Action‐orientation shields against primed cognitive conflict effects on effort‐related cardiac response.

This article presents a quasi‐experiment (N = 79 university students) testing whether individual differences in action‐state orientation moderate primed cognitive conflict's effects on sympathetically mediated cardiac response during task performance reflecting effort. Action control theory posits that action‐oriented individuals are less receptive to distracting affective stimuli during goal pursuit than state‐oriented individuals because action‐orientation is related to higher volitional skills. Therefore, we expected that action‐oriented individuals should be shielded against conflict primes' effect on effort‐related responses in the cardiovascular system. By contrast, state‐oriented individuals should be more sensitive to irrelevant negative affective stimulation and therefore mobilize higher resources under such conditions. Responses of the cardiac pre‐ejection period (PEP) during a moderately difficult short‐term memory task corroborated these predictions. The present findings provide the first evidence that individual differences in action‐state orientation indeed moderate previously demonstrated cognitive conflict priming effects on effort‐related cardiac response and extend recent findings on action shielding. Taking a volitional perspective, action control theory predicts that individual differences in action‐state orientation—an action control capacity—moderate individuals' sensitivity to affective distractors. As predicted, state‐oriented individuals showed stronger cardiac pre‐ejection period reactivity after conflict primes than after non‐conflict primes, while action‐oriented participants showed low reactivity in both conditions. That is, action‐orientation shields individuals against irrelevant negative affective stimulation on effort‐related cardiac response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]