It's not just what you say but how you say it, living without a stomach, and being philosophical
📝 Weekly paper summary
Category
Cross-over study (both Study 1 & 2 for this paper)
Context
The central assumption of Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) is that human motivation is rooted in the pursuit of pleasure and attenuation of pain. RFT distinguishes between two modes of self-regulation, which have been discussed quite a bit in personality-psychology, marketing, and management circles:
- A promotion focus (pursuit of achievement- or advancement-related goals, concentration on rewards when achieving goals, dream big, think creatively | more error-prone, less likely to think things through, less likely to have a plan B if things go wrong)
- A prevention focus (avoidance of losses, attenuation of pain, "playing it safe," risk-averse, thorough and careful, excellent problem-solving skills | overly cautious and pragmatic, less creative)
Although people have a chronic regulatory focus (usually dependent on their education and environment) that they typically "default" to, individuals' regulatory focus can also be primed or induced by specific phrasing of tasks or instructions. When the priming provided to individuals matches their chronic regulatory focus (i.e., when people experience regulatory fit), their task performance often increases. Conversely, when the priming induces a regulatory nonfit condition, performance is often reduced.
Although the idea of increasing performance and motivation by maintaining regulatory fit has received much empirical support for cognitive tasks, there is relatively less work assessing RFT's applicability to sporting tasks. In currently published studies, there are conflicting findings. Some researchers proposed that these contradictory findings resulted from the task difficulty or experiences of the sample (e.g., elite versus recreational athletes).
However, an additional explanation for these equivocal findings is that it's unclear whether people actively reframe instructions to what they perceive as a better fit to their emotional state and personality. In other words, it's unclear to what extent people process the instructions given to them versus rephrase them to correspond with their chronic regulatory focus. To use an exercise-related example (given that's usually the context I'm most interested in), suppose we had a promotion-focus instruction of asking people to "maintain a straight spine" versus a prevention-focus instruction to "avoid flexing your spine." Currently, it is unclear if you instructed someone with a chronic promotion focus to "avoid flexing their spine" whether they would reframe this internally to something more promotion-focused or maintain the regulatory nonfit condition.
The authors of this paper combined two experiments with different sport-specific tasks (Study 1- football/soccer penalty shootout; Study 2- volleyball serves) to test whether people reframed the instructions provided to them if they did not match their chronic regulatory focus. Each study had four groups:
- Group A - Promotion-oriented, promotion instruction (i.e., promotion-oriented with regulatory fit)
- Group B - Promotion-oriented, prevention instruction (i.e., promotion-oriented with regulatory nonfit)
- Group C - Prevention-oriented, prevention instruction (i.e., prevention-oriented with regulatory fit)
- Group D - Prevention-oriented, promotion instruction (i.e., prevention-oriented with regulatory nonfit)
Correctness
An advantage of combining these two studies into one paper is that we can see the sensitivity of this theory for binary (goal versus no goal during the penalty shootout in Study 1) and continuous (scoring system based on the proximity of serving balls to specific areas of the court) data. Furthermore, both studies had samples of 40 participants with decent experience in the sport. I also really appreciated their statistical approach. In addition to their multiple-group comparisons, they also conducted a linear regression analysis to predict task performance based on group membership. This approach is advantageous as this slight reframing attenuates the conflict that may arise from getting different answers about whether between-group differences are statistically significant depending on the selected multiple-comparisons correction factor.
The authors highlighted a few limitations of their work, one of which was how they determined group membership. Previous research has highlighted that athletes, especially team-sport athletes, are typically biased towards a promotion orientation. The researchers saw this in the current study as the promotion-focus groups (Groups A and B) were clearly promotion-oriented, but the prevention-focus groups (Groups C and D) were not clearly prevention-oriented. Thus, the classification of participants, and thus the findings of this study, must be considered relative to this sample. Therefore, future work using more heterogenous populations in non-sport-related settings would strengthen the generalizability of the findings from this study.
Additionally, different instructions require more research as specific tasks may be easier to reframe than others. For example, the instructions for working a complex job may be harder to reframe relative to performing ten penalties and re-calculating the number of successes or failures required in a soccer shootout. Finally, it's unclear whether participants reframed the instruction after completing the task since the researchers conducted their regulatory focus confirmation procedures following their task performance. The researchers recommended that future research ask participants to repeat their instructions right before and after task completion to address this limitation in their data.
Contributions
- In both studies, more than half of the participants who received the regulatory nonfit instruction reframed the instruction to something that matched their chronic regulatory focus.
- Findings from this study also support previous work suggesting that increased regulatory fit increases performance. These findings have exciting applications to the current focus of attention literature. Although it appears that the salience of proprioceptive information to task outcomes dictates whether an external or internal focus of attention is better for improving "performance," the content of the messaging is fundamentally different when prompting the two foci of attention. RFT builds on the internal versus external focus of attention literature by providing the same informational content but changing the framing. Their results suggest that it's not just about what you say but also how you say it!
- I'd love to see this theory applied to exercise-based (both performance and rehabilitation) contexts as well!
🧠 Fun fact of the week
The more you learn about platypuses, the weirder they get. For instance, did you they don't have a stomach? Instead, its gullet connects right to the intestines, and it is here that the platypus has some protein-busting enzymes.
🎙 Podcast to check out
Admittedly, I'm not finished listening to this one yet, but it's been a great discussion so far!
🗣 Quote of the week
“If you can get through doing things that you hate to do, on the other side is greatness.”
- David Goggins