Control of impulsive emotional behaviour through implementation intentions

Abstract

Past research has established that people can strategically enhance or override impulsive emotional behaviour with implementation intentions (Eder, Rothermund, & Proctor, 2010). However, it is unclear whether emotional action tendencies change by intentional processes or by habit formation processes due to repeated enactment of the intention (or both). The present study shows that forming implementation intentions is sufficient to modulate emotional action tendencies. Participants received instructions about how to respond to positive and negative stimuli on evaluation trials but no such trials were actually presented. Results showed that merely intending to approach and avoid affective stimuli influenced emotional action tendencies in a modified affective Simon task in which affective valence was irrelevant. An affective Simon effect (i.e., faster reactions when the valence of the stimulus corresponded with the valence of the movement) was observed when participants intended evaluations with affectively congruent responses (i.e., positive–approach, negative–avoid); in contrast, the effect was reversed in direction when participants planned evaluations with incongruent responses (i.e., positive–avoid, negative–approach). Thus, implementation intentions can regulate implicit emotional responses even in the absence of possible habit formation processes. Implications for dual-system accounts of emotion regulation are discussed.

Keywords:

• Approach and avoidance
• Automated emotion regulation
• Impulsive behaviour control
• Implementation intention
• Reflective–impulsive model

Notes

¹In contrast to general goal intentions (“I want to achieve z!”), implementation intentions additionally specify when, where, and how to pursue a goal (“When I encounter x, then I will perform behaviour y to achieve z!”). In the present research, evaluation represents the goal intention that was additionally furnished with implementation intentions that specify when (red border), where (picture content), and how (lever movement) to evaluate. With congruent and incongruent response instructions for the evaluation task, people thus prepare different sets of implementation intentions that link opposite responses to affective valence.

²Note that this prediction applies only to withholding a negated behavioural response but not to other types of inhibitory control like resistance to distracter interference, selective attention, and global response suppression (Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Hofmann et al., 2009). In fact, evidence is available that in selective-attention conditions temptation-inhibiting intentions (e.g., “If I encounter a distraction, then I will ignore it!”) are even more effective than task-facilitating intentions (e.g., “If I encounter a distraction, then I will focus harder on the task!”) to resist distractions (Parks-Stamm et al., 2010; Patterson & Mischel, 1976; see Gollwitzer, Bayer, & McCulloch, 2005, for an overview). Furthermore, people can strategically switch from an intention specifying a negated unwanted response (e.g., “If I see a TV ad, then I will not look at it”) to one specifying a wanted response (e.g., “If I see a TV ad, then I will switch the TV channel”). Thus, multiple regulatory strategies exist to cope with unwanted behavioural tendencies, and researchers should carefully distinguish between different types of control functions when evaluating the hypothesis of ironic control effects.