nucleation

LIT-1870: Altering Impulsive Decision Making With an Acceptance-Based Procedure

1 min read

Properties3
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1425) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC5661961, NIHMS906394), fetched as PMC XML through NCBI's E-utilities after the PMC web page put up a reCAPTCHA; worth reading as the first test of an acceptance-based intervention on delay discounting, in which discounting moved while the AAQ-II, the ACT process measure, did not. Read it knowing that it is a pilot of 30 students against a waitlist, that the waitlist group's own pre–post change in discounting was not significant, and that a Hawthorne effect is the authors' first limitation.
Tagspsychopathology-and-treatment, behavioral-integration
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1425 — Morrison, Madden, Odum, Friedel & Twohig — Altering impulsive decision making

Graph View

Morrison, K. L., Madden, G. J., Odum, A. L., Friedel, J. E. & Twohig, M. P. (2014). Behavior Therapy, 45(5), 630–639. doi:10.1016/j.beth.2014.01.001. PMC5661961.

Key takeaways

  • A single brief acceptance-based session lowered discounting of hypothetical delayed money a week later, relative to a waitlist, in a pilot of 30 steep discounters.
  • The ACT process measure (AAQ-II) did not move relative to control, so the study gives no sign that the change in discounting went through psychological flexibility as measured.
  • The effect rests on a small sample, a waitlist control and a training that told participants it was about impulsive decision making.

Why this is here

CLAIM-156 asks whether mindfulness and acceptance act on the discount curves or on the step from an impulse to action. This is one of the two mindfulness or ACT studies in Rung and Madden’s meta-analysis (LIT-1846). THEORY-050 holds that psychological inflexibility is the process ACT changes, and here an outcome changed while the inflexibility measure did not.

Backlinks