Self-regulation has been investigated on the past decades in many fields, and despite the fact thatcontributions have enlightened the understanding of a vast array of behaviors, the development ofgeneral explanatory models hardly reaches a consensus. A recent contribution on the field suggeststhat the presence or absence of a goal may lead to different self-regulatory states, in which theindividual would think and behave differently, facilitating goal achievement when there is a goal, orenvironmental adaptation, when there is not. Those states were defined as structured and unstructuredself-regulation and even though this line of research has potential to give significant contributions, it isimportant to develop a better description of those states, for example, in terms of which variables mayhave influence on the process. In an effort towards the development of a model based on the suggestedself-regulatory states, a sequence of experiments was conducted to test the moderation effects of selfcontrol(experiment 1) and self-efficacy (experiment 2) on the relation between goal presence/absenceand task performance. On experiment 1 participants were randomly selected for two groups, goal or nogoal, in which they had to perform a task with or without a specific goal. The performance on the taskwas measured and the moderation effects of self-control were investigated. On experiment 2, the sameprocedure was conducted but self-efficacy was tested as a moderator. On experiment 1 the task was tofinish a jigsaw puzzle and on experiment 2 it was the Tower of London task. At this point the resultssuggest that the model is feasible, with moderation effects found for self-control and self-efficacy. Also,the presence of a goal affected the performance on both tasks, suggesting that the model could be asignificant contribution to a better understanding of self-regulation.
Understanding and interpreting the effects of prior cognitive exertion on self-regulation of sport and exercise performance
