The self-regulation of face touching - a preregistered experiment testing if-then plans as a means to promote COVID-19 prevention
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Authors
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.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Psychology and Health |
Volume | 38 |
Issue number | 8 |
Pages (from-to) | 1089-1107 |
Number of pages | 19 |
ISSN | 0887-0446 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 08.2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
- behaviour change, COVID-19, Face touching, motivation, self-regulation
- Psychology