Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to Sheri L. Johnson for suggestions on an earlier draft.

Notes

1 I am fine with talking in terms of goals, though I generally retain these cybernetic overtones even then. In fact, I sometimes use goal language intentionally because I worry that the term cybernetic puts some people off. Some of its initial connotations (Wiener, 1948) have faded and other connotations, generally unconnected to the original ones, have arisen. I worry that the strengths of a cybernetic perspective are sometimes disregarded just because the word has come to have distracting connotations.

2 Depressed affect may be the most complicated case to attribute in this view. It arises in the context of loss of an incentive or removal of a goal (approach related) but also in the context of confirmed inability to escape a punishment (avoidance related). Are these two experiences of depressed affect the same or different? I suspect different, but subtly so.

3 As in my discussion of Conscientiousness, a link may be derived from the idea that feedback loops are organized hierarchically, with many goals in play simultaneously, along with continual juggling of the priorities afforded to each (Carver, 2003). From that view, turning away from one goal (even if one is failing at it) so as to pursue a different goal may represent a change in priority ranking rather than giving up. That might solve the problem of how to fit disengagement into a control-theory framework.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of the manuscript was facilitated by grants 1R01MH110477 and 1R01NR016838.