Goals and confidence as self-regulatory elements underlying health and illness behavior

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss some of the ways in which self- regulatory models of behavior relate to today’s understanding of health and illness. Although self-regulatory models have been around for a number of years in social and personality psychology, the systematic application of those models to health and disease is of more recent origin. As a result, many health psychologists are still becoming aware of the nature of self- regulatory models and how they relate to some of the phenomena that health psychologists seek to understand.