Assessment of Individual Differences in Regulatory Focus among Cigarette Smokers

Smoking cessation programs might benefit from tailoring messages to individual differences in regulatory focus (see Higgins, American Psychologist, 52:1280–1300, 1997), but there is little evidence on the stability or convergent validity of regulatory focus measures. In two studies, smokers completed four measures of regulatory focus: (a) Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ); (b) actual–ideal and actual–ought self-discrepancies; (c) response duration in naming ideal or ought self-guides; and (d) reaction time for lexical decisions about one’s ideal or ought self-guides. Study 1 included a 1-month retest. Retest reliability was adequate, but convergent validity was poor. Questionnaire and self-discrepancy measures were unrelated to each other or to the reaction time measures. To facilitate future studies of tailored health behavior change interventions, research is needed to determine whether weak convergent validity resulted from (a) invalidity of some or all of the regulatory focus measures or (b) validity of each for measuring a different aspect of the construct.