3 - (SYM 62) A Person-specific Model of Momentary Urgency: Measuring Within-person Associations Amidst Behavior Heterogeneity

Urgency, the tendency to respond to emotions with impulsive action, is associated with diverse psychopathology. Past EMA studies have documented temporal associations between emotion and self-reported impulsivity, but overall, individual differences in these associations have not related to trait urgency scales. These studies examined the pathway of emotion to self-rated impulsivity (e.g., EMA items which measure feeling “impulsive”). However, urgency defines a relationship between emotion and behavior, and work is still needed which measures momentary urgency through objective and clinically relevant behavioral indicators. This study used EMA to test whether urgency relates to within-person associations between emotions and the diverse behaviors it is implicated in (self-harm, binge eating, purging, reckless driving, substance use, anger outbursts, risky sex).

Modeling a heterogeneous transdiagnostic process presents unique statistical challenges. In daily life experiences of momentary urgency, both emotion and impulsive behaviors may vary by person (e.g., urgency may present as anger-driven aggression for one person, and shame-driven self-harm for another).

Undergraduates (n = 122; mean age 21.4, 71.3% female, 23.8% LGBTQ+, 18.9% Hispanic/Latinx, 32.8% White) who reported past week impulsive behaviors (above) completed EMAs of momentary emotion and impulsive behaviors 8 times per day for 14 days. A preregistered idiographic modeling approach was tested. Per person, each behavior which occurred frequently enough to model (n = 168 behaviors) was selected. Per behavior, a series of logistic regressions predicted the behavior by each emotion and valence-arousal affect quadrant factors, resulting in 3,360 total models run. The greatest beta coefficient per person was examined as their momentary urgency index. Specific emotions were more predictive of behavior than affect quadrant factors were for 80% of participants. A preregistered group-level linear model will also provide a test of whether the UPPS urgency scale (measured at baseline) is associated with the idiographic momentary urgency indices created.

This study defines momentary urgency using a unique idiographic approach which can account for heterogeneous presentations of a clinical mechanism. This strategy can be used to define other mechanisms with diverse presentations in future work. Understanding the temporal process of urgency could assist with targeting transdiagnostic behavioral concerns across diverse populations in clinical practice.