Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1
Once the regulatory focus theory based on hedonic principle has been put forward, there was a great repercussion in psychology field. Nowadays, many fields pay more attention to this theory and user information behavior field is in particular. This paper chooses the regulatory focus theory as research target, integrating the formation mechanism and fundamental connotation of this theory, summarizing and analyzing the methods which used in present to measure or induce the regulatory focus with dimension of the formation time of individual regulatory focus in order to provide accordance and ways for the empirical research of regulatory focus theory in future. After that, expounding the basic concept of its theoretical considerations-regulatory fit. Finally, this paper composites the main research achievement of the regulatory focus and its relative theories domestic and overseas from the point of view with user information behavior, expecting to give some help for the research of information science in approaching days.
JEL Codes: F34, G21 and G24
There are often something interesting in our daily life. Customers have entirely distinct purchase willingness for identical product though they have similar age, occupation, male and education background etc. For example, while some customers prefer the computers which have fashionable appearance and light weight, the others choose high untiguration and less property problems ones instead. For this purpose, scholars in user information behavior science, psychology science etc find that these customers would make different decision because that they will make a series of psychological changes when they stimulated by external marketing information on the basis of further research.
Higgins(1997) put forward the regulatory focus theory on basis of hedonism principle and selfdifference theory. Higgins considers that the reason why people show two different kinds of behavior of drown advantages and avoid disadvantages when they face the same stimulation is that every individual has two different hinds of self-behavior instructional type and two different accommodation model at the same: promotion focus and prevention focus. This explanation gives the inner cause of these interesting phenomena and resolved a hard nut in user information behavior domain.
From the proposition of regulatory focus theory to now, it is influence plant cover psychology, marketing, medical science, user behavior study and seems stronger and stronger. In this case, it
’s necessary to generalize and summarize this theory along with it is related applications. Review literatures related to this theory, not a few scholars from different fields have summarized the research achivements of regulatory focus theory, it is a pity that nearly no one pay attention to user inform ation behavior. So, this paper will
*Dr. Peng Zhu, School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China.
Email : pzhu@ieee.org

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1 expound the formation mechanism, basic components and measure method of regulatory focus theory with a systematic view on the basis of existing research, and summarize the research achivements and application in user information behavior field of this theory at core of user information behavior in order to bring some help about future
’s further study of user information behavior in information science.
Higgins considers that the regulatory focus is a kind of behavior disposition that people tends to a unique target, he divides the behavior disposition into two types of self-regulating system: promotion focus system and prevention focus system. The distinction of self-regulatory focus affects the behavioral motive decision, attitude preference and behavior satisfaction of individual directly.
In addition, there are some different basis needs including growth need and security needs according to psychology research. The regulatory focus theory distinguish the behavior pattern with two kinds purchasing happiness and avoid suffering, considering that the individual of promotion focus take the growth and development needs as the principal thing and guide themselves with ideal type self-orientation, on the contrary, individual of the prevention focus choose the security defense need as the principal an conduct themselves with should-type self-orientation. So promotion focus of individual should be easily induced in a circumstance of profit and non-profit, the regulating system of the prevention focus should be likely aroused in a loss and non-loss situation. In the perspective of behavior purpose, the individual of promotion focus aspire their ego ideal and devote themselves achieving their ego ambition. In contrast, individual of the prevention focus would be content with fulfilling their duty and responsibility in order to avoid mistakes.
In the perspective of behavioral achievement, the individual promotion focus pay more attention to whether there will be positive outcome during pursuing goals, but individual of the prevention focus hold a entirely different eye that they concentrate on the negative influence.
In the part of tactic model, the individual of promotion focus who enjoy risking to ensure their goals come true tend to take the approaching strategy, it ’s opposite that individual of the prevention focus prefer to use vigilant and conservative tactic owing to their tendency of avoiding risks and preventing losing opportunity. People show entirely different emotions when they in a certain regulatory focus condition on account that the two regulating systems show a lot of difference in behavior and mentality to a great extent. For example, on one hand, while the individual of promotion focus release delightful and exciting emotion as usual, individual of the prevention focus show something of relax instead when they achieve their goal, on the other hand, if the result of the goal is less than satisfactory, the individual of promotion focus is easily show depression but the individual of the prevention focus express anger and rage.
From the point of length of formation time, there are two kinds regulatory focus: long-term regulatory focus and short-term regulatory focus and different types have different formation time.
Higgins put forward that the formation of the prevention focus is strongly linked to one ’s life experience and parents
’ educational objectives. He divided parents’ educational objectives

