The Self-Regulation Perspective Flashcards
The self-regulation perspective – Introduction
Fundamental notions:
❖ Behaviour is guided by a motivational system of setting goals and evaluating and revising goal-directed processes (feedback)
❖ It is a system of conscious personal management that involves the process of guiding one’s own thoughts, behaviours and feelings to reach these goals
❖ Emphasis on the role of emotions in motivating and guiding behaviour (emotional feedback)
❖ Individuals tap into the schemas they have developed to inform and guide behaviour
Schemas revisited
❖ Schemas for events include information about
behaviour
• help understand others’ behavior
• help determine what to do in situations
❖ Mirror neurons
• active when doing behavior or watching same behavior
• strong link between thinking and doing
Intentions
❖ Not all behaviour derives from situational schemas for action
❖ Some behaviour is purposeful and results from
intention
Types of intentions
❖ Goal Intention—intent to obtain a particular
outcome or goal
❖ Implementation Intention—intent to take specific
actions (process) given a specific situation
• serves goal intentions (subordinate to)
Goals and goal setting
❖ Goals form central feature of human behaviour
• energize activities
• direct movements
• provide meaning for life
❖ Path of goal pursuit varies from person to person
❖ Setting higher goals results in higher performance
• greater effort
• more persistence
• greater concentration
• caveat: As long as goal is realistic
Implications of feedback control
❖ Behaviour is purposeful
❖ Self-regulation is continuous
❖ Goals may be dynamic over time
Self-directed attention
❖ Idea is that directing attention toward yourself engages the comparator in the feedback loop
• individual differences in self-directed attention
• experimental manipulations (mirror, video camera, audience)
❖ Increases evaluation of current behaviour to goals
• difficult to evaluate directly
• information seeking behaviour
❖ Behaviour more closely matches goals
• evidence across a range of behaviors
Hierarchical organisation of goals
❖Provides a way to link physical action to higher order goals
❖Assumptions:
• high-level and low-level goals
• feedback loops are arranged in layers
• behavioural output of high-level loop provides goal for next lower-level loop
❖Higher levels of hierarchy
• system concepts—ideal self
• principle control—broad overriding guidelines (traits)
• program control—vague scripts
Lower levels of hierarchy
❖ Relationships ❖ Sequences ❖ Transitions ❖ Configurations ❖ Sensations ❖ Intensity (of muscle tension)
Issues related to hierarchical organisations
❖ Not all levels may be functional all the time
• much behaviour is guided by program levels of control (functionally superordinate)
❖ Higher level goals can be satisfied by several lower-level goals
❖ A single lower-level activity can service multiple higher-level goals
❖ Goals at any one level may be compatible or incompatible with each other
• being frugal and environmentally responsible
• being frugal and being well-dressed
Is behaviour organised in hierarchies?
❖ Action Identification—asking people to think about
their actions
❖ People identify their behaviour as high-level a way
as they can
Example of different identifications associated with playing tennis:
Running, sweating, hitting a ball, swinging a racquet, lifting an arm, playing tennis
❖ When difficulty occurs at higher level, people
retreat to lower-level identification
Emotions
❖ Provide crucial information about goal priority
❖ Serve as a cue for reprioritisation (Simon)
• anxiety—personal well-being
• anger—autonomy
❖ Reflect “rate of progress” toward goals (Carver & Scheier)
• positive rate of progress = positive affect
• negative rate of progress = negative affect
• a faster rate of progress = greater intensity of affect
❖ Implications for behaviour
• negative affect triggers trying harder
• positive affect may influence coasting and reprioritisation
Stimulus-based action
❖ Goals can be activated without a person’s
awareness
❖ Research on subliminal stimuli
• stimuli presented outside of awareness
• stimuli affect subsequent behaviors
• the idea is that behavioral schemas have been
activated by the subliminal prime
Assessment
Individual differences in self-regulatory processes
❖ Private self-consciousness—tendency to think about
your feelings, motives, and actions two aspects:
• reflection—suggesting curiosity, fascination, and
inquisitiveness
• rumination—suggesting negative feeling states and
not being able to put something behind
❖ Behavioral Identification Form—identifies the level
at which people tend to view their behaviours
Problems in behaviour
❖ Conflicts among goals
Q. examples from class?
❖ Ill-specified goals
• identification of abstract, high-level goals but
lack of know-how to reach them
❖ Inability to disengage
• particularly relevant to self-defining goals
• patterns of sporadic effort, distress,
disengagement, and reconfrontation with goal
