This study discusses importance of self-regulation in daily life and explains ego-depletion as well as the positive effect of motivation on self-control for people who are experiencing ego-depletion. In pain, also, importance of self-regulation has been discussed and the study proposed problems related to lack of research on prevention of and solution to ego-depletion. For that reason, this study aimed to examine importance of ego-depletion in pain and effect of motivation.
This study was conducted with 72 female students of liberal arts classes at a university in Daejeon as subjects. The average age of the subjects was 20.46 years (SD=2.44), ranging from 18 to 28. For the experiment, first, cold pressor test (CPT) was used to measure pain tolerance and divide the subjects into high depletion group and low depletion group, by measuring the immersion time. Next, they were divided into high motivation and low motivation groups according to their motivation level, and, lastly, immersion time in CPT was measured. For analysis, two way ANOVA was performed. For post-hoc anlaysis, simple main effect was performed.
The analysis result showed that there was a significant correlation between the level of depletion and that of motivation. Also, main effect of motivation was observed, while there was no significant main effect from the level of depletion. In the post-hoc analysis, main effect of motivation was found in the high depletion group.
The conclusion of this study suggests that, in the state of higher depletion, motivation reduces pain-avoidance behavior. This implies importance of motivation on pain tolerance in the state of ego-depletion. This study had limitation because the subjects were only female students. Also, in the CPT, individual threshold value on pain was not controlled. Lastly, the test was not performed on actual patients with pain and, therefore, the study was limited in causal interpretation. However, this study has a clinical significance because it provided basis for relevance of motivation in the state of ego-depletion to pain tolerance, which is a known cause of chronic pain.