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Inside Collection (Textbook): The Psychology Of Emotions, Feelings and Thoughts
What is self-regulation? Which mental processes compose it, and how do those processes work together? Self-regulation is the conscious and nonconscious processes by which people regulate their thoughts, emotions, attention, behavior, and impulses. People generate thoughts, feelings and actions and adapt those to the attainment of personal goals. Behavioral self-regulation invovles self- observing and strategically adjusting performance processes, such as one's method of learning, whereas environmental self-regulation refers to observing and adjecting environmental conditions or outcomes. Covert self regulation involves monitoring and adjusting cognitive and affective states, such as imagery for remembering or relaxing. Someones performance and regulation is going to be changed by their goals, motivations, and decisions, People self-regulate their own functioning in order to achieve goals or change how they are thinking.
Someones actions and mental processes depend on one's beliefs and motives. Self -regulation is cyclical - that is, feedback (information, responses) from prior actions and performances changes the adjustments made during current efforts. Adjustments are necessary because personal, behavioral, and environmental factors are constantly changing during the course of learning and performance. Someones performances are constantly being changed by their attention and actions. Forethought is the phase that precedes efforts to act and sets the stage for a performance. A person self-reflects on performances afterwards, and this reflection influences their responses.
In the forethought phase people engage in a) task analysis and b) self-motivational beliefs. Task analysis involves the setting of goals and strategic planning. Self motivational beliefs involves self- efficacy, outcome expectations, intrinsic interest/value, and goal orientation.
In the performance phase people perform self-control processes and self- observation strategies. Self-control involves self-instruction (various verbalizations), imagery (forming mental pictures), attention focusing and task strategies (which assist learning and performance by reducing a task to its essential parts and organizing the parts meaningfully. For example, when students listen to a history lecture, they might identify a limited number of key points and record them chronologically in brief sentences. People do those things while learning (say in education), and in non- educational settings.
Also as part of someone's performance they do self-observation. This refers to a person's tracking of specific aspects of their own performance, the conditions that surround it, and the effects that it produces. You can set goals in forethought about how you are going to do self- observation.
Bandura (1986)1 has identified two self-reflected processes that are closely associated with self-observation: self- judgment and self-reactions. Self-judgment involves self-evaluating one's performance and attributing casual significance to the results. Self-evaluation refers to comparing self-monitored information with a standard or goal, such as a sprinter judging practice runs according to his or her best previous effort. Previous performance or self-criteria involves comparisons of current performance with earlier levels of one's behavior, such as a baseline or the previous performance.
People also make casual attributions about the results of their evaluations - such as whether poor performance is due to one's limited ability or to insufficient effort. Self-satisfaction involves perceptions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction and associated affect regarding one's performance, which is important because people pursue courses of action that result in satisfaction and positive affect, and avoid those courses that produce dissatisfaction and negative affect, such as anxiety.
Adaptive or defensive inferences are conclusions about how one needs to alter his or her self-regulatory approach during subsequent efforts to learn or perform. Adaptive inferences are important because they direct people to new and potentially better forms of performance self-regulation, such as by shifting the goals hierarchically or choosing a more effective strategy (Zimmerman + Martinez-Pons, 1992)2 In contrast, defensive inferences serve primarily to protect the person from future dissatisfaction and aversive affect, but unfortunately they also undermine successful adaptation. These defensive self-reactions include helplessness, procrastination, task avoidance, cognitive disengagement, and apathy. Garcia and Pintrich (1994)3 have referred to such defensive reactions as self-handicapping strategies, because, despite their intended protectiveness, they ultimately limit personal growth.
I said in the beginning of this chapter that "Self- regulation is the conscious and nonconscious processes by which people regulate their thoughts, emotions, attention, behavior, and impulses. People generate thoughts, feelings and actions and adapt those to the attainment of personal goals." But what is meant by terms such as self-regulation, self-control, self- awareness, and self-monitoring? The difficult thing to figure out I would think would be how much of self- regulation or what is going on mentally is conscious or not conscious. When someone is doing any action, how much of the control they are employing is conscious and how much of it is unconscious? That is a very complicated question. To a certain extent it is like you are unconsciously saying to yourself various things while you are doing something, but you also might be saying things to yourself consciously at the same time that also helps direct your behavior.
