آغازگر نقاب دار اولین نام واکنش پذیری تلاش مربوط به قلبی عروقی را افزایش می دهد

Abstract Recent research on motivational intensity has shown that explicit manipulations of self-focused attention (e.g., mirrors and video cameras) increase effort-related cardiovascular responses during active coping. An experiment examined whether masked first name priming, an implicit manipulation of self-focused attention, had similar effects. Participants (n = 52 young adults) performed a self-paced cognitive task, in which they were told to get as many trials correct as possible within 5 min. During the task, the participant's first name was primed for 0%, 33%, 67%, or 100% of the trials. First name priming, regardless of its frequency, significantly increased cardiovascular reactivity, particularly systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity. Furthermore, the priming manipulation interacted with individual differences in trait self-focus: trait self-focus predicted higher SBP reactivity in the 0% condition, but first name priming eliminated the effects of individual differences. Implications for self-awareness research and for the emerging interest in priming effects on effort are considered.

Introduction When people focus attention on the self, they evaluate the self against standards, norms, and goals. Self-focus enables people to monitor their performance and to evaluate whether they have fallen short of a goal, so it is a central mechanism in self-regulation and goal striving (Carver, 2003 and Duval and Silvia, 2001). Most of the research on how self-focus affects motivational processes has measured motivation using self-reports, behavioral measures of persistence (how long people spend working on a task), or how well people perform (for reviews, see Carver and Scheier, 1998 and Silvia and Duval, 2001a).Recent work, however, has examined how self-focus affects physiological outcomes, particularly cardiovascular reactivity, during the goal striving process (Gendolla et al., 2008, Silvia and al., 2011 and Silvia et al., 2010). Research on self-focus and effort-related cardiovascular reactivity has used Brehm's motivational intensity theory as a framework (Brehm and Self, 1989 and Brehm et al., 1983). Wright (1996) integrated this theory with Obrist's (1981) active coping approach to develop a model of the cardiovascular dynamics of effort regulation. According to motivational intensity theory, the intensity of motivation is a function of the importance of success and the difficulty of behaviors needed to achieve the goal. For fixed-difficulty tasks, cardiovascular reactivity is a function of task difficulty, provided that success is possible and the goal is worth the effort. Reactivity is low when tasks are easy, increases as tasks become more challenging, and then declines when achieving the goal is impossible or requires more effort than is justified by the goal's importance (for reviews, see Gendolla and Richter, 2010 and Wright and Kirby, 2001). For unfixed-difficulty tasks — also known as self-paced, piece-rate, and “do your best” tasks — people can work at their own pace and thus set their own level of challenge, so cardiovascular reactivity is a function of potential motivation (Wright et al., 2002). Self-focused attention, by inducing self-evaluation, makes achieving a goal more significant and self-relevant (Gendolla and Richter, 2010). As a result, self-focus should increase potential motivation, the amount of effort that is justified. Research thus far has supported the application of motivational intensity theory to self-focused attention. For unfixed-difficulty(self-paced) tasks, self-focused people showed higher cardiovascular reactivity, particularly systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity (Gendolla et al., 2008). For fixed-difficulty tasks, self-focused people didn't show greater SBP reactivity for easy or for impossible tasks, for which effort wasn't required or justified, but they did show greater SBP reactivity for tasks of intermediate difficulty (Gendolla et al., 2008, Study 2; Silvia et al., 2010). Furthermore, these interactive effects of self-focus and task difficulty on SBP reactivity have been replicated in research that assessed stable individual differences in trait self-focus instead of manipulating self-focus (Silvia et al., 2011). To date, however, studies of self-focus and cardiovascular reactivity have used only explicit manipulations of self-focus. These manipulations pose people with obvious, salient reminders of the self, and they evoke strong feelings of self-consciousness. Common explicit manipulations involve having participants sit in front of a mirror during the experiment (Phillips and Silvia, 2005), videotaping the participants and showing their image on a monitor (Duval, 1976, Silvia and Duval, 2001b and Silvia and Phillips, 2004), or making participants feel distinctive (Silvia and Eichstaedt, 2004 and Snow et al., 2004). A smaller tradition of self-awareness research, however, has explored implicit manipulations of self-focused attention. These manipulations direct attention to self and activate self-knowledge unobtrusively. The most common implicit manipulation is masked name priming. In one study, people were presented their last names (surnames) for 30 ms, followed by a 30 ms mask (Macrae et al., 1998). Last name priming significantly affected the self-regulation of social stereotypes. In recent work, masked first name priming (presenting the name for 27 ms and a mask for 100 ms) made people more likely to behave according to salient situational standards (Silvia and Phillips, under review). Another experiment showed that priming self-relevant pronouns (presenting “I” for 17 ms, followed by a 1000 ms mask) influenced affective regulation (Koole and Coenen, 2007). It's currently unknown how implicit manipulations of self-focus would affect cardiovascular reactivity during active coping. Given that implicit and explicit self-focus manipulations replicate each other and evoke the same self-evaluative and self-regulatory mechanisms, one would expect implicit self-focus to have the same influence on effort-related cardiovascular reactivity. Testing the effects of name priming on effort is valuable for several reasons. First, it extends the large literature on self-focused attention and motivation into new directions, given that most of that literature was developed prior to psychology's interest in implicit processes. Second, studying name priming extends an emerging interest in implicit processes in effort regulation, such as how masked primes influence the perceived difficulty of goal attainment or an orientation to act (Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010 and Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2011). Finally, it's unclear how manipulated self-focus and trait self-focus jointly influence effort-related cardiovascular reactivity. Past work has shown effects for state self-focus (Gendolla et al., 2008 and Silvia et al., 2010) and for trait self-focus (Silvia et al., 2011). Self-focus research, however, often finds interactions between manipulated and measured self-focus (e.g., Buss and Scheier, 1976, Carver and Scheier, 1978 and Kleinke et al., 1998). In a recent review, Fenigstein (2009) remarked that the nature of these interactions remains obscure — some studies find that state manipulations diminish the effects of individual differences (e.g., Carver and Scheier, 1978), whereas other studies find that state self-focus amplifies the effects of individual differences (e.g., Brockner, 1979) — so it is important for research to untangle how states and traits interact.

Conclusion The present experiment extended recent research on how self-focused attention influences the intensity of effort-related cardiovascular activity. Based on motivational intensity theory (Brehm and Self, 1989), we expected that masked first name priming would make success more important, thereby increasing the amount of effort that people would be willing to expend. Consistent with the theory, masked first name priming during a self-paced cognitive task significantly increased SBP reactivity. Prime frequency (33%, 67%, or 100% of the trials) made little difference. Furthermore, individual differences in trait self-focus interacted with the name priming manipulation. Trait self-focus predicted higher SBP reactivity in the control condition, but name priming wiped out the effects of trait self-focus. Taken together, the present findings extend work on self-focus and motivational intensity, which has used only manipulations of conscious self-focus, as well as the emerging literature on how priming affects effort-related physiology.