Self-Monitoring

Description of the Strategy

Self-monitoring refers to the process of systematically attending to one's current actions, thoughts, emotions, or physiological reactions and/or to their immediate antecedents or consequences over a sufficient period of time to allow for comprehensive and reliable sampling. Immediacy, continuity, and relative precision distinguish self-monitoring from typical retrospective self-reports (which are implicitly built upon the accurate recall of prior unsystematic self-monitoring). Self-monitoring, also called self-observation, serves a dual function within clinical behavior therapy in that it refers both to a discovery-oriented technique for self-assessment (e.g., “How many cigarettes per day do I smoke?”) and a method of altering the frequency of monitored activities (e.g., “I shouldn't be smoking that many cigarettes!”).

As a means of self-assessment and self-induced change, self-monitoring is widely employed. In a recent survey, for example, 83% of behavior therapists reported using self-monitoring with 44% of their patients. Yet the clinical impact of self-monitoring is difficult to examine in isolation from other regulatory mechanisms, such as postperformance self-evaluation, expectancy, mood, memory, and selective attention. Moreover, the dual nature of self-monitoring functions may be problematic to the extent that the change-inducing or “reactive” aspect of the process compromises the accuracy of the self-assessment aspect.

Self-monitoring is often used as a synonym for selfrecording, the process of manually, mechanically, or electronically counting and tabulating the frequency or intensity of an emitted response, its antecedents, or its consequences. Clearly, the process of directing one's attention inward or outward and discriminating among perceived stimuli is quite distinct from that of making a permanent record of monitored events. Nonetheless, many investigators consider the observational and recording processes to be the two defining components of self-monitoring. A third “duality” associated with self-monitoring (in addition to its dual functions and its dual components) refers to the twofold nature of its potential clinical targets—that is, the observation and recording of positive/desirable events (such as the implementation of a treatment strategy or the display of adaptive behavior) versus negative/undesirable ones (e.g., symptoms, countertherapeutic thoughts, etc.).

To complicate matters somewhat, the term selfmonitoring is regularly employed in social and personality psychology to denote an individual-difference variable that reflects the extent to which people observe and control their expressive self-presentations and are sensitive to cues regarding appropriate interpersonal behavior. Without denying its potential relevance to behavior modification, the social psychological meaning of self-monitoring will not be considered further.