As the universities settle into their routines of
lecture, tutorials and maybe labs for some students, the frequency of wild
parties has decreased and normality is returning to university towns. The
muttering from the older population about the lack of self-control of the young
has also faded to its normal background level.
Self-control has been an active area of
psychological and cognition studies for some time. The frontal lobes of your
brain are where the struggle goes on. The more you have to struggle, the
greater the degree of tiredness – just like your leg muscles as you climb up
stairs – or so the received wisdom goes.
The technospeak is that you experience
self-regulation depletion after experiencing a bout of self-regulation
demanding activity. Universities are, of course, great places to study this.
They have adequate supplies of eager lab rats to try things on among the
continuously renewed supply of undergrads shipped in each year.
Dahm et al
have recognized a problem with this source of lab rats, though, and have just
published a study which illustrates it (1). They point out that our pre-frontal
lobes are not fully developed until we are 25 or so, and thus the 20-year olds
rushing into the labs to be experimental subjects are not well-armed for the
self-control battle. It’s not just that they may be lacking in practice but
their ‘self-control muscle’ is still in the building stage.
The experimental program for their paper used a
cohort of 40-60 year olds as well as
undergrads and exercised their self-control muscles using a Stroop test. That’s
the one where subjects have to read the words for a series of colors that are
printed in inks of a different color to the one that the word describes. They
were then subjected to an autobiographical memory test in which accuracy was
measured. Of course control groups made sure that they wouldn’t draw false
conclusions.
The undergrads showed much greater self-regulatory
depletion than the ‘oldies’ who didn’t show very much, confirming our prejudice that we oldies have more self-control than those noisy youngsters. The authors warn their
colleagues about the possible bias lurking in a large number of cognitive studies
because their subject’s brains were not fully matured.
So next time you lie awake at 2 A.M. listening to
the student bacchanalia next door, just remember that they are still in the
process of strengthening their resistance to self-regulatory depletion by
beefing up their frontal lobes. Dousing them with alcohol makes the exercise
more challenging, just like increasing the weights on the exercise machine in
the gym.
