Self-Monitoring and Self-Licensing

The self is an important aspect of self-regulation. To what extent do people need to acknowledge a discrepancy between their current state and their future state to get into action and how do they deal with negative feelings that may accompany the experience of discrepancy? This question stands central in our research on self-monitoring as does the question of when and how people look for excuses to temporarily abandoning their goals to avoid negative emotions.