Personal Autonomy

Abstract

Personal autonomy is the capacity to govern oneself, to act from reasons and values one genuinely endorses rather than from external coercion or internal compulsion, a construct that sits at the intersection of moral philosophy and empirical psychology. Philosophers from Frankfurt to Dworkin analyzed autonomy as a structural relation among a person's desires; self-determination theory recast it as a basic psychological need whose satisfaction predicts motivation, internalization, and well-being. A central and often-missed distinction separates autonomy from independence: a person can act autonomously while relying on others. This article traces both lineages, examines how autonomy is supported or undermined in parenting, education, and work, and reviews its measurement. Three interactive demonstrations let the reader compute a relative autonomy index, separate autonomy from independence, and see how an authority figure's style shifts internalization.

Keywords: personal autonomy, self-determination theory, autonomy support

Personal autonomy names one of the oldest problems in the study of persons: what it means to be the author of one's own life. The word joins the Greek autos, self, and nomos, law, and so literally denotes self-legislation, the condition of a person whose actions issue from laws they give themselves rather than from laws imposed from without. The idea has two homes. In moral and political philosophy it grounds claims about freedom, responsibility, and the respect owed to persons as self-governing agents. In psychology it names a measurable feature of motivation and development, the degree to which behavior is experienced as volitional and self-endorsed rather than pressured or compelled. This article treats both, because the psychological construct that dominates contemporary research inherited its central questions, and some of its sharpest confusions, from the philosophical tradition that preceded it.

What Personal Autonomy Is

Personal autonomy is best defined as the capacity and the condition of self-governance: a person is autonomous to the extent that their actions, values, and commitments are genuinely their own, endorsed on reflection rather than merely undergone. Three contrasts sharpen the definition. Autonomy is opposed, first, to heteronomy, the governance of action by forces outside the self, whether the coercion of another person or the pull of circumstance. It is opposed, second, to internal compulsion, the state of the addict or the person in the grip of a desire they disown, whose behavior is caused by something within them that they nonetheless do not endorse. It is distinguished, third and most subtly, from independence, the mere absence of reliance on others; a point developed at length below, because the failure to draw it has generated decades of misunderstanding.

The construct is studied at several levels. At the level of a single action, autonomy is a property of the act's regulation, its perceived locus of causality, whether the person experiences the behavior as emanating from themselves or as imposed. At the level of the person, autonomy is a developmental achievement and a trait-like capacity for reflective self-endorsement. At the level of the social system, autonomy is something environments grant or withhold, a feature of how parents, teachers, clinicians, and managers structure the choices of those in their charge. Contemporary psychology, and this article, move among these levels, because the central empirical claim of the field is that they are linked: environments that support autonomous regulation of particular acts foster, over time, the development of autonomous persons.

Types of Personal Autonomy

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus files Personal Autonomy under the broad category of psychological phenomena and lists one narrower descriptor beneath it. The MeSH tree is a bibliographic indexing scheme, built to organize the biomedical literature, not a mechanistic taxonomy of the construct; its single formal child therefore sits alongside, not above, the conceptual distinctions, between autonomy and independence, between procedural and substantive accounts, that organize the rest of this article. The two classifications are orthogonal, and the presence of exactly one MeSH subtype reflects indexing practice rather than a claim that personal autonomy divides cleanly into one kind.

The Philosophical Inheritance

Autonomy entered modern moral philosophy through Immanuel Kant, for whom the autonomy of the will was the capacity to bind oneself to a moral law given by one's own reason. Contemporary theorists distinguish that Kantian moral autonomy from personal autonomy, the self-government of an individual's own desires and values whatever their moral content, which is the construct at issue here (Dworkin, 1988). The philosophical treatment of personal autonomy begins with the recognition that not every desire a person acts on is authentically their own. Harry Frankfurt gave this intuition its canonical form by distinguishing orders of desire. A first-order desire is a desire to do or have something; a second-order desire is a desire about one's first-order desires, in particular a second-order volition, the desire that a certain first-order desire be the one that moves one to act. On Frankfurt's account, a person acts of their own free will, and is to that extent autonomous, when the desire that actually moves them is the desire they want to be moved by; the unwilling addict, who is driven by a craving they wish were not effective, exemplifies the failure (Frankfurt, 1971). Autonomy, in this hierarchical model, is a structural relation within the self: harmony between what one wants and what one wants to want.

