Affect On Ego Depletion: Replenishment Versus Release Mechanism, Ze Zhu, Jian Li, Bo Zhang, Ye Li, Houcan Zhang

Psychology Faculty Publications

In this study, 2 experiments were conducted to investigate whether motivation and positive affect can alleviate ego depletion and to elucidate their possible mechanisms. In Experiment 1, a crossing-out-letter task was adapted to reach an ego depletion state for Chinese participants. Participants were then randomly assigned to the extrinsic motivation group, the positive affect group or the depletion control group. After the experimental treatment, a dumbbell task was used to measure participants' remaining self-regulatory resources. The results showed that participants in the motivation and positive affect groups performed better on the dumbbell task than participants in the depletion control group. …