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1 into two parts: promoted desire and preventive desire. The former opinions that parents encourage their children overcome difficulties, maintain independence, enjoy happiness in positive condition and experience disappointment in failure, the later lay emphasis on children
’s security need and do their best to protect children from suffering pain, they try to train their children with a self-regulation method of vigilance and conservative during the parents-child campaign that children can feel the pain and suffering about negative outcome and perceive relax about positive achievement. With the growth of children, self-regulating system of individual seems steadier and steadier. In addition, the interaction among friends and couples also can impact the formation of individual-identity regulatory focus.
Friedman finds that the formation of identical regulatory focus has a strong relationship with the success and failure of ego goal on the basis of former research when people achieve their goals successfully by the methods of the promotion focus ， they will firmly believe that the promotion focus can help people attain success easily in their inner mind, and they will prefer to adopt risky and adient strategy when they face new assignments. On the contrary, if someone approach their objectives by the way of the prevention focus ， they will turn to the conservative and vigilant tactic during they accomplish their mission at a later time. With time going by, the stories of success and failure from long-term accumulation lead that individual prefer to use the certain self-regulatory focus identical regulatory focus.
Situational regulatory focus is a kind of temporary self-regulatory focus that aroused in a certain circumstance. People imitate different conditions to arouse a certain self-regulating method by providing disparate clues or doing an established behavior.
Although the two kinds of regulatory focus have different formation reason, for which the identical regulatory focus tends to be steady and the situational regulatory focus maintains a short time instead, they have the same motivation and result.
According to the result of related research, the regulatory focus of the target people come into being of two ways, one is the personal characteristics of measure target, the other has been used before target be stimulated. The former is used to take scale to measure, the later are aroused in a certain circumstance.
4.1 The measurement of identical regulatory focus
Regulatory Focus Questionnaire which exploited and designed by Higgins based on the formation mechanism of identical regulatory focus is the most used ways to measure the identical regulatory focus. Higgins redefines the promoted/preventive success as promoted proud and preventive proud and considers that the promoted/preventive success is a expect reaction to new assignment which can drive the subjective history of success during people accomplish their promoted/preventive goals, the questionnaire operates with the measuring object of the subjective history. According the research, the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire has great applicability in the test of common theory because of it is better internal consistency and discrimination validity. It ’s a pity that it has some disadvantages such as the excessive emphasis about factor of cognitive behavior and loss of emotion reaction, emotion factor and questions oriented by now and future.

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1
Selves questionnaire. Higgins distinguishes individual into 3 types from his self-difference theory: the ideal self 、 actual self and should self. the ideal self is the identical characteristics people wish to have and it is corresponding with promotion focus. Actual self is the characteristics that people think they already own. They should self is the attributive character people should to have and it is corresponding with the prevention focus. The design principle of the questionnaire is that measuring the self-regulatory focus by calculating the D-value among the 3 egoism, and the D-value between ideal self and actual self represents the score of promotion focus ， and the D-value between should self and actual self stands for the level of the prevention focus.
General Regulatory Focus Measure is such kind measure scale combining the success and failure in pursuing goals put forward by Lockwood(2002) according to regulatory focus theory.
The questions put a focus on the experience of students ’ academic work so it is targets are students. Many experts and scholars (Haws, Dholakia, et al.) deem the GRFM scales is superior to RFQ and the aspects on academic performance and grade which can replace
RFQ are in particular. But compared with RFQ, GRFM scale adds questions about emotions and asks with perspective of results. For example, “I often worry that I can’t accomplish my academic object ”. In addition, there are some questions seems ambiguous and fuzzy in
GRFM scale, such as
“In general, I prefer attain success rather than prevent failure”.
Table 1. The compare of 4 measure ways of regulatory focus
Measure methods
Advantages Disadvantages
RFQ
Great in consistency and discrimination validity;
Have strong representativeness and stability
Shows self-difference, loss of emotion reaction, emotion factor and questions oriented by now and future
SQ Use different scores stand for self-regulatory focus
Have low-reliability and weak-stability in remeasurement
BIS/BAS great in internal consistency and uniformity and stability it express the promotion focus of individual with questions drawing on advantages and explain individual of the prevention focus with issues avoiding disadvantages
GRFM great in internal consistency and uniformity and stability; can replace RFQ on the aspect of academic performance some questions seems ambiguous and fuzzy
4.2 The induction of situational regulatory focus
The situational regulatory focus is aroused by information clues in circumstance and measured by experimental study. It achieves the motivation of induction by controlling the stimuli-presenting mode of information, memory of participator and task description. Some frequently-used ways in related research are summarized as follow:

