There are a few limitations to these studies. In Study 1,we chose to have participants think about the toaster attributes most important to an average college student to ensure this task was not inadvertently affirming. Future work should have participants make decisions that are important to them, but not in the values domain. In Study1, the experimental and control conditions were in separate runs, which is nonstandard for fMRI studies. Because self-affirmation findings sometimes show lasting effects(Cohen et al., 2006), this design was selected to provide participants with a break to prevent carryover