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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In: Psychology and Health, Vol. 38, No. 8, 08.2023, p. 1089-1107.
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
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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 -