Other important questions are - how does a persons goals and motivations influence their feelings, behavior, self-control and actions? How much of feeling, impulses and impulse control, motivation and goal creating is conscious or unconscious? If you think about it, your goals, motivations, and the natural impulses that result from your emotions (which are to a large extent determined by your goals and motivations) are going to be fluctuating and changing all of the time.
People can alter the goals they have, however there is going to be an incredibly complex set of unconscious goals that one is not aware of. These goals create multiple motivations as well as multiple concerns. Also, doing well at approaching an incentive is not quite the same experience as doing well at avoiding a threat. If you think about it, your emotions are going to be different if you achieve something you are striving for then if you are threatened and respond because you are under pressure. It makes sense that approach is going to have such positive affects as elation, eagerness and excitement, and such negative affects as frusturation, anger and sadness. (Carver, 20044; Carver + Harmon-Jones, 20095). Avoidance involves such positive affects as relief and contentment (when someone avoids a threat, they are relieved and content) and such negative affects as fear, guilt and anxiety.
Goals can be changed by how motivated someone is to have that goal. Some goals can be brought into conscious awareness at various times for various reasons. Simon (1967)6 reasoned that emotions are calls for reprioritization: that emotion regarding a goal that is out of awareness eventually induces people to give that goal a higher priority. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the claim for higher priority. Affect pulls the out-of-awareness into awareness.
Simon's analysis applies readily to negative feelings, such as anxiety and frustration. If you promised your spouse you would go to the post office today and you've been too busy, the creeping of the clock toward closing time can cause an increase in frustration or anxiety (or both). The stronger the affect, the more likely the goal it concerns will rise in priority until it comes into awareness and becomes the reference for behavior.
Therefore, it makes sense that the main goal you have and you know you have can reliquish its place. You are constantly shifting the goals you have, you simply might not be aware that you are doing this. If you think about it, people unconsciously might create many goals that they don't think about because they don't understand that they are motivated to do those things. They simply don't know that they are trying to reach certain objectives clearly. Take for instance sexual goals - people probably do many things to enhance sexual feelings without being aware that that is the motivation behind other goals they are consciously striving to achieve.
Emotionally people have many desires - all of these emotions are going to create and alter the various goals that people have (conscious and unconscious). If you think about that further, on a moment-by-moment basis your emotions are going to be altered continuously by various goals - your emotions are going to be creating goals, objectives and whatnot. For instance, even with simple activities you may have an emotional goal that you aren't aware of. Say you are opening a door - maybe a previous event caused you to slow down when opening the door and going into the next area because your motivation was decreased so you weren't as excited about moving onto the next activity in your life.
So before someone does anything, their previous thoughts and emotions are going to determine how they perform during the action/activity. They have many goals that they created unconsciously and consciously that determined to some extent the emotions they are feeling, and they thought many things which (in combination with their emotions) helps determine how they are thinking. During the action conscious verbalizations and mental imagery help assist performance, and reflection of the performance afterwards helps to determine a persons response.
The process of self-regulation is not completely understood, nor do I think it ever will be, because it is basically asking the question of how exactly does the mental processes behind thinking and feeling work. When 'mental imagery' is used, how exactly does that work? Which associated images come up with each image you bring up for a specific purpose? When people monitor their affective state, how much does that enhance what they are feeling or change what they are feeling? When someone uses a strategy such as a verbalization to help learning, why does that work exactly the way it does?
There seems to be a large unconscious factor that is too complicated to be understood. The unconscious is so complicated, as it has many factors that are interacting with each other all of the time. When those factors mentioned in the previous paragraph are brought up (mental images, monitoring, cognitive strategies), along with the natural unconscious emotion and motivation that occurs always with humans, it becomes obvious that there is no telling what could be influencing your thinking and feeling (on a detailed, moment to moment basis and even just considering the obvious factors).
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This work is licensed by Mark Pettinelli under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Mark Pettinelli on Nov 11, 2012 5:27 am -0600.
