Abstract
Individual differences in goal engagement and goal disengagement processes have been demonstrated to be related to goal attainment, health, and emotional well–being. However, there is a dearth of studies on the developmental conditions of individual differences in these processes. Social learning processes contribute to the formation of individual dispositions even in adulthood. As one pathway of learning, we investigated observational learning of goal regulation processes in romantic relationships in two experimental studies. Study 1 ( N = 67 couples, M = 32.65 years) replicated a previous finding that observing partners imitated their partner's goal regulation processes in the same task and extended it by showing transfer effects to another task. Study 2 ( N = 60 couples, M = 25.9 years) demonstrated that—given a lack of praise of the modelled actions—partners still imitated goal regulation processes but to a smaller extent. These findings lend support for observational learning as a pathway to individual differences in the application of goal regulation processes. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology
Highlights
Theories of self-regulation postulate that goals structure people’s lives and fill them with meaning (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995)
We focus on romantic partners in young adulthood, who might provide an intimate learning environment for each other when it comes to methods for coping with emotions and barriers in goal pursuit across a longer period of time
Tuskeviciute et al (2018) showed that partners applied a particular coping behaviour for different problems than the one their partner was dealing with. In line with this finding, the transfer effects to a previously unobserved task in the present study indicate that the observed goal regulation process is applied to a different setting
Summary
Theories of self-regulation postulate that goals structure people’s lives and fill them with meaning (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995). Two categories of processes are broadly distinguished (Brandstätter, 2018; Haase, Heckhausen, & Wrosch, 2013; Heckhausen & Wrosch, 2016): Goal engagement refers to processes of tenacious goal pursuit, correcting or compensating endeavours and increased resource recruitment to attain the original goal. Research has shown reliable individual differences in the use of regulatory processes among individuals who confront similar obstacles in goal pursuit (Brandstätter, 2018; Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schulz, 2010).
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