Until recently, researchers couldn’t offer much help. In dozens of studies, they looked unsuccessfully for telltale emotional reactions, turning up either contradictory results or nothing at all. Being depleted didn’t seem to consistently make people feel depressed or angry or discontented. In 2010, when an international team of researchers combed through the results of more than eighty studies, they concluded that ego depletion’s effects on behavior were strong, large, and reliable, but that the effects on subjective feelings were considerably weaker. People in depleted condition reported
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