Self-Regulation: Learning Across Disciplines

The capacity to self-regulate is a key developmental ability that has become a focal point for research across multiple disciplines. Yet interdisciplinary collaboration on self-regulation is rare and the term is often applied in different ways across studies. Drawing on literature from psychology, medical sciences, sociology, and economics, this article provides a synthesis of disciplinary approaches to research on self-regulation. A review of search returns from one prominent database per discipline is used to investigate overlap and divergence on the topic. This review argues that interdisciplinary collaboration has the potential to integrate perspectives on self-regulation into a more coherent body of work, resulting in advances that could not be achieved through any one discipline alone. The review also identifies and discusses three current impediments to collaboration: terminology, measurement, and disciplinary conventions.