As the science of self-control matures, the organization and integration of its key concepts becomes increasingly important. In response, we identified seven major components or "nodes" in current theories and research bearing on self-control: desire, higher order goal, desire-goal conflict, control motivation, control capacity, control effort, and enactment constraints. To unify these diverse and interdisciplinary areas of research, we formulated the interplay of these components in an integrative model of self-control. In this model, desire and an at least partly incompatible higher order goal generate desire-goal conflict, which activates control motivation. Control motivation and control capacity interactively determine potential control effort. The actual control effort invested is determined by several moderators, including desire strength, perceived skill, and competing goals. Actual control effort and desire strength compete to determine a prevailing force, which ultimately determines behavior, provided that enactment constraints do not impede it. The proposed theoretical framework is useful for highlighting several new directions for research on self-control and for classifying self-control failures and self-control interventions.

The field of self-control has witnessed an unprecedented boom, not least due to the immense implications of successful and unsuccessful self-control for people's lives. However, successful and unsuccessful self-control can take many different forms, and many conceptual problems have been raised as to what self-control is about and how to best study it. Integrating different literatures, our Social and Personality Psychology Compass article provides a general model of self-control, which distinguishes between preventive (i.e., anticipatory) and interventive (i.e., momentary) forms of self-control. The proposed Preventive-Interventive Model (PI-Model) of Self-Control combines seven basic components: preventive strategies, desire, conflict, motivation, volition, opportunity constraints, and behavioral enactment. The model helps to distinguish self-control from standard motivational processes, to define the concept of temptation, and to identify different types of self-control failure including self-monitoring failure, motivational self-control failure, and volitional self-control failure. Further, the model helps to outline five broad mechanisms through which people may be able to proactively boost self-control success.In this 10-week supplementary teaching and learning guide, weeks 1-2 are spent reviewing previous models from which the PI-Model drew ideas. Week 3 is spent reading about integrative models of self-control including the PI-Model. Weeks 4-7 focus on core components from the PI-Model: desire, conflict, motivation, and preventive self-control.Week 8 covers pertinent topics to self-control including affect and self-regulation. Week 9 takes the learner into the context of everyday life and self-control. And finally, week 10 deals with practical ways to boost self-control.We believe that a thorough reading and discussion of the papers in this teaching andlearning guide will provide a broad introduction to the field of self-control and might also help the learner identify self-control conflicts and make smart decisions about how to handle them. SyllabusWeek 1: cybernetic and self-regulatory strength models of self-regulation and self-control Cybernetic modelsCarver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 111-135.

We incorporate anthropological insights into a stigma framework to elucidate the role of culture in threat perception and stigma among Chinese groups. Prior work suggests that genetic contamination that jeopardizes the extension of one’s family lineage may comprise a culture-specific threat among Chinese groups. In Study 1, a national survey conducted from 2002–2003 assessed cultural differences in mental illness stigma and perceptions of threat in 56 Chinese-Americans and 589 European-Americans. Study 2 sought to empirically test this culture-specific threat of genetic contamination to lineage via a memory paradigm. Conducted from June to August 2010, 48 Chinese-American and 37 European-American university students in New York City read vignettes containing content referring to lineage or non-lineage concerns. Half the participants in each ethnic group were assigned to a condition in which the illness was likely to be inherited (genetic condition) and the rest read that the illness was unlikely to be inherited (non-genetic condition). Findings from Study 1 and 2 were convergent. In Study 1, culture-specific threat to lineage predicted cultural variation in stigma independently and after accounting for other forms of threat. In Study 2, Chinese-Americans in the genetic condition were more likely to accurately recall and recognize lineage content than the Chinese-Americans in the non-genetic condition, but that memorial pattern was not found for non-lineage content. The identification of this culture-specific threat among Chinese groups has direct implications for culturally-tailored anti-stigma interventions. Further, this framework might be implemented across other conditions and cultural groups to reduce stigma across cultures.

Disorderly environments are linked to disorderly behaviors. Broken windows theory (Wilson & Kelling, 1982), an influential theory of crime and rule-breaking, assumes that scene-level social disorder cues (e.g., litter, graffiti) cause people to reason that they can get away with breaking rules. But what if part of the story is not about such complex social reasoning? Recent research suggests that basic visual disorder cues may be sufficient to encourage complex rule-breaking behavior. To test this hypothesis, we first conducted a set of experiments (Experiments 1-3) in which we identified basic visual disorder cues that generalize across visual stimuli with a variety of semantic content. Our results revealed that spatial features (e.g., nonstraight edges, asymmetry) are more important than color features (e.g., hue, saturation, value) for visual disorder. Exploiting this knowledge, we then reconstructed stimuli contrasted in terms of visual disorder, but absent of scene-level social disorder cues, to test whether visual disorder alone encourages cheating in a second set of experiments (Experiments 4 and 5). In these experiments, manipulating visual disorder increased the likelihood of cheating by up to 35% and the average magnitude of cheating by up to 87%. This work suggests that theories of rule-breaking that assume that complex social reasoning (e.g., about norms, policing, poverty) is necessary, should be reconsidered (e.g., Kelling & Coles, 1997; Sampson & Raudenbush, 2004). Furthermore, these experiments show that simple perceptual properties of the environment can affect complex behavior and sheds light on the extent to which our actions are within our control. (PsycINFO Database Record