The hierarchical account faced an obvious objection, that the higher-order desire might itself be manipulated or unreflective, threatening a regress. Gerald Dworkin answered by shifting the criterion from the content of the desires to the process by which a person comes to endorse them. What matters for autonomy, on Dworkin's procedural account, is not which desires a person has but whether they have the capacity to reflect critically on their preferences and to accept or attempt to change them in light of higher-order values, a capacity he termed procedural independence, meaning that the reflective endorsement was not itself produced by manipulation, indoctrination, or coercion (Dworkin, 1988). This move made autonomy content-neutral: a person could autonomously commit to a life of obedience or dependence, provided the commitment issued from their own critical reflection.

Procedural, content-neutral accounts drew a powerful critique from feminist philosophy, which observed that they abstract the reflecting self from the social conditions that form it. The relational autonomy tradition, collected in the influential volume edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, argued that agents are socially constituted, that the very capacities for reflection and self-endorsement are developed and sustained within relationships, and that an adequate theory must therefore treat autonomy as compatible with, and partly constituted by, dependence and connection rather than opposing them (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000). This critique, as the next section shows, converges strikingly with the empirical finding that gave self-determination theory its distinctive shape.

Autonomy in Self-Determination Theory

The construct that dominates contemporary empirical work is the one supplied by self-determination theory, the broad framework of human motivation developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. The theory grew from an unexpected experimental finding: offering a tangible reward for an already-interesting activity tends to reduce, rather than strengthen, the intrinsic motivation to perform it once the reward is withdrawn, an undermining effect confirmed across decades of experiments in a later meta-analysis and explained as the reward's shifting of the perceived locus of causality from inside the person to outside (Deci et al., 1999). Building on that finding, self-determination theory posits three basic psychological needs, for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, whose satisfaction is necessary for intrinsic motivation, healthy development, and well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Within this framework autonomy is defined not as independence but as volition, the experience of acting with a sense of willingness and choice, of standing behind what one does. Its opposite is not dependence but being controlled, whether by external contingencies or by internal pressures such as guilt and ego-involvement (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

The theory's most consequential empirical claim is that autonomy and independence are separable, and that the two are routinely and damagingly conflated. Valery Chirkov, Ryan, and colleagues tested this directly across four cultures, showing that the degree to which a practice is autonomously endorsed predicts well-being independently of whether the practice is individualist or collectivist, independent or dependent; people can fully and volitionally endorse interdependent cultural values, and when they do, those values support rather than undermine their well-being (Chirkov et al., 2003). Autonomy so understood is not a Western or individualist value but a universal feature of healthy functioning, a conclusion that aligns the empirical program with the relational critique of the procedural philosophers.

A second pillar is organismic integration theory, the sub-theory describing how initially external regulations become internalized. Deci, Eghrari, and colleagues demonstrated experimentally that internalization is graded and can be facilitated: providing a meaningful rationale for an uninteresting task, acknowledging the person's perspective, and conveying choice rather than pressure led participants to internalize the activity's regulation more fully and to engage with it more autonomously afterward (Deci et al., 1994). The theory arranges regulatory styles along a continuum of increasing autonomy, from external regulation through introjection and identification to integrated and intrinsic regulation, a continuum made quantitative in the relative autonomy index examined in the Worked Example. Figure 1 arranges the four measured styles along this continuum with the weights the index assigns them, and the first demonstration below lets the reader construct a motivational profile and read off where it falls.

Relative Autonomy Index

Rate each regulatory style from 1 to 7 to build a motivational profile. The index weights controlled styles negatively and autonomous styles positively (external −2, introjected −1, identified +1, intrinsic +2) and sums them.

The index is bounded between −18 (fully controlled) and +18 (fully autonomous). A positive score marks predominantly self-endorsed motivation; a negative score marks motivation driven mainly by external contingencies and internal pressure.

