Revisiting the influence of regulatory focus on eagerness and vigilance in signal detection

ABSTRACT

A core prediction of classical regulatory focus theory is that a promotion focus should bias responses towards more hits in a signal detection task and a prevention focus towards more correct rejections. However, it is unclear whether this is also true when rejection is enacted by inhibiting a response. Three initial pre-registered studies show that regulatory focus does not bias response patterns in a speeded go/nogo signal detection task in which the absence of a signal requires inhibition, over two manipulations of regulatory focus and two different signal-to-noise ratios. A further registered study shows that while the predicted effect does occur in a word recognition task modelled on previous research, it is obviated by the presence of time pressure when responding. Though these findings cannot definitively answer whether regulatory focus effects generalize to response inhibition, they highlight the importance of cognitive elaboration time for regulatory focus effects and provide important insight towards understanding their operating conditions. In addition, surprising results from a registered pilot study show that regulatory focus manipulations on the tactical level may have unpredictable results, providing methodological recommendations for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Regulatory focus
• signal detection
• eagerness
• vigilance
• go/nogo
• memory recognition

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Christina Andres and Julius Rennert for their feedback while preparing this manuscript and Andreas Eder for his support throughout the project.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in OSF at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/E5N4V.

Notes

1. Note that the pre-registrations of the first three experiments reflect only this hypothesis, although more thorough theoretical review yielded the diverging predictions given here.

2. All Bayesian analyses in this paper use a Cauchy prior scaled with a parameter of 0.707. Robustness checks are performed with parameters of 1 and 1.414. If evidence for a hypothesis is weaker in any robustness check, it is mentioned in the text.

3. Scholer et al. (2008) provide evidence that regulatory focus can affect behavioral tactic choice using a larger sample, but their studies were specifically designed to elicit a shift in typical tactic choice and cannot therefore be used as an estimate of how large the “default” effect is.

4. Although R. S. Friedman and Förster (2001) argue that the effect of regulatory focus should only manifest in the recognition phase, Scholer and Higgins (2008) found effects of regulatory focus in both the acquisition and recognition phase in a related paradigm. In addition, it is difficult to conceive of a reason why additional manipulation during the acquisition phase should weaken the effect. Therefore, both phases are manipulated in order to provide the strongest possible induction.

5. Please note that the precise amount of money offered for experiment (and therefore the performance-contingent amount as well) are contingent on economic considerations and may change somewhat. The values given are estimates.

6. Initial technical checks showed this error occurring sporadically on some systems.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Association of Social Psychology [none/preregistered research grant].