Need Support and Regulatory Focus in Responding to COVID-19

Abstract

Prevention focus is a self-regulatory orientation that serves the need for security, and promotion focus is a self-regulatory orientation that serves the need for growth. From mid-March to early April 2020, did people judge prevention focus to be more useful than promotion focus for responding to COVID-19? Our study tested and showed support for this hypothesis with 401 American and Canadian participants, who we sampled in 100-person waves on the first 4 Thursdays of the pandemic. For this study, we developed a new measure of the judged usefulness of promotion and prevention focus. Additionally, results showed that the judged usefulness of promotion and prevention focus related positively to support of the psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness, respectively, in responding to COVID-19. Exploratory analyses showed that day-today differences in autonomy, competence, and relatedness support and in promotion and prevention focus tended to be small, which is notable given the largescale changes to social distancing, employment, and media coverage of the virus during this time. Our research could be useful for crafting persuasive advocacy and narrative communications that encourage social distancing to protect others about whom people care most.

Feeling Socially Connected and Focusing on Growth: Relationships With Wellbeing During a Major Holiday in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Additionally, we speculate that during Thanksgiving in 2020, participants experienced a new prevention-prevention conflict specific to the pandemic. Participants’ descriptions of what they did that day, news accounts ( Caspiani and Borter, 2020 ; Trotta and Layne, 2020 ), and the fact that duties and caution/self-control aspects of prevention focus loaded on different factors (cf., Haws et al, 2010 ; Higgins et al, 2001 ; Vaughn et al, 2020 ) suggest that many people experienced conflicts between two types of prevention goals. It appears that one was to fulfill duties to maintain holiday traditions by gathering with extended family.…”

“… Vaughn, 2017 , Study 2). Therefore, we developed a new scale for the current research by modifying the promotion and prevention measure in Vaughn et al’s (2020) research. Because hopes/ideals and duties/oughts are the most common ways to operationally define promotion and prevention focus (e.g., Summerville and Roese, 2008 ; Hodis, 2017 ), we included items about these goals.…”

“…This is because the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness mutually satisfy each other (e.g., Ryan and Deci, 2017 ). The other theory we applied was regulatory focus theory ( Higgins, 1997 , 1998 ; Scholer et al, 2019a ) because it distinguishes between two self-regulatory orientations that relate to wellbeing ( Lanaj et al, 2012 ; Koopmann et al, 2016 ; Zhang et al, 2019 ; Wu and Chen, 2020 ) and that are important in responses to COVID-19 ( Vaughn et al, 2020 ). These orientations are promotion and prevention focus.…”

“…Research shows that greater satisfaction of all three needs correlates very strongly with wellbeing, feelings of personal integrity, and feeling volitional (for reviews, see Deci and Ryan, 2000 ; Ryan and Deci, 2017 ). Satisfactions of these needs tend to be highly correlated (e.g., Sheldon and Hilpert, 2012 ; Chen et al, 2015 ; Vaughn, 2017 , 2019 ; Vaughn et al, 2020 ), and balanced satisfaction of these needs appears to be important for wellbeing, both within persons ( Sheldon and Niemiec, 2006 ) and between life domains ( Milyavskaya et al, 2009 ). With that said, “in different settings, any one of the three needs will emerge to ‘take the lead’ in terms of its association with wellness outcomes, even as the other two remain important” ( Ryan and Deci, 2017 , p. 247).…”

“…In the COVID-19 pandemic, prevention was encouraged ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020b , c , 2021 ). Research in the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic showed that participants judged prevention focus to be more useful than promotion focus for responding to the virus ( Vaughn et al, 2020 ).…”