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Contents
- Abstract
- Self-Regulation of Behavior
- Control Processes and Sel-Regulation
- Hierarchical Organization of Behavior
- Difficulty, Disengagement, and Withdrawal
- Assessing expectancies
- Expectancies and affect
- Limitation and Challenge
- A More Elaborated View: Meta-Monitoring and Emotion
- Discrepancy Reduction and Rate of Reduction
- Changes in Rate and the Abruptness of Change
- Further Processing, and Differences Between Immediate and Thought-Out Expectancies
- Issues and Questions Within the Model
- Reference Values Used in Meta-Monitoring
- Changing Meta-Level Standards
- Time Frames for Input to Meta-Monitoring
- Multiple Affects From a Single Event, and the Independence of Positive and Negative Affect
- Effects of Existing Emotion on Subsequent Experience
- Breadth of Intended Application
- Issues Relating Emotion to Disengagement
- Hierarchical Organization Sometimes Creates an Inability to Disengage
- Disengagement Requires That There Be an Override Mechanism
- Failure to override
- Relations to Other Theories
- Interruption Can Cause Emotion
- Affect Can Cause Interruption and Reprioritization
- The need to assume dual monitoring
- Types of Discrepancy and Quality of Affect
- Conclusion
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Abstract
The question of how affect arises and what affect indicates is examined from a feedback-based viewpoint on self-regulation. Using the analogy of action control as the attempt to diminish distance to a goal, a second feedback system is postulated that senses and regulates the rate at which the action-guiding system is functioning. This second system is seen as responsible for affect. Implications of these assertions and issues that arise from them are addressed in the remainder of the article. Several issues relate to the emotion model itself; others concern the relation between negative emotion and disengagement from goals. Relations to 3 other emotion theories are also addressed. The authors conclude that this view on affect is a useful supplement to other theories and that the concept of emotion is easily assimilated to feedback models of self-regulation.
This article addresses the nature of certain aspects of emotion, as viewed from a control-theory perspective on behavior. This perspective focuses on the feedback-based processes through which people self-regulate their actions to minimize discrepancies between actual acts and desired or intended acts. In this article we consider what such a viewpoint on behavior may say about the nature of emotion (see also Simon, 1967). More specifically,...