Charles S. Carver
Self-Regulation Processes
Most of my work is associated in one fashion or other with the phrase
"self-regulation."
I think of human beings as complex goal-directed systems that
self-regulate
their actions with respect to those goals. Sometimes people have
to juggle multiple goals that aren't entirely compatible with one
another.
Sometimes people encounter difficulty in moving toward their goals, and
they have to decide how to respond to those difficulties. These
kinds
of problems raise issues about how to understand both effective and
ineffective
self-regulation. One important assumption in this view is that
people
who are confident are more persistent in their struggles than people
who
are doubtful. This assumption provides the basis for a somewhat
separate
(though obviously related) line of research on
optimism.
Another assumption that has relatively recently acquired a more
prominent
place in our thinking is that people regulate both with respect to
desired
goals and with respect to undesired "anti-goals." This assumption
serves to link the broader ideas about self-regulation with work on
behavioral
approach and avoidance systems.
These ideas also have potentially important implications
for thinking about the nature of
affect,
a topic I have started writing more about recently. I have
published a theoretical statement about possible self-regulatory
functions of
positive affect. And,
consistent with the Carver and Scheier account of the processing basis
of affect, I have found that certain kinds of
negative affect relate to approach processes rather than avoidance processes. This work has since been expanded to a literature review, in collaboration with Eddie Harmon-Jones, making the case that
anger is an approach-related affect.
Michael Scheier and I have written a
book
on some themes of self-regulation we think are important
in human behavior. It was published in fall of 1998
by Cambridge University Press, under the title
On the
self-regulation
of behavior.
In the past several years, prompted in part by issues that emerged in several editions of our
personality textbook,
I have become interested in the question of what processes underlie behavioral constraint. It turns out that many different personality psychologists have addressed that issue, and the positions they have
taken have varied considerably. I initially reviewed some of those ideas, along with ideas from sources in cognitive psychology and developmental psychology, in
an
article published in PSPR. Some of these ideas also have reverberations in the interface between personality and neuroscience. I later did a somewhat selective review of literature bearing on serotonin function, which appears to implicate
serotonin function in impulsivity.
This work on impulsivity and constraint, along with work on serotonergic function, have opened a new area of interest for me. Together with two of my clinical colleagues, I am conducting research on some of the genetic factors that may underlie depression and other disorders. We are interested as well in the broad questions of how such disorder relate to more normal aspects of personality, such as impulsiveness. This has led to an in-depth review of depression, a briefer discussion of impulse and constraint in personality as well as psychopathology, and research on serotonin and impulsiveness.
Carver Home
Research Interests
