• Hugo J E M Alberts, Carolien Martijn, Judith Greb, Harald Merckelbach, and Nanne K de Vries.
• Universiteit Maastricht, Faculty of Psychology, Experimental Psychololgy, PO box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. j.alberts@psychology.unimaas.nl
• Br J Soc Psychol. 2007 Jun 1; 46 (Pt 2): 383-99.

AbstractResearch has shown that repeated exercise of self-control leads to impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, a phenomenon labelled ego depletion. The current research investigates the influence of automatic processes on self-control performance. Study 1 shows that activation of persistence leads to stable self-control performance and may help to overcome effects of ego depletion. Initially depleted participants kept their physical self-control performances constant when primed with persistence. If such a prime was absent, self-control performance of depleted participants decreased indicating ego depletion. Using a different manipulation, these findings were replicated in Study 2.

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