Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults
Self-regulation depletion (SRD), or ego-depletion, refers to decrements in self-regulation performance immediately following a different self-regulation-demanding activity. There are now over a hundred studies reporting SRD across a broad range of tasks and conditions. However, most studies have use...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
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Public Library of Science
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14045 |
| _version_ | 1848748514771730432 |
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| author | Dahm, T. Neshat-Doost, H. Golden, A. Horn, E. Hagger, Martin Dagleish, T. |
| author_facet | Dahm, T. Neshat-Doost, H. Golden, A. Horn, E. Hagger, Martin Dagleish, T. |
| author_sort | Dahm, T. |
| building | Curtin Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | Self-regulation depletion (SRD), or ego-depletion, refers to decrements in self-regulation performance immediately following a different self-regulation-demanding activity. There are now over a hundred studies reporting SRD across a broad range of tasks and conditions. However, most studies have used young student samples. Because prefrontal brain regions thought to subserve self-regulation do not fully mature until 25 years of age, it is possible that SRD effects are confined to younger populations and are attenuated or disappear in older samples. We investigated this using the Stroop color task as an SRD induction and an autobiographical memory task as the outcome measure. We found that younger participants (<25 years) were susceptible to depletion effects, but found no support for such effects in an older group (40–65 years). This suggests that the widely-reported phenomenon of SRD has important developmental boundary conditions casting doubt on claims that it represents a general feature of human cognition. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T07:06:15Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | curtin-20.500.11937-14045 |
| institution | Curtin University Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T07:06:15Z |
| publishDate | 2011 |
| publisher | Public Library of Science |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | curtin-20.500.11937-140452017-09-13T14:06:27Z Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults Dahm, T. Neshat-Doost, H. Golden, A. Horn, E. Hagger, Martin Dagleish, T. Self-regulation depletion (SRD), or ego-depletion, refers to decrements in self-regulation performance immediately following a different self-regulation-demanding activity. There are now over a hundred studies reporting SRD across a broad range of tasks and conditions. However, most studies have used young student samples. Because prefrontal brain regions thought to subserve self-regulation do not fully mature until 25 years of age, it is possible that SRD effects are confined to younger populations and are attenuated or disappear in older samples. We investigated this using the Stroop color task as an SRD induction and an autobiographical memory task as the outcome measure. We found that younger participants (<25 years) were susceptible to depletion effects, but found no support for such effects in an older group (40–65 years). This suggests that the widely-reported phenomenon of SRD has important developmental boundary conditions casting doubt on claims that it represents a general feature of human cognition. 2011 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14045 10.1371/journal.pone.0026351 Public Library of Science fulltext |
| spellingShingle | Dahm, T. Neshat-Doost, H. Golden, A. Horn, E. Hagger, Martin Dagleish, T. Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title | Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title_full | Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title_fullStr | Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title_full_unstemmed | Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title_short | Age shall not weary us: Deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| title_sort | age shall not weary us: deleterious effects of self-regulation depletion are specific to younger adults |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14045 |