Diminished desire: a route to effortless self-control?

Self-control is essential to human functioning. It makes for healthy and happy lives through successful academic and career performance, interpersonal relationships, and generally successful pursuit of long-term goals. However, the modus operandi of self-control remains unclear. Existing models of self-control view self-control as being dependent on a resource that can be depleted with exertion of that self-control. However, in real-life, someone who is proficient at self-control is not someone who fails in all subsequent self-control tasks following one self-control exercise. Thus, dispositional self-control may not operate under the same conditions as state self-control in laboratory settings. Furthermore, recent studies have offered a new perspective on self-control. For instance, in a recent diary study on temptations, participants with high self-control indicated experiencing less desire for temptations in daily life. These findings call for the disentangling of different processes underlying dispositional self-control, and the research presented will do so, starting with the role of desire in self-control. Studies will be presented demonstrating that dispositional self-control predicts differences in desire. Desire is made up of several components. The present studies show that high dispositional self-control is associated with less explicit as well as implicit hedonic activation in the face of temptation compared to low self-control. High dispositional self-control is also associated with less positive affective valence derived from temptations compared to low dispositional self-control. The findings are discussed in the light of the construct of self-control and combined with other recent findings showing that the secret of successful self-control may lie in automatic processes, enabling avoidance of undesired behaviors.