Personality, Self-Regulation, and Adaptation: A Cognitive-Social Framework

Styles of self-regulation are an integral aspect of personality. Reconciling the trait and social–cognitive perspectives on self-regulation requires understanding the underlying cognitive architecture. The three-level architecture proposed by Wells and Matthews is applied to understanding individual differences in adaptation to the challenges posed by everyday life events, by demanding tasks, and potential hostility in other people. In each case, self-regulative processing is prone to “cognitive distortions,” such as biases in appraisal of the self and of external demands. Across the research areas surveyed, the single most important trait is neuroticism. It relates to various self-referent processes, including appraisals of threat and loss of control across various contexts, negative appraisals of the self as a social agent associated with shyness, and negative or maladaptive metacognitions. Neuroticism also may relate to attributions of hostility to others via its association with emotionally reactive aggression. More neurotic subjects also prefer to cope through emotion focus and disengagement as opposed to task focus.