TY - JOUR

T1 - The self-regulation of face touching - a preregistered experiment testing if-then plans as a means to promote COVID-19 prevention

AU - Keller, Lucas

AU - Kabengele, Marie Claire

AU - Gollwitzer, Peter M.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2023/8

Y1 - 2023/8

N2 - Objective: Reducing face touching could help slow COVID-19’s spread. We tested whether implementation intentions, a simple-to-use behaviour change intervention, reduce face-touching behaviour effectively. Design: In this pre-registered online study, we utilised a novel way to collect behavioural data during a pandemic. We obtained video recordings of 156 adults while performing three engaging tasks for four minutes each. After the baseline task, participants formed the goal to avoid touching their faces; some participants also formed implementation intentions, targeting either the frequency or duration of face touching. Main Outcome Measures: The 468 videos were rated by two independent raters for face touching frequency and duration. Results: Face touching was widespread. Compared to the baseline, there was a slight reduction in the frequency of face touching after the experimental manipulations. We observed a significant decrease in the length of face touching only for participants with duration-focused implementation intentions. Conclusion: While implementation intentions have effectively downregulated other unwanted behaviours, they did not reduce the frequency of face-touching behaviour. Still, duration-focused implementation intentions appear to be a promising strategy for face-touching behaviour change. This highlights the need for further optimisation and field research to test the effectiveness of implementation intentions in everyday life contexts.

AB - Objective: Reducing face touching could help slow COVID-19’s spread. We tested whether implementation intentions, a simple-to-use behaviour change intervention, reduce face-touching behaviour effectively. Design: In this pre-registered online study, we utilised a novel way to collect behavioural data during a pandemic. We obtained video recordings of 156 adults while performing three engaging tasks for four minutes each. After the baseline task, participants formed the goal to avoid touching their faces; some participants also formed implementation intentions, targeting either the frequency or duration of face touching. Main Outcome Measures: The 468 videos were rated by two independent raters for face touching frequency and duration. Results: Face touching was widespread. Compared to the baseline, there was a slight reduction in the frequency of face touching after the experimental manipulations. We observed a significant decrease in the length of face touching only for participants with duration-focused implementation intentions. Conclusion: While implementation intentions have effectively downregulated other unwanted behaviours, they did not reduce the frequency of face-touching behaviour. Still, duration-focused implementation intentions appear to be a promising strategy for face-touching behaviour change. This highlights the need for further optimisation and field research to test the effectiveness of implementation intentions in everyday life contexts.

KW - behaviour change

KW - COVID-19

KW - Face touching

KW - motivation

KW - self-regulation

KW - Psychology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119671967&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/b51e0cb2-6f2b-31e3-be09-81d05bf032d2/

U2 - 10.1080/08870446.2021.2005793

DO - 10.1080/08870446.2021.2005793

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 34802356

AN - SCOPUS:85119671967

VL - 38

SP - 1089

EP - 1107

JO - Psychology and Health

JF - Psychology and Health

SN - 0887-0446

IS - 8

ER -