A New Six-Day Diary Tool Catches Impulsivity in the Moment

A new 274-person study introduces the SPUR scale, a brief in-the-moment measure of impulsivity that outpredicted an existing tool for alcohol use, drug use, and self-control lapses.

Most impulsivity questionnaires ask people to rate themselves in general terms, which misses how impulsive urges actually rise and fall hour to hour. Researchers Ashmita Mazumder, Suzanne Erb, and Marc A. Fournier built a new tool called SPUR (Spontaneity, Urgency, and Rash action) to capture impulsivity as it happens in daily life. They recruited 274 adults who answered brief surveys on their phones multiple times a day for six days, a method called ecological momentary assessment. Using multilevel factor analysis, the team confirmed that momentary impulsivity breaks down into three distinct components rather than one general trait, and the SPUR items held together reliably across thousands of individual check-ins. The new measure correlated well with existing impulsivity questionnaires, providing evidence it measures what it claims to, and it also predicted same-day alcohol consumption, drug use, and lapses in self-control. Notably, SPUR added predictive power beyond the most popular existing state-impulsivity measure, suggesting it captures something those tools miss. Because the sample was drawn from everyday participants rather than clinical populations, it remains to be seen how well SPUR performs in people with diagnosed impulse-control or substance use disorders.