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Chronic stress, executive functioning, and real‐life self‐control: An experience sampling study
Author(s) -
Wolff Max,
Enge Sören,
Kräplin Anja,
Krönke KlausMartin,
Bühringer Gerhard,
Smolka Michael N.,
Goschke Thomas
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/jopy.12587
Subject(s) - psychology , chronic stress , cognition , stress (linguistics) , self control , executive functions , developmental psychology , structural equation modeling , control (management) , experience sampling method , clinical psychology , social psychology , psychiatry , neuroscience , linguistics , philosophy , statistics , mathematics , management , economics
Objective To test the hypothesis that chronic stress impairs the use of cognitive control for self‐control, we examined how chronic stress affects the relation between individual differences in general executive functioning (GEF) and self‐control in real‐life situations. Method About 338 young adults with varying degrees of chronic stress underwent experience sampling of real‐life self‐control for 7 days and completed a battery of nine executive function tasks from which a latent variable representing individual differences in GEF was derived. Results Structural equation models showed that higher levels of chronic stress were associated with stronger desires and a less negative relationship between GEF and desire strength. Chronic stress and GEF did not predict desire enactment in situations where effortful resistance was attempted. Conclusions These findings suggest that chronic stress may impair self‐control by reducing the use of cognitive control for “early” desire regulation strategies while leaving “late” resistance strategies unaffected. That relationships between executive functioning and real‐life self‐control can be moderated by third factors such as chronic stress may to some extent explain the common finding of weak or missing associations between laboratory measures of executive functioning and real‐life self‐control.