Autoregulation, Resources, and Personality Potential

The paper lays the foundation of contemporary approaches to the explanation of human life activity in the autoregulation (self-regulation) perspective. The author poses the problem of living capacity exceeding the traditional idea of success, and argues for the multiplicity of the criteria of the desirable. At least three of these criteria, which have complicated relationships with each other, are theoretically justified: 1) maximization of positive affects and minimization of negative ones; 2) deliberate action control and control over the goal attainment; 3) meaning-making through the involvement into significant contexts of one's own and others' lives. The first criterion points at the correspondence to human nature, the second one at the degree of personal maturity, and the third one at the presence of perspective and related-ness with other people. Considering this system of criteria, the paper offers the definition of psychological and subjective well-being as the objective or subjective degree of correspondence between the actual and the desirable state of functioning. In view of the issue of psychological factors that mediate the attainment of the desired outcome the concept of psychological resources is thoroughly analyzed from the systemic-activity viewpoint; the integral nature of psychological resources is highlighted and a classification of their forms offered. The concepts of psychological capital and personality potential are analyzed as different conceptualizations of the integrative autoregulation potential. While the concept of psychological capital is based on the economic metaphor, the concept of personality potential on the physical-energetic one. Autoregulation is presented in the paper as a global explanatory framework. At the same time two different classifications of specific ways and forms of autoregulation are offered. The one is based on the distinction of varied criteria of the desirable with which the actual state of affairs is compared; in line with this, the following processes are distinguished: functional autoregulation, goal autoregulation, emotional autoregulation, motivational autoregula-tion and personality autoregulation. By the complexity of the organization of the corresponding processes the author distinguishes self-control, self-discipline, self-management, self-determination and self-organization. Finally, a systemic-activity model of activity unfolding from the initial motivational impulse to its completion is proposed, that depicts human activity as a process that is flexibly controlled at all its stages.

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