ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that, just as with pain, distress inspires people to engage self-control to remediate situations where things have actually or potentially gone awry. Pain is related to physical and social damage and recruits unpleasant feelings and sensations. Self-control refers to the mental capacity individuals use to influence their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The affect alarm model suggests that self-control is instigated by conflict, by which we mean any disagreement or discrepancy between competing mental representations, response tendencies, or actual behavior. Conflict also plays a large role in a prominent cognitive neuroscience theory of control, conflict monitoring theory. Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST), goal conflict activates the motivational system that is responsible for the braking or stopping of ongoing behavior, the behavioral inhibition system (BIS). The evidence for conflict's aversive nature comes from work on the error-related negativity (ERN), a negative voltage deflection in the event-related brain potential.
