Charles S. Carver (2018), Psychological Inquiry 29(3):139–144 — DOI-10.1080/1047840X.2018.1513681
Key takeaways
- What cybernetics adds to goal talk. Goal pursuit also needs perception of the present state and a comparison of it with the goal: “action occurs in service to changing the input” (Powers, LIT-1179).
- Psychopathology as distorted loop parameters. The input can be biased or attend to the wrong channel. The reference value can be wrong, too lofty, or “inimical to one’s life-space of goals”. The comparison can be too precise or too sloppy. The output can be missing, or blocked by doubt.
- Valence. Valence “has a different origin and a different meaning than most other people seem to think”. An approach system and an avoidance system can each do well or badly, so each can produce positive or negative affect (citing Carver & Scheier 1990, 1998). Valence is neutral at a reference value, and “these are all seen in terms of velocity of goal attainment rather than states”.
- Engagement against progress. Engagement is high near the criterion and somewhat below it. Effort falls off when things go “too badly”, and ceases when the incentive is lost.
- Competition and priority. Behaviour can be guided by two competing sources, one reactive and one deliberative. Which level of Powers’s hierarchy is “functionally superordinate” varies by situation and person. Many goals are in play at once, with “continual juggling of the priorities afforded to each”. Turning from one goal to another may be a change in priority ranking rather than giving up (n. 3).
- Doubt is outside the loop. Nothing in control theory predicts disengagement: “A thermostat that can’t get the furnace to keep up … doesn’t quit trying”. Expectancy-value theory supplies what is missing.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 for the record’s proposal that hedonic valence is a regime in which one ordering of a system’s own states prevails in the negotiation among its perspectives (CLAIM-440, TERM-076). It is the only first-hand statement of Carver and Scheier’s affect account that the record could reach lawfully. The 1990 paper (LIT-1441) and the 1982 review (LIT-604) are both Unavailable. The bearing is set out in NOTE-1102. In short:
- the proposal’s sign clause is Carver and Scheier’s, with one difference that matters: their neutral point is a reference rate, not rest;
- their account puts a valence on every goal loop and has no single potential ordering;
- their priority juggling is the nearest thing in the tradition to the proposal’s potential.
Its loop vocabulary is Powers’s (LIT-1179, LIT-1188, LIT-1197).
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.