Self-regulation processes and health: The importance of optimism and goal adjustment

ABSTRACT This article discusses how self-regulatory models can be used to understand people’s response to health threats. The article begins with a general discussion of the principles and assumptions of self-reg-ulatory models of behavior. Two distinct lines of research are then pre-sented addressing two important processes of adaptive self-regulation. First, we provide a brief overview of the literature on optimism and ad-justment to chronic disease and other health outcomes. Second, we present an overview of the process of disengagement from unattainable goals, focusing on recent research. We close by making recommendations for future research. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the ways in which self-regulatory models of behavior can help us understand people’s responses to health threats. This article begins with a general dis-cussion of a set of orienting assumptions and principles embedded in models of self-regulation of behavior, placing the heaviest emphasis on our own approach. We then describe two distinct lines of researc