Autonomy Is Not Independence

The single most important conceptual point about personal autonomy, and the one most often missed, is that it is orthogonal to independence. Independence is a matter of whether one relies on others; autonomy is a matter of whether one's action is volitional and self-endorsed. The two vary separately, producing four combinations. A teenager who defies their parents to win peer approval is independent but heteronomous, acting from external pressure while appearing self-reliant. A patient who, after reflection, willingly follows a physician's regimen is dependent but autonomous, endorsing a course of action that relies wholly on another's expertise. Recognizing these combinations dissolves a family of apparent paradoxes, chief among them the worry that fostering autonomy means fostering selfish self-sufficiency.

The distinction matters most in development, where autonomy and detachment are easily confused. Laurence Steinberg and Susan Silverberg studied the growth of autonomy in early adolescence and found that emotional autonomy from parents, when it took the form of detachment, was not a marker of healthy individuation but was associated with greater susceptibility to peer pressure, precisely the substitution of one external control for another rather than a gain in genuine self-governance (Steinberg & Silverberg, 1986). Healthy adolescent development, the study implied, involves not severance from parents but a renegotiation of the relationship toward volitional self-regulation, a theme central to the study of adolescent psychology. The confusion of autonomy with independence is thus not merely a philosopher's worry; it produces measurable errors in how development is assessed. The second demonstration makes the two dimensions manipulable so their independence can be seen directly.

Autonomy is not independence

Autonomy (volitional versus controlled) and independence (independent versus dependent) are separate dimensions. Set each axis and see which of the four combinations results.

The two off-diagonal cells are the ones that matter: a person can be autonomously dependent, and independent yet heteronomous. Because the dimensions vary separately, fostering autonomy is not the same as fostering self-sufficiency.

Supporting and Undermining Autonomy

If autonomy is a need, the practical question is how social environments meet or frustrate it. The answer, developed across decades of research, contrasts an autonomy-supportive style with a controlling one. An autonomy-supportive authority takes the perspective of the other, provides a meaningful rationale for requests, offers choice where choice is real, minimizes pressure and controlling language, and acknowledges negative feelings rather than dismissing them. A controlling authority relies on rewards, deadlines, surveillance, and evaluative pressure, and communicates in the language of should and must.

The parenting evidence is foundational. Wendy Grolnick and Ryan found that parents who supported their children's autonomy, rather than controlling their behavior, had children who showed greater self-regulation and competence in school, an effect mediated by the children's more internalized, self-determined reasons for engaging with schoolwork (Grolnick & Ryan, 1989). The pattern generalizes across life domains. In the workplace, a meta-analytic review by Gavin Slemp and colleagues, synthesizing studies of leader autonomy support, found it reliably associated with employees' need satisfaction, autonomous motivation, well-being, and performance (Slemp et al., 2018). The mechanism is the same one Deci and colleagues isolated experimentally: autonomy-supportive conditions promote the internalization of regulations, converting compliance that depends on surveillance into self-endorsed action that persists without it (Deci et al., 1994).

Autonomy support is not the same as unlimited choice. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper showed that although choice can enhance intrinsic motivation, its value is neither unlimited nor culturally uniform: in some conditions extensive choice reduced motivation, and children from interdependent cultural backgrounds were more intrinsically motivated when a trusted authority made a choice for them than when they chose themselves (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999). The finding underscores that what supports autonomy is not the sheer quantity of options but the experience of volition, which a well-chosen structure can enhance and an overwhelming array can defeat. The third demonstration lets the reader assemble an authority figure's style and see its predicted effect on internalization.

Autonomy support versus control

Assemble an authority figure's style and see its predicted effect on how fully the other person internalizes the requested behavior.

Autonomy-supportive features raise internalization; controlling features lower it. The pattern holds across contexts: providing rationale, choice, and acknowledgment converts surveillance-dependent compliance into self-endorsed action that persists on its own.

Autonomy, Well-Being, and Bioethics

Two further literatures treat autonomy as central. In the psychology of well-being, Carol Ryff's influential model of psychological well-being includes autonomy as one of six core dimensions, defining it as self-determination, independence of thought, and the regulation of behavior by internal standards rather than by social pressures to think and act in certain ways (Ryff, 1989). Ryff's autonomy is measured as a stable feature of the well-functioning person, and it correlates with a range of positive outcomes, situating self-governance within the broader architecture of a flourishing life.

