Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents a thorough overview of a model of human functioning based on the idea that behavior is goal-directed and regulated by feedback control processes. It describes feedback processes and their application to behavior, considers goals and the idea that goals are organized hierarchically, examines affect as deriving from a different kind of feedback process, and analyzes how success expectancies influence whether people keep trying to attain goals or disengage. Later sections consider a series of emerging themes, including dynamic systems as a model for shifting among goals, catastrophe theory as a model for persistence, and the question of whether behavior is controlled or instead 'emerges'. Three chapters consider the implications of these various ideas for understanding maladaptive behavior, and the closing chapter asks whether goals are a necessity of life. Throughout, theory is presented in the context of diverse issues that link the theory to other literatures.
Table of Contents1. Introduction and plan; 2. Principles of feedback control; 3. Discrepancy reducing feedback processes in behavior; 4. Discrepancy enlarging loops, and three further issues; 5. Goals and behavior; 6. Goals, hierarchicality, and behavior: further issues; 7. Public and private aspects of the self; 8. Control processes and affect; 9. Affect: issues and comparisons; 10. Expectancies and disengagement; 11. Disengagement: issues and comparisons; 12. Applications to problems in living; 13. Hierarchicality and problems in living; 14. Chaos and dynamic systems; 15. Catastrophe theory; 16. Further applications to problems in living; 17. Is behavior controlled or does it emerge?; 18. Goal engagement, life and death.
