Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Parkway, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0213, USA.
Health Psychol. 2013 May;32(5):487-98. doi: 10.1037/a0028533.
The goal of this article is to review and highlight the relevance of social psychological research on self-regulation for health-related theory and practice.
We first review research on goal setting, or determining which goals to pursue and the criteria to determine whether one has succeeded. We discuss when and why people adopt goals, what properties of goals increase the likelihood of their attainment, and why people abandon goals. We then review research on goal striving, which includes the planning and execution of actions that lead to goal attainment, and the processes that people use to shield their goals from being disrupted by other competing goals, temptations, or distractions. We describe four types of strategies that people use when pursuing goals.
We find that self-regulation entails the operation of a number of psychological mechanisms, and that there is no single solution that will help all people in all situations. We recommend a number of strategies that can help people to more effectively set and attain health-related goals.
We conclude that enhancing health behavior requires a nuanced understanding and sensitivity to the varied, dynamic psychological processes involved in self-regulation, and that health is a prototypical and central domain in which to examine the relevance of these theoretical models for real behavior. We discuss the implications of this research for theory and practice in health-related domains.
本文旨在回顾和强调自我调节的社会心理学研究对于健康相关理论和实践的相关性。
我们首先回顾了目标设定的研究，即确定要追求哪些目标以及确定一个人是否成功的标准。我们讨论了人们何时以及为何会设定目标，哪些目标特性会增加目标实现的可能性，以及人们为何会放弃目标。然后，我们回顾了目标努力的研究，包括实现目标所需的行动规划和执行，以及人们用来防止目标被其他竞争目标、诱惑或干扰破坏的过程。我们描述了人们在追求目标时使用的四种策略。
我们发现自我调节需要一系列心理机制的运作，并没有一种单一的解决方案可以帮助所有情况的所有人。我们建议了一些策略，可以帮助人们更有效地设定和实现与健康相关的目标。
我们的结论是，增强健康行为需要对自我调节中涉及的各种动态心理过程有细致的理解和敏感性，健康是检验这些理论模型在实际行为中的相关性的典型和核心领域。我们讨论了这项研究对健康相关领域的理论和实践的影响。
