Guilty pleasures and grim necessities: affective attitudes in dilemmas of self-control

Do self-control situations pit controlled reason against impulsive emotion, or do some emotions support the controlled choice? A pilot study of self-control attitudes found ambivalence between hedonic affect associated with short-term perspectives and self-conscious affect associated with the long term. In Study 1, negative self-conscious affect accompanied higher self-control among delayed-cost dilemmas ("guilty pleasures") but not delayed-benefit dilemmas ("grim necessities"). Study 2 showed that hedonic affect was more accessible than was self-conscious affect, but this difference was less among high self-control dilemmas. In Study 3, unobtrusively primed self-conscious emotion words caused dieters to eat less if the emotions were negative, more if positive. Hedonic positive and negative emotion words had the opposite effect. Self-conscious emotional associations, then, can support self-control if brought to mind before the chance to act.