ABSTRACT People with autonomous motives (e.g., personal importance) may use automated strategies to effortlessly sustain goal-directed behavior and overcome obstacles. We investigated whether conscious effort, ease of goal striving, physiological effort, and the number of obstacles encountered mediate relations between motives and goal attainment for a competitive cycling goal. Additionally, half the participants (n = 57) were trained in Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) – a technique that facilitates development of goal-directed behavior – with remaining participants (n = 54) treated as controls. Conscious investment of effort mediated relations between autonomous motives and goal attainment. Subjective ease of goal striving and physiological effort did not. This result indicates that successful goal striving is not perceived as effortless for autonomously motivated individuals working on competitive goals. Conversely, MCII predicted a reduction in obstacles, which in turn was associated with easier goal striving but not goal attainment. Although MCII did not support goal attainment in the current study, its ability to minimize the influence of obstacles may still be useful for other types of goals or for sustaining long-term goal pursuit.

Previous research has identified a variety of ways to mitigate the ego-depletion effect (ie, whereby exerting self-control in a first task impairs performance in a second self-control task). In the present chapter, we discuss if–then planning (ie, forming implementation intentions; IIs) as an easily applicable self-regulation tool that can help individuals and groups to overcome major threats to effective task performance. After a short overview of research on ego depletion, the moderators of the ego-depletion effect, and recent conceptual developments, we review studies that have directly tested II effects on ego depletion. We differentiate between studies investigating whether IIs can prevent individuals from becoming depleted from studies exploring whether IIs can help participants to overcome the negative consequences of being depleted in subsequent self-control tasks. Because the self-regulation threat of being depleted often cooccurs with other self-regulation threats, we then expand our view to determine whether IIs can have beneficial effects not only with regard to self-regulatory resource depletion but also to other major threats to self-regulation: impulse control and cue exposure, emotional and social distress, lapse-activated pattern and abstinence violations, impairments in self-monitoring and self-awareness, the disruptive influence of other people, and alcohol intoxication. We also review research on the regulation of detrimental self-states (eg, being anxious) by IIs, and on new methods to strengthen self-regulation by combining IIs with helpful strategies such as self-affirmation, setting autonomous goals, and mental contrasting. Finally, we discuss all of these findings and their implications for both the original and more recent conceptual explications of the ego-depletion phenomenon as well as for II research, and point to venues for future investigation.

Implementation intentions are if-then plans that create a mental link between a situational cue and a goal-directed response that people can form to help them achieve emotion regulation goals more effectively. The main goal of this study was to determine if forming the goal intention to not get disgusted together with a perspective taking implementation intention is more effective than forming the goal intention to not get disgusted that spells out the same perspective taking strategy but without linking it to the cue. Eighty-six female participants viewed disgusting, neutral, and pleasant pictures under four instructions: no emotion regulation instructions (CG), the goal intention to not get disgusted (GI), this goal intention furnished with the perspective taking regulation strategy (GI-PT), and this goal intention in tandem with the perspective taking implementation intention (PT-II). Compared with CG, GI, and GI-PT participants, PT-II participants showed a significantly larger decrease in disgust when seeing the disgusting pictures. This effect remained constant across repeated exposure to the critical contents and was larger among individuals who did not consciously try to reappraise the disgusting pictures than among individuals who consciously tried to reappraise them. Valence rating, arousal rating, and sympathetic activity did not significantly differ between conditions. We conclude that it is the if(situational cue)-then(goal-directed response) link created by forming the perspective taking implementation intention that accounts for the positive effect on disgust and not simply the information about the perspective taking behavior to adopt.