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1
Assignment framework method is one of most used methods, it presents information clues with distinct expression form in certain circumstance and assignments, arousing the promotion focus through emphasizing profit-framework and the prevention focus via emphasizing loss-framework. For example,
“you can gain reward if you accomplish the assignment ” (framework of the promotion focus of emphasizing profit), “you will be punished if you can ’t complete your job” (the framework of the prevention focus of emphasizing loss).
The initiating normal forms of regulatory focus are various, such as arousing the promotion focus or the prevention focus by asking participator to recall the memory of disappointing or anger; inspire the temporary regulatory focus by guiding participator to show their promotive and preventable goals. Writing, it asks participators write short articles about certain subjects, some about positive articles of dreams and achievements to maintain the condition of the promotion focus ， some about articles of security and cautions so that they can hold the prevention focus. Deep imagination method, it helps people attain temporary promotion focus or the prevention focus before the ending of imagination through asking people to imagine they ’re chasing the promoted or preventive goals. This method can’t operate judging by a certain criterion and control the imaginational extent of individual accurately, for which it
’s hardly used. Besides, exports find that situational regulatory focus of individual can mutual effect, so we can arouse people ’s regulatory focus by making use of individual who has a close relationship with participator.
On a whole, the present research about inducement mechanism of situational regulatory focus don ’t have a standard and normative operation procedure and scholars hold different viewpoint in measuring identical regulatory focus. At present, great majority of research use the RFQ revised by Le guo ’an etc. because of the singularity of measuring method among national research, some exports improve the mature measure methods in overseas study according the self-condition. Such as, Qiu yongjuan revises the regulative matching of GRFM and the influence of advertising persuading effect caused by the involving degree. Tian xuehong designs the Chinese revised edition of RFSS to research the influence of promise rank caused by identical regulatory focus of individual. Which means that we can do further research in future.
Higgins developed the regulatory fit g theory according to his regulatory focus. This theory ties individual ’s regulatory focus with his behavioral motive, emotional attitude, tactical mode of pursuing goals, and considers that individual ’s regulatory focus will lead a tendency of certain tactic mode and behavioral motive. The regulatory fit is that people feel correct if they are satisfied with their self-tendency. This matching between tendency and regulatory focus can strengthen the behavioral motive and emotional experience along with people chasing their targets, and they also strengthen the validity and significance of behavior, so they will adjust the behavioral tactic during pursuing the goals.
According to this theory, Higgins put forward some hypothesis and demonstrated by some research. Firstly, the higher level the regulatory fit is, the more intensive of the motive of chasing the goals; Secondly, the higher level the regulatory fit g is, the more intensive of emotional experience of goals ’ result. Thirdly, the higher level the regulatory fit is, the higher satisfy and evaluation individual makes to the result of goals.
The use of regulatory focus and regulatory fit theory refers to a lot of aspects consisting user information behavior science, organizational behavior science, leadership science, human

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1 health, social and welfare services etc. In recent years, the research of user information behavior according to regulatory focus theory including user emotional attitude, tendency and cognition, these emotion and preference are reflected in the choice of desire and strategy in pursuing the target.
6.1 The related research of Regulatory Focus Theory
The previous study has demonstrated that different self- regulatory focus result in different preference of things, strategy and behavior. Gu explores the relevance between the preference individual shows to certain types of result and self-regulatory focus. The experiment shoes that the promotion focus arouses decision maker pay more attention to maximum absolute economic result, and the prevention focus arouses people concentrate on relative economic result. There still are some exports proving the research on the research background about traditional consumption environment. For example, Shalvi find that the customers of promotion focus are wearisome with the negotiations during the bargaining activity they are willing to avoid or quit the negotiations by compensation with money. These different preference effects the final decision indirectly.
Individual adopting different types of regulatory focus has different target and goals, which impact the choice of people ’s behavioral tactic mode, and the specific information condition is notable. For example, Liang cheng lei analyses the influence that regulatory focus brings to the impulsive consuming behavior based on experiment. It is proved that regulatory focus would interfere the impact effect of the impulsive consuming behavior that information framework causes, the extent of the impulsive consuming behavior would be enhanced if the self-regulatory focus is consistent with the information framework. Samson explores the influence from the self-regulatory focus to the decision change on the general information background of Emergency purchasing situation, he put forward that different people likely make different decision because promotion focus 、 customers of the prevention focus may evaluate goods in a heuristic/reflecting way.
6.2 The related research of Regulatory Fit
In user behavior domain, scholars prove the influence from self-regulatory to the object of study and the hypothesis of regulatory fit theory owing that association study about regulatory focus and information behavior usually covers the fit question of the two parts.
Nowadays, more and more exports devoted themselves researching the influence of user
’s attitude and behavioral willing caused by regulatory fit. For instance, Hsu etc research the relationship between the regulative matching and the consumption willingness and attitude of consumer with the consumer objects of green food. They find that if the information of food is fit with the self-regulatory focus, customers will be more positive and have a stronger willingness to buy green foods, in which the consumer characteristics plays a certain roll.
Interiorly, the research about this almost chooses the advertising as the information bearer object, such as Wang dan ping etc prove that a more positive advertising attitude can be modeled if the regulatory focus of audiences is fit with the framework of advertising information. Li qi geng etc study the formation of re-buy willingness from point of view of the regulatory fit between customer and advertising information based on regulatory focus system with the method of quasi-experimental design, and result is that when the types of regulatory focus between customer and advertising information are fit , the willingness of re-buy will increase. In all, the information persuasion, information attitude, product attitude and

