Uncovering urgency in daily life: Testing a novel method for assessing emotion-impulsivity co-occurrence 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, as defined, urgency is a dynamic, if … then process. However, urgency has mostly been studied using cross-sectional dispositional scales and laboratory-based tasks. Recent work modeling urgency dynamically as the covariance of momentary emotion and impulsivity has found no associations with trait scores of urgency and impulsivity. We propose that the co-occurrence only of intense instances of emotion and impulsivity may better match urgency's conceptualization. In exploratory analyses of ambulatory assessment data (N = 342), we found a significant correlation between dispositional impulsivity and intense emotion-impulsivity co-occurrences, but not with their momentary covariance. We replicated these results in five preregistered ambulatory assessment studies (total N = 844). These findings have implications for the measurement of momentary urgency, and for the articulation of other intense and dynamic events in the moment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).