Meichenbaum's Self-Instructional Theory highlights

• A. External reinforcement
• B. Dream analysis
• C. Emphasizes internal speech and the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the environment.
• D. A focus on behavioral avoidance.

Answer: (C)

The idea being tested is how Meichenbaum explains self-regulation through internal speech and the way a person and their environment influence each other. In Self-Instructional Theory, people learn to guide their own behavior with self-talk—silent instructions, reminders, and strategies that they repeat to themselves as they perform tasks. This inner dialogue helps them plan, monitor, and adjust their actions, especially in challenging or new situations. At the same time, behavior and self-talk are shaped by feedback from the environment, and those internal processes, in turn, influence how a person responds to environmental demands. That bidirectional loop—internal speech guiding action and the environment shaping, and being shaped by, that inner process—is the core idea.

External reinforcement describes rewards and punishments driving behavior, which is more about operant conditioning than internal self-regulation. Dream analysis belongs to psychodynamic approaches focused on unconscious content. A focus on behavioral avoidance highlights a behavior but doesn’t capture the mechanism of self-guided regulation through inner dialogue and reciprocal interaction with the environment.