Introduction: Some Issues on Self-Regulation to Consider

This special issue entitled “Motivation and self-regulation” started after the kind invitation of Professor Hirotsugu Yamauchi to the other co-editors and the willingness of the distinguished Psychologia Society of Japan to host in its journal Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient the articles included in this special issue. We are grateful to them. The special issue comprises six articles. Due to space limitations four of them are included in Issue 4, Volume 45 and two in Issue 1, Volume 46 of the journal. The introduction deals with all 6 articles because of the unity of the concepts in all of them. The goal we set, a special issue on motivation and self-regulation, was challenging, because there is a lot and highly interesting work in this area. Self-regulation is a concept that was introduced into the psychological and educational vocabulary in the 1980s (Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1992) and since then it has attracted the interest of researchers all over the world. It draws on various lines of research such as metacognition (Brown, 1987; see also Efklides, 2001), achievement goals (Ames, 1992; Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1984; see also Thrash & Elliot, 2001), intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985), action control (Kuhl, 1985), appraisal processes (see Boekaerts & Niemivirta, 2000), etc., but the emphasis is on how the people monitor and control, i.e., regulate, their performance, their cognition and affect as well as their environment in order to achieve their goal. Self-regulation has also been related to autonomy and self-determination in goal setting (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000) and to cognitive or metacognitive strategy use for the successful implementation of the goals set (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991; Weinstein & Mayer, 1986). After almost two decades of research, however, there are still many issues that have not been resolved. This special issue aims at highlighting some of them. Let us name a few: 1. Self-regulation, as the name denotes, presupposes the active involvement of one’s own self. However, which aspects of one’s self are relevant to self-regulation and how do they interact with regulatory processes? This issue is taken up in the articles of Pajares and