The temporal architecture of decision regulation: Development and initial validation of the Decision Regulation Inventory

Decision regulation fails recurrently across psychiatric and neurological conditions. Theory has long described it as a temporally extended process unfolding across anticipation, real-time control, and post-decision reevaluation, yet existing psychometric tools measure only its fragments, and no single instrument integrates them. We present the Decision Regulation Inventory (DRI), a 24-item self-report instrument that bridges this gap within a single temporal framework, with items grounded in morally consequential scenarios as a prototype of high-stakes choice. In 557 French-speaking adults, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses recovered a five-dimensional structure (Empathic Deliberation, Principled Deliberation, Control Failure under Excitation, Control Failure under Pressure, Post-decision Reevaluation) with acceptable model fit and configural and metric measurement invariance across sex; invariance across country was supported but preliminary given the small French subsample. Convergent and divergent correlations with six external instrument families broadly conformed to the predicted nomological pattern. In exploratory clinical contrasts, Control Failure under Pressure tracked psychiatric and neurological burden, with FDR-corrected elevations in six of seven diagnostic categories, a transdiagnostic signal whose specificity against negative affectivity remains to be tested. Pending discriminant and clinical validation, the DRI offers a process-level instrument for consequential decision research and clinical psychopathology.