La réévaluation cognitive pour maîtriser la tentation en situation d'apprentissage

One of the major obstacles in the learning process is temptation, which has the power to divert students from even their most important goals (e.g. getting a degree). Recently, Magen and Gross (2007) proposed an alternative strategy to manage temptation, namely cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal refers to changing the meaning of a situation in order to modify its emotional impact (Gross, 1998). In our studies, participants had to memorize tedious material (or had to search for information on the Internet) while being tempted by pictures pasted on the wall, by funny clips on the television or by Internet. After obtaining a baseline measure of their ability to resist temptation, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition (no-reappraisal), a reappraisal condition (thinking of the situation as a test of willpower or as an opportunity to improve their memory) or an obedience condition (obeying of the instruction to do the task properly). Compared to the control condition and the obedience condition, results showed that participants who were instructed to reappraise the situation (1) were less tempted by temptation and, (2) showed better performance in a subsequent test. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that cognitive reappraisal seems to be behaviourally beneficial (a decrease in temptation) and cognitively beneficial (an increase in performance).(PSY 3) -- UCL, 201