References 205are added to people’s hierarchies or of how to think about
growth and change over time (but see Carver & Scheier,
1998, 1999a, 1999b). Similarly, the concepts addressed here
bear in several ways on problems in behavior and behavior
change, though space constraints prevent us from describing
them in detail. For example, we suspect that many problems
in people’s lives are, at their core, problems of disengage-
ment versus engagement and the failure to disengage adap-
tively (Carver & Scheier, 1998). As another example, it may
be useful to conceptualize problems as less-than-optimal
adaptations in a multidimensional phase space, which require
some jostling to bounce the person to a new attractor (Hayes
& Strauss, 1998). These are all areas in which more work re-
mains to be done.
These are just some of the ways in which we think the fam-
ily of ideas described here will likely be explored in the near
future. Further analyses of the self-regulation of behavior are
likely to produce insights that transform the models from
which the insights grew. As the models change, so will our un-
derstanding of motivational processes and of how human be-
ings function as coherent, autonomous units. This we take to
be one of the core pursuits of personality psychology.
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