Compare methods

	Ego Depletion Paradigm	Facial EMG
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1986
Originator	Roy Baumeister and colleagues	John Cacioppo, Richard Petty and colleagues
Type	Sequential-task experimental paradigm	Psychophysiological affect-measurement method
Seminal source	Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252-1265.	Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Losch, M. E., & Kim, H. S. (1986). Electromyographic activity over facial muscle regions can differentiate the valence and intensity of affective reactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 260-268.
Aliases	Self-Control Depletion Paradigm, Dual-Task Self-Control Paradigm, Strength Model Paradigm	Facial Electromyography, EMG Affect Measurement, Corrugator-Zygomaticus EMG
Related	3	3
Summary	The ego depletion paradigm, introduced by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice in 1998, tests the strength model of self-control, which holds that acts of self-regulation draw on a limited, shared resource that becomes temporarily depleted with use. In the classic dual-task design, participants first perform a task requiring self-control -- such as resisting tempting food, suppressing emotion, or overriding a habitual response -- or an equivalent task without such demands, and then perform a second, unrelated self-control task. The prediction is that those who exerted self-control on the first task perform worse on the second, exhibiting ego depletion. The 1998 demonstrations were highly influential and generated a vast literature, but large-scale replication efforts in the 2010s yielded weak or inconsistent results, making ego depletion a central case in debates about replicability and prompting theoretical revisions and stricter methodological standards.	Facial electromyography (EMG) measures affect by recording the tiny electrical signals produced by facial muscles, providing an objective, continuous index of emotional valence and intensity that can detect reactions too subtle or fleeting to produce a visible expression. Cacioppo, Petty, Losch, and Kim showed in 1986 that activity over two muscle regions differentiates affect: the corrugator supercilii (the brow muscle that furrows in frowning) increases with negative affect, while the zygomaticus major (the cheek muscle that pulls in smiling) increases with positive affect, and amplitudes scale with the intensity of the reaction. Because surface electrodes capture muscle activity even when no overt expression occurs, facial EMG offers a sensitive, hard-to-fake measure of evaluative responses widely used in research on attitudes, emotion, persuasion, and social perception, often paired with reaction-time and self-report measures.