On the Self-Regulation of Behavior
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New Ed, 7/5/2001
EAN 9780521000994, ISBN10: 0521000998
Paperback, 460 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm
Language: English
This 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.
1. 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.