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1 behavioral willingness will be better if the information framework is fit with self-regulatory focus.
Besides the research on the area of user
’s attitude and behavior intention, some experts are exploring the influence degree of the regulatory fit Theory on individual cognition. For example, when Samand etc. used the regulatory focus theory to study the redemption of
Mobile Coupons, they thought that the redemption of the mobile coupons was decided by the strength of the consumers ’ motivation of consumption. To examine their thinking, they set up two groups of situational experiments and find that when the coupons were in line with the regulatory focus of the individual, the utility type of customers would have a stronger perception, on the contrary, the buyers of hedonism would have no difference in perception when they are in the condition of regulatory fit. In the cognitive domain, the persuasive information of individual perception can also be affected by regulatory fit. An sheng fan consults some advertisements for products, letting participants write relevant essays to motivate related regulatory focus, the experiments prove that people will easily be persuaded if the self-regulatory focus is fit with the information framework of the advertising compared with the non-fit. Lai Sheng qiang is not adhere to the traditional research of information behavior, and study the effectiveness of persuasion of internet word of mouth (IWOM) creatively, and the result shows that the comment of negative or low quality are better in persuasion on preventive individual; but the comment of positive or high quality does better in persuading promoted individual. Zhao Tong proves that the impact about the effectiveness of persuasion produced by online comment and the self-regulatory focus matching from the point of view of the regulatory fit.
The effect of regulatory fit will lead individuals to make relevant decisions and behavior firmly by reinforcing the persuasion of information. However, the fit effect is influenced and adjusted by certain factors, for example, involvement, cognitive need, perceive risk and so on. Among theses, the involvement has been shopping-rush goods in recent years. The involvement may be divided into personal involvement and product involvement. Traditional research gives priority to personal involvement, and we consider that only under the condition of poor level of involvement can produce adjust fit effect. However, recently research found that there is unclear influence from the degree of personal involvement to information behavior and attitude of customers; Individual attitude plays an important roll in the effect of fit result which caused by product involvement, and the influence of behavioral willingness is also weak. According to this, there are still a lot of different opinions from the relevant research of the effect of regulatory fit, we have a wide platform.
As a while, the study of the regulatory focus theory and user information behavioral usually refers to questions of fit, the reason may be that it
’s single-factor study in user information behavior field is pretty good because the regulatory focus theory has been put forward earlier.
Along with the proposeal of regulatory fit theory, more and more exports and scholars pay great attention to influence from interaction of the interference factors between self-regulatory focus and other intermediary to self-cognitive, tactical type etc, that
’s why the current situation cones into being. In addition, there are still some boundedness of the applied research of regulatory focus theory by summarized the former literature. On the one hand, the objects of study are still confined to the motivation and individual
’s behavior , we neglect the regulatory focus of group and don ’t go down to research the group. On the other hand, in the domain of user behavior, the empirical research of regulatory focus is in such a condition of traditional consumption, exploring the behavior change of customer in traditional buying-form. But the

Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1 buying-form of customer tends to be diversity, quick and convenient with the rising of internet and mobile internet, it ’s a pity that there are still a lack of research achievement of regulatory focus theory in internet and E-business field. So, the research about user information behavior of regulatory focus theory is weak in depth and range, we must set out to research further in future.
This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation (No. 71403121) and
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 30920130132008).
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Proceedings of 29th International Business Research Conference
24 - 25 November 2014, Novotel Hotel Sydney Central, Sydney, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-64-1
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