Handbook of Self-Regulation

Monique Boekaerts, Paul R Pintrich, Moshe Zeidner

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780123695192
• eBook ISBN:
  9780080575490
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pharmacology

The Handbook of Self-Regulation represents state-of-the-art coverage of the latest theory, research, and developments in applications of self-regulation research. Chapters are of interest to psychologists interested in the development and operation of self-regulation as well as applications to health, organizational, clinical, and educational psychology.This book pulls together theory, research, and applications in the self-regulation domain and provides broad coverage of conceptual, methodological, and treatment issues. In view of the burgeoning interest and massive research on various aspects of self-regulation, the time seems ripe for this Handbook, aimed at reflecting the current state of the field. The goal is to provide researchers, students, and clinicians in the field with substantial state-of-the-art overviews, reviews, and reflections on the conceptual and methodological issues and complexities particular to self-regulation research. - Coverage of state-of-the-art in self-regulation research from different perspectives - Application of self-regulation research to health, clinical, organizational, and educational psychology - Brings together in one volume research on self-regulation in different subdisciplines - Most comprehensive and penetrating compendium of information on self-regulation from multi-disciplinary perspectives

1

Self-Regulation

An Introductory Overview

Monique Boekaerts*; Paul R. Pintrich^†; Moshe Zeidner^{‡ *}Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
^†The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
^‡The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

In planning the Handbook of Self-Regulation, our aim was to provide an overview of a relatively new and increasingly important area in psychological research: self-regulation. Although self-regulation is a relative newcomer in the psychology journals, there is now a large but diverse body of research on this topic. In the 1980s, a large number of articles on self-regulation appeared, mainly in social psychology and personality journals. In the 1990s, the concept was broadened to include various aspects and application of self-regulation constructs, including self-regulated learning, self-control, and self-management. Publications began to appear in educational, organizational, clinical, and health psychology journals that used a number of related but different self-regulation constructs and labels.

Each of us was struck by the many different viewpoints on self-regulation that had been presented in the literature and by the broad range of phenomena that had been addressed by researchers involved in self-regulation research. We noticed that scholars from different areas of psychology had written about parallel but nonoverlapping phenomena and regretted that these articles were scattered throughout the many different psychological journals that reflected their own parochial interests and concerns. We felt that what was needed was a dialogue between researchers from these different fields within psychology. In our view, our understanding of the dynamics of self-regulation would profit a great deal from cross-area fertilization. A handbook offers the opportunity for scholars from the different areas to discuss their perspective on self-regulation, but to have these different viewpoints represented in one volume.

In this respect we wanted to echo Bruner’s (1990) plea for less fragmentation and more coherence in psychological theory and research:

I have written it (his book) at a time when psychology, the science of the mind as William James once called it, has become fragmented as never before in its history. It has lost its center and risks losing the cohesion needed to assume the internal exchange that might justify a division of labor between its parts. And the parts, each with its own organizational identity, its own theoretical apparatus, and often its own journals, have become specialties whose products become less and less exportable. Too often they seal themselves within their own rhetoric and within their own parish of authorities. This self-sealing risks making each part (and the aggregate that increasingly constitutes psychology’s patchquilt whole) ever more remote from other inquiries dedicated to the understanding of mind and the human condition—inquiries in the humanities or the other social sciences. (pp. ix–x)

This quote can certainly be applied to research on self-regulation as it has been pursued by individuals working within the many different areas of psychology with a diversity of theories, models, constructs, and methodologies. Self-regulation theory and research in its many guises certainly deals with issues of the science of the mind. In fact, many of the specific issues William James was concerned with, such as willpower and behavior (e.g., his classic example of the difficulty of arising from a warm bed in the morning), are directly related to current topics in self-regulation.

However, the search for a general understanding of self-regulation has not been coherent given the diversity in the field. For example, researchers in one area, such as educational psychology, may not read articles on self-regulation produced by researchers working in a different area, such as health psychology. The main reason for this alienation may be that applied psychologists working within a particular context consider themselves a specific scientific community: They speak the same language, use their own conceptual models, and construct their own instruments and research designs to collect data about a specific aspect of self-regulation (e.g., about self-regulated learning, managing stress, regulation of one’s health) in a specific context (e.g., homes, classrooms, health clinics, work-places). This has resulted in large bodies of domain-specific knowledge about self-regulation, each covering specific aspects of self-regulation and using their own scientific terminology. A consequence of such domain or area specificity is that the information assembled about self-regulation is published in separate journals. Even more detrimental to the development of a common insight into the various phenomena of self-regulation is that a kaleidoscope of terms and labels exists and that these may sound unfamiliar, even alien, to researchers who are not in that particular area.