In bioethics, autonomy occupies a still more prominent place. The principle of respect for autonomy, articulated by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, is one of the four principles of biomedical ethics and grounds the doctrine of informed consent: it holds that competent patients have the right to make their own medical decisions, which imposes on clinicians a duty not merely to refrain from coercion but positively to foster autonomous choice through disclosure and the promotion of understanding (Beauchamp & Childress, 2019). The bioethical concept is normative, concerned with the rights a person is owed, whereas the psychological concept is descriptive, concerned with a state a person is in; the two are distinct but mutually reinforcing, since the respect the ethicist demands is most meaningful where the psychological capacity the scientist studies is present and supported.

Worked Example

Self-determination theory makes autonomy quantitative through the relative autonomy index (RAI), a single score that summarizes a motivational profile by weighting each regulatory style by how autonomous it is. The self-regulation questionnaire measures four styles, each on a scale from 1 to 7: external regulation (acting for reward or to avoid punishment), introjected regulation (acting from internal pressure such as guilt or ego-involvement), identified regulation (acting because one values the goal), and intrinsic regulation (acting from interest and enjoyment). The RAI weights these by their position on the autonomy continuum, assigning the two controlled styles negative weights and the two autonomous styles positive weights: external −2, introjected −1, identified +1, intrinsic +2. The index is the weighted sum, RAI = (−2 × external) + (−1 × introjected) + (1 × identified) + (2 × intrinsic).

Consider a student whose subscale scores reflect studying mainly under pressure: external = 6, introjected = 5, identified = 3, intrinsic = 2. The index is RAI = (−2 × 6) + (−1 × 5) + (1 × 3) + (2 × 2) = −12 − 5 + 3 + 4 = −10, a firmly controlled profile in which the pull of reward and pressure outweighs valuing and interest. Now consider a student who studies mostly from interest and conviction: external = 2, introjected = 3, identified = 6, intrinsic = 6. Here RAI = (−2 × 2) + (−1 × 3) + (1 × 6) + (2 × 6) = −4 − 3 + 6 + 12 = 11, an autonomous profile. Because the subscales range from 1 to 7, the index is bounded: its minimum is (−2 × 7) + (−1 × 7) + (1 × 1) + (2 × 1) = −18, its maximum is (−2 × 1) + (−1 × 1) + (1 × 7) + (2 × 7) = 18. A positive RAI marks predominantly autonomous regulation, a negative one predominantly controlled, and the magnitude gives the strength. The first demonstration computes exactly this index from four sliders, so a profile can be built and its score read directly.

Discussion

Personal autonomy has proved to be one of the rare constructs that bridges the humanities and the empirical sciences without losing its identity. The philosophical tradition supplied the defining insight, that a person's own desires can be alien to them, and the two criteria, hierarchical endorsement and procedural independence, that any adequate account must address. Self-determination theory took up the same problem with the tools of experiment and measurement, recasting autonomy as a psychological need, showing that it can be reliably assessed, and demonstrating that the social conditions supporting it produce better motivation, deeper internalization, and greater well-being. The convergence of the relational critique in philosophy with the cross-cultural finding in psychology, that autonomy is compatible with, and often realized through, dependence and connection, is among the more striking cases of two disciplines arriving at the same correction from opposite directions.

Tensions remain. The relationship between the descriptive psychological construct and the normative bioethical principle is invoked more often than it is analyzed, and the two can come apart, as when a patient makes an autonomously endorsed choice that a clinician judges harmful. The measurement of autonomy, though far advanced, still leans on self-report, and the perceived locus of causality that anchors the construct is by its nature accessible mainly through the person's own account. And the boundary between supporting autonomy and subtly steering it, between offering a rationale and manipulating through one, is easier to state than to police. What is no longer contested is the core claim that unites the traditions: that to treat a person as an end is to respect and to foster their capacity to govern themselves, and that this capacity is not a luxury of the independent but a need of every developing agent.

