Self-Regulation

The term self-regulation is used by many professionals across a diverse set of fields, such as psychology, education, athletics, and musicianship, to describe a number of related yet distinct phenomena. Moreover, there are several subfields that address self-regulation of behaviors, cognitions, motivation, or emotions. Although self-regulation may have many connotations, a broad theme is that it refers to adaptation to one’s environment. Usually, this adaptation is viewed as a cyclical feedback loop in which one identifies a need, selects actions to address that need, acts, and then evaluates the effectiveness of the selected actions. In addition, self-regulation implies that the individual plays an active role and is the primary agent of change in this cyclical loop as opposed to external forces or persons. Relatedly, because ...