This book is a reader-friendly description of a viewpoint on human behavior which sees all behavior as aimed at attaining goals. A wide variety of topics are treated: ranging from goals, to emotion, to persistence and giving up, to living and dying. Both adaptive behavior and problems are examined. The book blends ideas that have long been part of self-regulation models with ideas that are recently emergent in psychology: dynamic systems and catastrophe theory. It also blends theoretical statement with wide-ranging discussion of issues.
Contents
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.
Prize Winner
Winners of the 1998 Outstanding Scientific Contribution Award of the APA Division 38
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