Current Directions

The most active current work refines the basic-needs framework and tests its reach through large-scale synthesis. On the theoretical side, Maarten Vansteenkiste, Ryan, and Bart Soenens surveyed the state of basic psychological need theory, consolidating evidence that need satisfaction and need frustration are distinct rather than opposite ends of one dimension, that autonomy frustration in particular predicts ill-being and defensive functioning, and mapping the open questions about need integration, individual differences, and the candidacy of further needs (Vansteenkiste et al., 2020). This distinction between the absence of support and the active thwarting of autonomy has reorganized how the construct is measured and where intervention is targeted.

On the applied side, meta-analysis has tested whether autonomy support produces benefits at scale. In the health domain, Nikos Ntoumanis and a large team synthesized self-determination-theory-based interventions and found that they reliably increased need satisfaction and autonomous motivation and produced small but consistent improvements in health behavior and psychological health (Ntoumanis et al., 2021). Cross-cultural synthesis has addressed the lingering charge that autonomy is a parochial value: a meta-analysis by Shannon Yu and colleagues found that the general need for autonomy predicted subjective well-being in both the United States and East Asia, with the association present in both regions rather than confined to individualist cultures (Yu et al., 2018). Together these strands are moving the field from establishing that autonomy matters to specifying how much, for whom, and through what mechanisms its support can be engineered.

Common Misconceptions

Autonomy means independence or self-sufficiency.

It does not. Autonomy is volitional self-endorsement of one's actions; independence is the absence of reliance on others. A person can act autonomously while depending wholly on others, and can be independent while driven by pressure. The two dimensions are separable, and conflating them is the field's most persistent error (Chirkov et al., 2003).

Autonomy is a Western or individualist value.

Cross-cultural evidence indicates that the volitional endorsement of one's values predicts well-being in collectivist as well as individualist cultures. People can autonomously embrace interdependent values, and when they do those values support their functioning, so autonomy appears to be a general feature of healthy development rather than a culturally specific ideal (Chirkov et al., 2003; Yu et al., 2018).

Supporting autonomy means offering unlimited choice.

What supports autonomy is the experience of volition, not the sheer number of options. Excessive choice can reduce motivation, and in some contexts a choice made by a trusted authority enhances motivation more than choosing oneself. Autonomy support is about rationale, perspective-taking, and meaningful structure, not maximal freedom (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999).

Glossary

Autonomy support.

A motivating style that fosters volition by taking the other's perspective, providing a rationale, offering meaningful choice, minimizing pressure, and acknowledging feelings.

Basic psychological needs.

In self-determination theory, the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, whose satisfaction is held to be necessary for motivation, growth, and well-being.

Controlling style.

A motivating style that pressures behavior through rewards, deadlines, surveillance, evaluation, and the language of obligation; the opposite of autonomy support.

External regulation.

The least autonomous regulatory style, in which behavior is driven by external contingencies such as reward or the avoidance of punishment.

Heteronomy.

Governance of action by forces outside the self, whether coercion by others or the pull of circumstance; the classical opposite of autonomy.

Identified regulation.

A relatively autonomous regulatory style in which a person acts because they consciously value the goal or its outcome, even if the activity is not itself enjoyable.

Independence.

The condition of not relying on others; a dimension separable from autonomy, since one can be autonomously dependent or heteronomously independent.

Intrinsic regulation.

The most autonomous regulatory style, in which behavior is performed for its own sake, out of interest and enjoyment.

Introjected regulation.

A controlled regulatory style in which behavior is driven by internal pressures such as guilt, shame, or contingent self-esteem; taken in but not fully accepted as one's own.

Organismic integration theory.

The self-determination sub-theory describing how external regulations are internalized along a continuum from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation.

Perceived locus of causality.

The experienced source of one's behavior, ranging from internal (the act feels self-initiated and volitional) to external (the act feels imposed); the phenomenological marker of autonomy.

Procedural independence.

Dworkin's criterion that a person's reflective endorsement of their desires count as autonomous only if it was not itself produced by manipulation, indoctrination, or coercion.

Relational autonomy.

The view that autonomy is socially constituted, developed and sustained through relationships, and thus compatible with dependence and connection rather than opposed to them.

Relative autonomy index.

A single score summarizing a motivational profile by weighting each regulatory style by its autonomy: external −2, introjected −1, identified +1, intrinsic +2.

