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Individuals have a large repertoire of defensive strategies for dealing with personally relevant negative feedback including health risk information. Defensive processes are covered in a diverse literature and in theoretical models such as the extended parallel process model, but outside the psychopathological domain, little attention has been paid to the conceptualization and measurement of defenses. In this study, we reviewed the broad literature and developed an integrated conceptual model of various defensive strategies to guide measurement development. In addition, we developed and tested measures of defensiveness for colorectal cancer screening, an important public health issue. We conducted 2 surveys of independent samples of screening-age adults (n= 226, 287) to iteratively test and refine measures using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation models. Our …