Self-regulation and goal theories in brain injury rehabilitation

Goal planning is a central concept in the clinical practice of rehabilitation. Several disciplines within psychology and medicine have elaborated theories related to goal attainment and self-regulation, the process of managing one's own goal-directed behavior. These theories may be highly relevant to brain injury rehabilitation both to help address characteristic deficits in executive function and to teach clients how to manage life tasks outside of formal rehabilitation. In this article, we describe testable, theoretically motivated interventions at 2 levels: the goal level focused on attaining or enhancing performance on individual tasks and the self-regulation level of metacognitive processes involved in planning and managing one's own goal-directed behavior. We also discuss issues in experimental methodology that are important to adapting this area of research to brain injury rehabilitation, including consideration of cognitive status and other individual differences in selecting the participant sample, choice of between-subjects versus within-subjects experimental design, and selection of appropriate outcome measures.