Respect for autonomy.

The bioethical principle that competent persons have the right to make their own decisions, grounding informed consent and imposing a duty to foster autonomous choice.

Second-order desire.

In Frankfurt's account, a desire about one's own first-order desires; a second-order volition is the desire that a particular first-order desire be the one that moves one to act.

Volition.

The experience of acting with willingness and a sense of choice, standing behind one's own behavior; the core of autonomy in self-determination theory.

Key Researchers

Edward L. Deci (1942-2026). Psychologist at the University of Rochester who, with Richard Ryan, founded self-determination theory and whose early experiments established that tangible rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. Google Scholar - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Gerald Dworkin (living). Moral and political philosopher, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, whose procedural, content-neutral theory of autonomy answered the regress objection to hierarchical accounts. Wikipedia - Wikidata - Faculty Page

Harry G. Frankfurt (1929-2023). Philosopher at Princeton University whose hierarchical account of freedom of the will, built on second-order desires, shaped the modern philosophical analysis of autonomy. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Richard M. Ryan (living). Clinical psychologist at Australian Catholic University and the University of Rochester, co-founder of self-determination theory and one of the most cited scientists in the social sciences. Google Scholar - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Carol D. Ryff (living). Psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who developed the multidimensional model of psychological well-being, in which autonomy is one of six core dimensions. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Laurence Steinberg (living). Developmental psychologist at Temple University whose research distinguished healthy adolescent autonomy from mere detachment from parents. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Maarten Vansteenkiste (living). Motivational psychologist at Ghent University whose work advanced basic psychological need theory and the distinction between need satisfaction and need frustration. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is personal autonomy?
Personal autonomy is the capacity and the condition of governing oneself, of acting from reasons and values one genuinely endorses rather than from external coercion or internal compulsion. It is studied both as a philosophical property of persons and as a measurable psychological state that predicts motivation and well-being (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

How is autonomy different from independence?
Autonomy concerns whether an action is volitional and self-endorsed; independence concerns whether one relies on others. They are separable dimensions. A person can act autonomously while depending on others, and can be independent while driven by pressure. Conflating the two is a common and consequential error (Chirkov et al., 2003).

What did Frankfurt and Dworkin add to the concept?
Harry Frankfurt argued that a person is autonomous when the desire that moves them is one they endorse at a higher level, a harmony between first-order and second-order desires (Frankfurt, 1971). Gerald Dworkin shifted the criterion to the process of endorsement, requiring that reflection be procedurally one's own and free of manipulation (Dworkin, 1988).

Is autonomy a basic psychological need?
Self-determination theory holds that it is one of three basic needs, alongside competence and relatedness, whose satisfaction is necessary for intrinsic motivation, healthy development, and well-being. Extensive evidence links autonomy satisfaction to better functioning and autonomy frustration to ill-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Vansteenkiste et al., 2020).

Is autonomy only valued in Western cultures?
No. Cross-cultural research indicates that the volitional endorsement of one's values predicts well-being in collectivist as well as individualist cultures. People can autonomously embrace interdependent values, so autonomy functions as a general feature of healthy development rather than a culturally specific ideal (Chirkov et al., 2003; Yu et al., 2018).

How can parents, teachers, and managers support autonomy?
By adopting an autonomy-supportive rather than a controlling style: taking the other's perspective, providing a meaningful rationale, offering genuine choice, minimizing pressure and controlling language, and acknowledging feelings. Such conditions promote internalization and are linked to better self-regulation, well-being, and performance (Grolnick & Ryan, 1989; Slemp et al., 2018).

Does supporting autonomy mean giving unlimited choice?
No. What matters is the experience of volition, not the number of options. Too much choice can reduce motivation, and a choice made by a trusted authority can sometimes enhance it. Autonomy support is about rationale and meaningful structure rather than maximal freedom (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999).

How is autonomy measured?
One common approach uses the self-regulation questionnaire to score four regulatory styles and combines them into a relative autonomy index, weighting controlled styles negatively and autonomous styles positively. A positive index marks predominantly autonomous regulation, a negative one predominantly controlled (Ryan & Deci, 2017).

References