Self‐Regulatory Perspectives on Personality

Abstract

Abstract Self‐regulatory models of personality emphasize the system of goals that make up the self, the relationships among goals at different levels of abstraction, and the processes by which people try to move toward goals and away from threats. Our view is that actions are managed by one set of feedback processes, and that feelings arise from a different set of feedback processes. Another element in this view is that when people encounter obstacles to goal attainment, their expectancies of success help determine whether they continue to try, or disengage from further effort. Disengaging can create problems for people, but giving up the unattainable is an important part of life. The view discussed here also assumes that people's aspirations tend to recalibrate over experience, such that successes tend to promote higher goals and failures tend to promote lowering of goals. Sometimes goals conflict, so that trying to attain one means suppressing another. This effort sometimes backfires, though, bringing the suppressed desire even more into awareness. Efforts to suppress also sometimes fail, producing a loss of self‐control. Finally, the self‐regulatory models discussed here continue to grow. One direction for growth is provided by ideas in recently emerging bodies of thought known as dynamic systems theory and connectionism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.