State Urgency and Trait Impulsivity: Exploring an Alternative Articulation of Urgency in Momentary Data

Abstract

Impulsivity is a personality trait with broad health implications. Urgency is a facet of impulsivity defined as the tendency to engage in rash action when experiencing strong emotions. Thus, urgency is defined as a dynamic, if-then process. However, urgency has mostly been studied using cross-sectional global dispositional scales. Recent work has sought to model urgency dynamically as the covariance of affect and impulsivity assessed in the moment. However, this operationalization of momentary urgency appears to be unassociated with traditional urgency and impulsivity scores. We propose an alternative conceptualization of momentary urgency as the cooccurrence only of intense instances of affect and impulsivity. In an ambulatory assessment study of community participants (N=342; undergraduates excluded from participation), we tested the relationship between affect-impulsivity cooccurrence and trait impulsivity. We found a significant correlation between dispositional impulsivity and affect-impulsivity cooccurrence, but not with urgency as previously defined by momentary covariances. These findings have implications for both the conceptualization and measurement of momentary urgency, as well as for the articulation of other intense, dynamic events in the moment.