Behaviour Control as the Basis of Self-Regulation
The paper attempts to substantiate the viability of the construct “behaviour control” - a novel concept that enriches our notion of regulation and self-regulation analyzed from new systemic and subjective grounds. Control of behaviour as the basis for regulation has formed itself in an attempt to validate the integral construct of subject regulation. Behaviour control is a psychological level of behaviour regulation which actualizes individual resources of Man's mental organization and ensures the balance between internal potentialities and external objectives. The hypothesis of behaviour control is compatible with the idea of the unity of cognitive, affective and volitional mental processes. As a result, three components of behaviour control have been singled out: 1) cognitive control (the ability to anticipate events, extract and organize mental experience, to mentally plan decisions and stimulate performance, and an aptitude for cognitive flexibility and the ability to compare anticipated and factual results; cognitive flexibility); 2) emotional regulation (emotional intensity, emotional instability, activity, the ability to empathize, to understand one's own emotions and those of the Other); 3) optional (unconditioned) control (the ability to organize actions arbitrarily versus volitional efforts). The comparison between domestic and foreign concepts and approaches to the study of mental regulation of behaviour and activity has shown that the concept “behaviour control” cannot be reduced to the concept “self-regulation” exclusively or to the regulation of mental states and mental activity. Behavior control as a regulatory function of the subject actualizes the individual abilities (resources) of a person in accordance with the purposes and objectives (both external and internal). The research has shown the difference between the concept “behaviour control” and the similar concept “vitality” where high-level processes of self-regulation are accentuated, whereas the former concept underlies them and becomes an individual psychological mechanism of adaptive behavior throughout the subject's development. A brief verification of this construct in a number of researches is presented. An attempt to substantiate an integrative concept that incorporates various aspects of mental organization that are actualized in individual regulation corresponds to the current trends in search of generalizing models of mental regulation as one of the key problems in modern psychology.