ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that self-control processes leads people to become psychologically alienated from their emotional preferences. Alienation tendencies are associated with various psychological problems, like learned helplessness, persistent negative emotion, and psychosomatic symptoms. Karl Marx's ideas influenced psychologist Erich Fromm, who regarded alienation as a psychological condition that is caused by greed and materialist values. The chapter proposes a new theoretical model of alienation that is termed as the ego fixation hypothesis. Initial studies on ego fixation were conducted in the domain of consumer psychology. According to the affective modulation model, state-oriented individual's proclivity towards self-infiltration is due to these individual's inability to down-regulate negative effect. The extension of the ego fixation model is the somatic neglect hypothesis. Self-regulation is often equated with a kind of inner battle, in which people must struggle to gain a hold over the hot emotional impulses that interfere with their cold, cognitively represented goals.
