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Personality and Self-Regulation

Rick H. Hoyle*

Because people are not in complete control of the physical and social environments they encounter in daily life, it is inevitable that discrepancies arise between what their identities, goals, and preferences lead them to expect or desire in specific situations and what transpires in those situations. People generally find such discrepancies at least mildly and temporarily unsettling, because they call into question their understanding of how the world works (or could work) or their understanding of their own goals, motives, or behavior. When these discrepancies arise, they generally are met with swift and decisive actions aimed at aligning expectations or desires and reality. These actions, collectively referred to as self-regulation, are the natural, often automatic response of healthy individuals to salient discrepancies between expectation and reality as they perceive it. They may involve cognition or behavior, and almost always are attended by affect.

Effective self-regulation is the bedrock of healthy psychological functioning. People who routinely are successful at self-regulation benefit from a sense of psychological stability and personal control that allows them to manage their perceptions of themselves and how they are perceived by others. Their behavior typically reflects salient goals and adopted standards of behavior. Departures from these desired states are handled smoothly and effectively. People who routinely fail at self-regulation enjoy none of the psychological benefits that derive from a sense of psychological stability and control and struggle with mild to severe forms of psychopathology. Effective self-regulation, by which people control their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, is essential for adaptive functioning.

The recognition that self-regulation is of central importance in adaptive functioning has inspired a large literature on the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of effective and ineffective self-regulation. Contributors to this literature represent the full range of subdisciplines within psychological science as well as other disciplines concerned with human behavior (e.g., sociology, education). In the psychological sciences, different perspectives and streams of research on self-regulation have been showcased in a number of edited volumes published within the last decade (e.g., Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000; Cameron & Leventhal, 2003; de Ridder & de Wit, 2006; Heckhausen & Dweck, 1998).

Despite the impressive size and breadth of the literature on self-regulation in psychological science and related disciplines, relatively little research or theorizing (especially in the adult literature) has targeted the intersection of self-regulation and personality processes. As such, research on personality structure and process rarely reflects the rich detail of models of self-regulatory processes, and research on the self-regulatory processes rarely addresses the fact that some portion of those processes is a reflection of stable tendencies of individuals. The primary aim of this handbook is to bridge the personality and process-oriented literatures on self-regulation by showcasing programs of research that draw from and speak to both perspectives.

In this opening chapter, I begin by discussing personality and information-processing perspectives on self-regulation. Next, I describe ways in which the personality and information-processing perspectives might be integrated. These range from methodological approaches, in which constructs representing the two perspectives are examined through integrated data-analytic strategies, to conceptual approaches, in which the two perspectives are unified in a holistic theoretical model of self-regulation. In the final section of the chapter, I preview the individual contributions that constitute the remainder of the handbook, which is organized in three conceptually coherent but overlapping parts: the emergence and early expression of variability in self-regulation; self-regulation as a process that plays out in the context of normal adult personality; and individual differences in the components, styles, and effectiveness of self-regulation.

Temperament and Personality Perspectives

The characteristic means by which people self-regulate and the routine success or failure they experience are reflected in personality traits. Many of these traits are rooted in temperament, which manifests early in life. Despite the obvious continuity between temperament and personality, the literatures on these two manifestations of personhood are relatively distinct; thus, they are summarized separately in this section.

Temperament Constructs

The basic elements of the self-system and the capacity to self-regulate begin to emerge early in life. For example, variation in the ability to inhibit behavior stabilizes by about one year of age (Kagan, 1997). The ego—the psychological structure and processes through which people relate to their social and physical environment—undergoes differentiation and change as young children mature (Loevinger, 1976). In terms of self-regulation, the developing individual becomes increasingly more able to delay gratification and increasingly less prone to act impulsively or in response to external pressure (Hy & Loevinger, 1996). With the emergence of self-awareness and internalized standards of behavior comes the capacity to self-regulate.

A temperament construct with clear implications for self-regulation is effortful control, defined as the “ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant response, to detect errors, and to engage in planning” (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005, p. 169). Although specific constructs and labels vary across models of temperament, most include two broad factors that reflect the tendency toward a dominant response of approach or avoidance. Through the exercise of effortful control, children are able to inhibit these dominant responses when they would conflict with an activity in which they are engaged. Individual differences in effortful control begin to emerge by two years of age and by four years of age are temporally stable (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000). Effortful control is a precursor to the constraint dimension in adult models of personality.

A related temperament construct is behavioral inhibition, which focuses on variation in children’s reactions to unfamiliar or unexpected stimuli. In the presence of such stimuli, children as young as one year of age who are behaviorally inhibited exhibit stress and behavioral restraint. The neurophysiology of behavioral inhibition indicates overactivity in brain regions associated with fear (Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005). Thus behaviorally inhibited children are faced with the regulatory challenge of managing fear and anxiety in the face of the unexpected. Because a stimulus for self-regulation is unexpected feedback from the environment (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), behaviorally inhibited individuals face the challenge of managing such feedback while also managing the fear and anxiety such stimuli invoke.

These and other temperament constructs influence the emergence and development of self-regulation and underlie personality traits relevant to adult self-regulation. Although a large number of personality traits have some relevance for adult self-regulation, those that follow most clearly from temperament and are most likely to appear in major models of personality can be grouped under the general headings of conscientiousness and impulsivity.

Conscientiousness and Related Constructs

Among the higher-order dimensions of personality, conscientiousness is the most clearly relevant for self-regulation. Although defined somewhat differently in lexical and psychometric models, conscientiousness generally concerns the ways in which people characteristically manage their behavior. People who are high on conscientiousness are confident, disciplined, orderly, and planful, whereas people who are low on conscientiousness are not confident in their ability to control their behavior, and are spontaneous, distractible, and prone to procrastinate (Costa & McCrae, 1992). In research linking conscientiousness to behavior, the more narrowly focused facets underlying the domain are emphasized (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). The facets—competence/self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation/cautiousness—reflect different behavioral tendencies characteristic of successful self-regulation (Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, & Goldberg, 2005).

A related higher-order dimension of personality is constraint, which reflects well the temperament trait of behavioral inhibition (Tellegen, 1982). Facets of constraint focus on the tendency to inhibit the expression of impulse and emotion (control), behavior at odds with social convention (traditionalism), and risk taking (harm avoidance). As with conscientiousness, in research on self-regulation constraint is best considered in terms of its facets.

Impulsivity and Related Constructs

As a trait, impulsivity is the tendency to act without thought or planning. It is evident in early childhood (Clark, 1993) and has a strong neurobiological signature (Spinella, 2004). Impulsive behaviors typically are quick, often inappropriate, and frequently risky. People who are highly impulsive are prone to a host of high-risk behaviors characterized by poor self-control (e.g., Hoyle, Fejfar, & Miller, 2000; Krueger, Caspi, Moffitt, White, & Slouthamer-Loeber, 1996;...