In our opinion, models and data collected from different vantage points with respect to the same or similar constructs are highly relevant to our efforts to achieve a science of the mind and a true understanding of what a complex construct such as self-regulation really means. These models and data can be the starting point for scholarly discussions which will promote reflection on one’s own ideas and further one’s understanding of the phenomena involving self-regulation. However, we are well aware that discussion and interaction of researchers who have drifted apart over the last few decades will be successful only if researchers have an open mind and are willing to question their own constructs and measurement instruments and are willing to extend and elaborate their own models.

Given this diversity, but armed with the goal of helping to reduce fragmentation and increase coherence in the field, we sought to bring together authors with different perspectives on self-regulation. To achieve this goal, we invited authors with an active program of research in a particular area of self-regulation to write a chapter for this handbook. We also wanted to include authors from outside the United States of America to avoid the traditional bias of much of American psychology, as well as to represent the diversity of international research on this topic. We explained to our authors that a book with a diversity of vantage points on self-regulation would help to identify cross-cutting themes that unite researchers in the different areas of psychology. We encouraged them to write a chapter that would allow for exploration of the similarities and dissimilarities in the conceptual frameworks, paradigms, and research methodologies of various research groups and to stimulate cross-fertilization of ideas in the field. We asked our authors to focus on the different ways individuals guide and direct their own behavior, cognition, and affect as well as the interactions among cognition, affect, and action. To our delight most of the authors we invited agreed to write a chapter, and we think they were successful in discussing and integrating these different aspects in their chapters.

In addition, we organized an expert meeting at Leiden University in The Netherlands. This expert meeting was sponsored by the Dutch National Foundation of Scientific Research (NWO) and we are very grateful for their support. For seven days, researchers from three applied fields of psychology met in Leiden to present their views on self-regulation and discuss the implications of their views, as well as to comment on the data and views presented by others. Many interesting questions were raised, the most prominent being whether the concepts used in health psychology, educational psychology, and organizational psychology represent similar ideas or whether quite different meanings are attached to these concepts in these different applied fields. Several chapters presented in this handbook grew out of these presentations and discussions.

The choice of the other topics for inclusion in the handbook was guided by our wish to include a wide range of contributors who together would enhance the breadth of paradigmatic perspectives relevant to self-regulation. We have not strived for genuine comprehensiveness: It is clearly impossible to cover the entire range of topics that constitute the phenomenon of self-regulation and do justice to each aspect. Consequently, some topics were left out of the book. For example, activity psychology and the vast domain of mood regulation are clearly missing. The range of topics that are included cover the use of self-regulation constructs in various areas of psychology, such as social, personality, clinical, developmental, educational, organizational, health, and community psychology.

It is clear from the diversity of the chapters in this handbook that self-regulation is a very difficult construct to define theoretically as well as to operationalize empirically. Nevertheless, the several years we worked together on the handbook have strengthened our conviction that self-regulation is an important topic that is highly relevant to the science of the mind and human behavior. At the same time, we are convinced that significant future progress is going to depend on our ability to clearly define the construct theoretically and to empirically distinguish it from other similar constructs. In this handbook many different definitions of self-regulation have been provided and a variety of explanations have been advanced to account for the observed effects of self-regulation on various outcome measures. We hope that the handbook will contribute to the cross-area conversations that are necessary to foster the much needed clarification of the term self-regulation and related constructs. The concluding chapter in this handbook provides a summary of the different definitions and future directions for theory and research as one attempt to stimulate the cross-area conversations.

The 23 chapters are organized into three sections. The chapters in Part I focus on general theories and models of self-regulation that can be applied to many different domains of human behavior. Part II includes chapters on domain specific applications of self-regulation theory and research in the areas of educational, health, and organizational psychology. Finally, the chapters in Part III concern the application of self-regulation constructs to improve practice in some way.

