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	Self-Monitoring Scale	Regulatory Focus Questionnaire
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	1974	2001
Originator	Mark Snyder	E. Tory Higgins and colleagues
Type	Self-report individual-difference scale	Self-report two-dimensional scale
Seminal source	Snyder, M. (1974). Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 526-537.	Higgins, E. T., Friedman, R. S., Harlow, R. E., Idson, L. C., Ayduk, O. N., & Taylor, A. (2001). Achievement orientations from subjective histories of success: Promotion pride versus prevention pride. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(1), 3-23.
Aliases	SM Scale, Snyder Self-Monitoring Scale, Self-Monitoring Inventory	RFQ, Promotion-Prevention Questionnaire, Regulatory Focus Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	The Self-Monitoring Scale, introduced by Mark Snyder in 1974, measures the extent to which people observe and control their expressive behavior and self-presentation in response to situational and interpersonal cues. High self-monitors are sensitive to social context and skilled at adjusting how they come across, behaving like social chameleons whose conduct varies across situations; low self-monitors express their inner attitudes and dispositions more consistently regardless of audience. The original 25-item true/false scale was designed to be internally consistent and temporally stable, validated through laboratory and field studies of expressive control. The construct became influential in person-situation debates, attitude-behavior consistency, and research on impression management, persuasion, and relationships, although the scale's dimensionality and revisions have been the subject of ongoing discussion.	The Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ), developed by Higgins and colleagues in 2001, measures two independent motivational orientations derived from regulatory focus theory: a promotion focus concerned with growth, ideals, gains, and eager pursuit of positive outcomes, and a prevention focus concerned with safety, duties, responsibilities, and vigilant avoidance of negative outcomes. Rather than asking directly about current motivation, the RFQ assesses respondents' subjective histories of success in promotion and prevention self-regulation, yielding two scores that can be high or low independently. Because promotion and prevention foci predict different strategic preferences -- eagerness versus vigilance -- emotional reactions, and responses to framing, the RFQ is widely used in research on motivation, persuasion, decision making, and organizational behavior to capture chronic self-regulatory style.