The impact of Regulatory Modes on self control in health behaviors

Regulatory modes refer to the self-regulatory orientations of individuals engaged in goal pursuit. Locomotion is the desire for continuous progress or movement in goal pursuit, privileging the movement from state to state. Assessment, on the other hand, represents the desire to critically evaluate and compare alternative goals and means, favoring the decision of which performance are best to pursue. Apparently, locomotion and assessment regulatory orientations have an opposite impact on the allocation of resources to controlled cognitive processes. When locomotion prevails over assessment people prefer to save resources for starting and maintaining action. Thus they are not motivated to use cognitive resources for higher order mental activity. When assessment prevails, on the contrary, their main accessible goal is “evaluating, comparing, reflecting”, therefore they are motivated to use most of the available resources for higher order mental activities such as abstract thinking, counterfactuals, error detection, and, as a consequence, self control. In this paper we will present two studies aimed to investigate the different impact of the two regulatory modes on self control in health behaviors.