The chapters in Part I present an overview of the concept of self-regulation within psychology and some of the many constraints to its becoming a major construct within psychology. These chapters help us raise once again general questions about the nature of information processing, problem solving, motivation and decision making, as well as questions about the interaction between cognition and affect that cut across all areas of psychology. We hope that these chapters begin to address Bruner’s concerns about fragmentation and they do suggest that self-regulatory constructs could be a cohesive force for integrating the different parochial areas of psychology.

The first three substantive chapters in this section take a more social psychological perspective on self-regulation. Zimmerman outlines the role of self-regulation as part of a general social cognitive theory of behavior. He argues that our regulatory skills, or lack thereof, are the sources of our perception of personal agency that lies at the core of our sense of self. He describes what is presently understood about the structure of the self-regulatory system, as well as the effect of the social and physical environmental context on self-regulation. Zimmerman also describes dysfunction in self-regulation and points to its development. Arguing that self-regulation is self-directed and feedback controlled, Carver and Scheier focus their chapter on hierarchicality among goals. These authors describe multiple paths to high-level goals and multiple meanings of concrete actions. The ideas discussed in their chapter have interesting implications for conceptualizing problem-solving behavior in various applied settings, including therapeutic behaviorial change. In the third chapter, Shah and Kruglanski present a structural theory of goal networks. They explain how goals and means relate to each other and the implications of these associations for a number of regulatory phenomena, such as goal commitment, choice of means, and means substitution. These authors also explicitly address individual differences in self-regulatory focus.

The next two chapters represent both social and personality perspectives on self-regulation. The chapter by Kuhl introduces a differentiated view of energy flow between personality systems and provides access to an additional category of determinants of goal-directed action. His theory of Personality Systems Interactions spells out the conditions under which cognitive performance is modulated by affect and relevant personality traits. Matthews, Schwean, Campbell, Saklofske, and Mohamed argue that styles of self-regulation are an integral aspect of personality. They emphasize the dynamic nature of self-knowledge and describe how traits such as neuroticism, introversion, and optimism–pessimism may be linked to various aspects of self-regulation.

Demetriou’s chapter adds a developmental as well as systemic perspective to our understanding of self-regulation. He reviews research on the development of the self-concept, self-representations, self-monitoring, and self-modification. Demetriou presents a theory of cognitive change, focusing on the way children and adolescents self-monitor and how this important aspect of self-regulation develops. Shapiro and Schwartz continue with a more systemic model and address the possible implications of making intention explicit in self-regulation theory. They introduce the construct of “intention to systemic mindfulness,” which refers to a broad self-regulatory focus that embeds the self and symptom in larger systems. Jackson, Mackenzie, and Hobfoll also present a larger systemic view and draw attention to major biases that exist in traditional theories of psychology, including self-regulation theory. They argue that traditional models of self-regulation assume that behavior is determined by individual goals and needs with limited influence from others or the environmental context. They show how notions that are highly valued within a particular society, such as self-control, personal freedom, and accountability, are reflected in theories of self-regulation that researchers who grew up in that culture propose to the scientific community.

Part II includes chapters on paradigms that have emerged in research on self-regulation in specific areas. Domain-specific models of self-regulation that are used in organizational, health, and educational psychology are represented in this section. Vancouver describes two general approaches to understanding human behavior in industrial and organizational settings, and how they have been integrated in self-regulation models. Most importantly, he offers his own model for integrating the cybernetic or systems approach with the decision-making or problem-solving approach to organizational psychology. At the same time, the issues he discusses regarding the architecture of self-regulating systems is relevant to many areas of self-regulation, not just organizational models.

The next two chapters in Part II focus on models of self-regulation as applied to health behaviors. The chapter by Maes and Gebhardt concerns the promotion of health and healthy living. They review the major health behavior models and provide a general listing of the important components of these models such as goals, values, perceived competence, cost–benefit analysis, and mediati...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• 1: Self-Regulation: An Introductory Overview
• Part I: General Theories and Models of Self-Regulation
• Part II: Domain-Specific Models and Research on Self-Regulation
• Part III: Interventions and Applications of Self-Regulation Theory and Research
• Index