Can't control yourself? Monitor those bad habits.

What strategies can people use to control unwanted habits? Past work has focused on controlling other kinds of automatic impulses, especially temptations. The nature of habit cuing calls for certain self-control strategies. Because the slow-to-change memory trace of habits is not amenable to change or reinterpretation, successful habit control involves inhibiting the unwanted response when activated in memory.

Forewarned and forearmed? Two meta-analytic syntheses of forewarnings of influence appeals.

Two research syntheses evaluate the effects on attitudes of forewarning of an influence appeal. In general, warnings appeared to threaten people's attitudes or their self-images, and warning impact depended on which aspect of the self was threatened. When the topic of the appeal was involving and concerned immediate outcomes or when the appeal was actually delivered, recipients appeared to focus on the potential threat to their attitudes, and they responded defensively by cognitively bolstering their own views and resisting the appeal.

Habits in everyday life: thought, emotion, and action.

To illustrate the differing thoughts and emotions involved in guiding habitual and nonhabitual behavior, 2 diary studies were conducted in which participants provided hourly reports of their ongoing experiences. When participants were engaged in habitual behavior, defined as behavior that had been performed almost daily in stable contexts, they were likely to think about issues unrelated to their behavior, presumably because they did not have to consciously guide their actions. When engaged in nonhabitual behavior, or actions performed less often or in shifting contexts, participants' thoughts tended to correspond to their behavior, suggesting that thought was necessary to guide action.