Dynamics in health behavior self-regulation: leveraging intensive longitudinal methods to understand the in situ translation of intentions into behavior

Background: Health behaviors such as smoking, physical activity, and diet are essential to long-term health. However, many individual, social, and environmental determinants a person encounters in everyday life strongly determine such behaviors and influence, whether a person is able to act in line with their health goals at a given moment. Temporal Self-Regulation Theory thus proposes a dynamic perspective on (health) behavior self-regulation as it understands behavior as a shared function of the interplay of such determinants and intentions as well as goal-related feedback processes over time. Still, an empirical examination with the required 1) density of measurement and 2) in the relevant context of self-regulation, in situ, has been lacking to date.

Methods: I integrate five publications and seven separate intensive-longitudinal studies examining different health-promoting and -risking behaviors to quantitatively assess the three dimensions of dynamics and their influence on the self-regulation of behavior.

Results: Within-person, moment-to-moment fluctuations in behavioral intentions vary meaningfully and interact with momentary contextual determinants in predicting behavior (synchronicity). Evaluative feedback processes based on past behavior facilitate goal-oriented, adaptive changes in intentions, but not behavior, over time (sequentiality). More durable intentions (stability) improve the translation of intentions into behavior.

Conclusions: Integrating dynamic features into theories of (health) behavior self-regulation cannot only provide us with a more nuanced understanding of what drives behavior where it is crucial, in situ, but also facilitates the development of targeted interventions to support individual efforts of behavior change as well as policy-level interventions that aim for such a change across larger groups of the population.