Abstract: We examined whether self-report and behavioral measures of impulsivity fail to converge because they assess impulsivity at the trait and state levels, respectively. To this end, we hypothesized that the stable (trait) level of performance across administrations of behavioral impulsivity measures would be predictive of self-report impulsivity scores, such that the correlation between self-report and behavioral measures would increase with the number of assessments across which behavioral impulsivity measures are aggregated. A sample of 383 participants ( M age = 30.44, SD age = 4.33, 69% female) completed self-report and behavioral impulsivity measures three times over a week. We found that for two of the three behavioral measures, the association between self-report and behavioral measures increased when both assessed impulsivity at the trait level. To our knowledge, the current study is the first to test trait-level versus state-level assessment as an explanation for the divergence between self-report and behavioral impulsivity measures. Our findings offer practical suggestions on how behavioral measures can be used to assess trait-level impulsivity and theoretical insights for other fields with a similar problem of diverging self-report and behavioral measures of the same construct.
Dong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.