Friday QotD: Self Regulation Edition

Note:  This was supposed to be Friday's qotd, but I just plain forgot to undraft it.

 
This weekend, I'm going to a meet-and-greet with the ladyfriend, meeting the faculty and staff of the department in which she is working for this year.  I will dress well (likely a brown corduroy sport coat with leather elbow patches, cause what's a doctorate for, if not for such articles of clothing?).  My conversation at the party will consist of polite and interesting questions, short and disarming answers, and no fart jokes whatsoever.  These aren't instructions given to me by the lady, but rather these are things I know well from my relatively civilized upbringing.  Now, in order to behave this well, I need to inhibit all kinds of things that in my field we call "pre-potent responses."  I will need to self-regulate, use all of my human-brain and neocortex to keep myself from saying and doing inappropriate things, because social situations make me kind of want to be inappropriate.

Follow below the fold for more flabbity-bloo about self-regulation.
In psychology, we generally accept that there is some function in the brain that prevents us from doing the first thing that comes to mind, something that allows us to plan ahead and make judgements about what is right to do.  The research tends to converge on the prefrontal cortex (the area just behind the forehead, and the area whose relative size distinguishes us from other animals) as the region of the brain that allows us to inhibit our base reactions and impulses.  As interesting as the neuroscience end of this issue is, I like a series of studies by a scientist named Roy Baumeister at Florida State.

Baumeister asked whether our ability to inhibit prepotent responses and plan ahead might be a limited resource.  An analogy that might make a bit more sense is limited nature of attention -- we can only pay attention to a limited amount of information at the same time.  This is why the cell phone/driving thing is such a bad idea, because if you're attending to the conversation at any level, you're diverting resources from attending to the road.  (See Dr. David Strayer at University of Utah for the fundamental research on this notion).  Baumeister and his colleagues asked whether self-control might be similarly limited, but rather than functioning in real-time (such that we can only inhibit so many responses), these researchers looked at self-control over a relatively long time course, and they discovered something called Ego Depletion.

Now, this is not the typical ego described in Freudian "psychology," but rather a nickname for the notion that the control and regulation of the self can be used up, in a manner of speaking.  To study this question, the researchers asked three  groups of participants to sit in a room for a little while (I forget how long, maybe 10-20 minutes?) while looking at a table holding either nothing (the control condition), a bowl of radishes, or a big plate of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.  The participants were asked to just wait and not touch the food (if it was there) and that their experiment would begin soon.  (As a side note, they were really evil in this one -- they baked the cookies IN THE ROOM just prior to the experimental session.)  After the waiting time was up, the participants were asked to solve a problem on pencil and paper -- the problems were not solvable, inasmuch as they had no correct solution.  

The experimenters measured how long it took for the participants to give up.  The group that sat and stared at the cookies gave up in less than half the time that the other two groups (who did not differ) gave up.  The experimenters say that this is congruent with the hypothesis that self-control is a limited resources, as the participants were inhibiting the response to reach out and EAT THE COOKIES, but in the radish condition, they didn't exactly have to work hard to not eat the radishes.  This notion of ego depletion has been challenged (extensively), but I think it's an interesting idea that actually seems to have a neurally plausible mechanism (i.e., neurons in the prefrontal cortex can only fire so many times before they need some time to recover).  

Now, what does that have to do with me at a fancy cocktail party, behaving myself and impressing everyone with my kind, gentlemanly bearing?  Well, my first instinct at parties is generally to tell dick and fart jokes, as these are among the funniest known to humankind.  That being said, not everyone can relax enough to enjoy them, or maybe they just don't know enough about dicks and farts.  So I have to behave, because the ladyfriend needs to look good in front of her coworkers.  

The question I have for you all relates to this ego depletion thing.  Does it find support in your life experience?  I guess I'm asking you to look back in time at situations where you had to inhibit yourself for extended periods of time, and then to try and remember whether you were "tapped out" and acting really bizarrely afterwards.  

Have you ever been so "ego-depleted" that you got yourself in trouble?  If so, how did you recover?

Do you think that we can practice self-control, such that we become better and better at it?

Are you suspecting that all of this is just leading up to some stupid joke about premature ejaculation?

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