The Schematic Association Between Self-Control and Reduced Vitality

Previous research found a loss in subjective vitality after the completion of self-control tasks. Therefore, we assumed that self-control and decreased vitality are schematically associated in memory. In an experiment on MTurk, we asked 301 participants to take the perspective of the main characters of two stories. First, all participants read the same story about a person who did not exercise self-control. The participants were then randomly assigned either a story in which the main character controlled his/her actions (self-control group), or a story without such self-control (control group). After each story the participants indicated how vital the main character would feel at the end of the story. The vitality ratings of the groups did not differ with regard to the first story. However, as expected, the self-control group gave lower vitality ratings than the control group regarding the second story. The findings have implications for research on ego depletion.