Living for Today or Tomorrow? Self‐Regulation amidst Proximal or Distal Exercise Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although health promotion efforts to increase exercise behavior often emphasise long-term outcomes, sustained action in service of a distal reward is challenging. These studies examined how focusing on the proximal benefits of exercise, compared to distal outcomes or more general outcomes, may strengthen individuals' self-regulatory self-efficacy and support physical activity or exercise behavior. METHODS: Participants in Study 1 (N = 1057 community members) completed an online survey. Participants in Study 2 (N = 69 students) and Study 3 (N = 107 students) experienced experimental manipulations related to proximal or distal outcomes of exercise, and then completed survey measures. In Study 4, new members at a commercial gym (N = 210) completed a survey and had check-ins recorded over 17 weeks. RESULTS: In Study 1, participants who ranked proximal outcomes of exercise as relatively more important than distal outcomes reported more frequent physical activity. In Studies 2 and 3, participants induced to focus on proximal outcomes reported increased self-regulatory self-efficacy. In Study 4, valuing proximal benefits predicted sustained exercise behavior (i.e. check-ins), particularly when fitness goal adherence felt difficult. CONCLUSIONS: Those holding increased proximal outcome beliefs reported more activity and greater efficacy to overcome the barriers that derail exercise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".