Psychology 2550A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 17: Sympathetic Nervous System, Negative Affectivity, Electrical Resistance And Conductance
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23 Apr 2017
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Chapter 17: Self Regulation from goal pursuit to goal attainment
Overview of Contributions to Self-regulation from each level
• Akrasia – lack or a weakness of the will a character trait (Greeks) – deficiency of the will
• psychodynamic: self regulation problems reflect internal conflicts b/w basic bio impulses
vs inhibiting influences, often outside awareness; importance of ability to delay
gratification
• Trait dispositional: found and measured broad individual differences in
conscientiousness and self-regulatio, as ell as distiitie if…the.. ehaiour
signatures in self-regulation; examined constructs and dimensions of ego control and
ego resilience
• Bio: id brain centers, pathways and interacting hot and cool systems in effortful control
and delay of gratification
• Behavioural: importance and power of situations and stimulus control; how emotional
conditioning and response consequences shape behaviour and make self control and
regulation difficult
• Phenomenological: perception is subejctve; persons cognitive appraisals and construal
of situations influence their impact on behaviour; showed possibilities for self-
determination; higher order processes provide routes to enhance self-direction
• Social cognitive: helped bridge the gap b/w construal and action; showed how the
construal of the situation interacts with other mental representations to influence goal
directed effortful behaviour; analyzed the mental mechanisms and strategies that
enable delay of gratification and goal directed self-control
Self-Regulatory Process in Goal Pursuit
Personal Goals and Projects
• Goals an individual pursues are organized and coherent, and of central importance in
the functioning of the personality system
• Differ in goals you value, and shift over development
Life tasks
• Current life tasks are defined as projects to which individuals commit themselves during
particular periods in their lives
• Self created tasks help give meaning to the individuals life and provide organization and
direction for many more specific activities and goal pursuits that are in their service
• Are significant LT goals that are meaningful for the individual at a certain point in time
• Experienced as personally urgent, also often ill-defined and loosely formulated, w/
limited self awareness
Goal Hierarchies
• Are organized hierarchically in the personality system, with some – the super ordinate
goals – more important than the subordinate goals
• When goal attainment at a given level is blocked and frustrated, people may continue to
strive toward the higher level goal toward which the lower level activity was directed
• Goals central to understanding personal and life goals – but methods of pursuing
depend on own standards and self-evaluations
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Standards and Self-evaluation
• In goal pursuit, people evaluate their own behaviour and perceived progress, and
reward and punish themselves accordingly
• People asses themselves and become their own internal judges and reward-punishment
system, using the standards that they have developed for themselves
• People compare current state of performance with those standards, if they perceive
discrepancy, tend to be motivated to reduce it or reset their standards to lower level
Why self-regulate
Automaticity
• Most of goal pursuit is automatic
• These automatic mental-emotional processes activated in goal pursuit are adaptive for
most life functions
Beyond Automaticity to willpower
• John Bargh – showed that most of what people do runs off automatically without
conscious intervention
• Its elicited by the particular stimulus conditions in the situation, often without persons
awareness
o Becomes easy to bypass own evaluative self standards and to exhibit reflexive,
automatic impulsive behaviour – that may later regret
• These findings coexist w/ the intuitive conviction that human beings have the capacity
to take control and exert willpower at least some of the time
• Often people do overcome obstacles and temptations along way to achieving their
valued LT goals, and manage to resist the pull of even strong situational pressures
Self-regulation requires both motivation and competence
• Effective self regulation and self control in goal pursuit depends on persons motivation
and their competencies
• If these self regulatory behaviours are serving a higher goal central to the self, like being
a worthy, self-respecting person, their motivational significance will be high and they
will be mentally more accessible
• Helps to distinguish b/w self-regulatory motivation and competence
o Often have one of these but not the other
• Even with high regulatory motivation, goal attainment depends critically on the
availability and accessibility of effective self-regulatory competencies
• Self-regulatory competencies refer to the cognitive and attentional mechanisms that
help us execute goal-directed behaviour
The bio level: effortful control
Brain mechanisms in effortful control
• Researchers have described an anterior attentional system that regulates the pathways
involved in EF throughout the cortex
• EF is required for adaptive, goal directed behaviours to solve novel problems,
particularly those calling for the inhibition of automatic or established thoughts and
responses
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• These EF brain systems, and their associated psych processes enable effortful control, or
in lay language, will power and in goal pursuit
o Do so by allowing people to regulate their attention
o Attention regulation process includes the ability to focus attention in perception,
to switch attention b/w tasks, to ignore or inhibit interfering responses and to
control thoughts flexibly
Trait Dispositional
• Self report measures have been developed to identify individual differences in the
attention control mechanisms that are basic for effortful control
• And that are correlated with the brain measures
• Attention control scores are related positively to extraversion and negatively to anxiety
and impulsivity
Ego control and ego resilience
• Ego control refers to the degree of impulse control in such functions as inhibition of
aggression and the ability to plan
• A related construct, ego resilience, refers to the individuals ability to adapt to
environmental demands by appropriately modifying his or her habitual level of ego
control
• Ego resiliey allos futioig / soe elastiity ad pereaility
• Together these two constructs represent core qualities for adaptive functioning from an
influential trait dispositional perspective that also has been influenced by modern
psychodynamic research
• Jack Block – the resilient person anticipates wisely when to stop something unfruitful or
to continue something that may ultimately prove fruitful
• In its adaptiveness, resiliency well serves evolution
• E.g. oe study rated hildre’s tedey to ihiit ipulses to ifer their leel of ego
control and also observed their delay behaviour in experimental situations
• Exposed children to a frustration in which barrier separated child from toy
• Undercontrolling children (been rated as not inhibiting their impulses) reacted more
violently to the frustrating barrier than did over controlling, inhibited
• Undercontrolling also became less constructive in their play
• Those high on indices of ego control tend to be more able to control and inhibit their
motor activity
• In studies of the ego-resiliency construct, toddlers were evaluated for the degree to
which they seemed secure and competent (in a problem solving task)
o Toddlers who were secure and competent also scored higher on measures of ego
resiliency when they reached age 4/5 years
• Ego resilient children at age 3 viewed as popular, interesting and attractive at later ages
• Resilience concept also is related to delay of immediate gratification for the sake of
more valued but delayed outcomes
• Both the concepts of ego control and ego resiliency help characterize important
individual differences in self-regulation and self control patterns
Social-Cognitive and Phenomenological-Humanistic Level
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