INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
The crucial difference between Socionics and other typologies is use of the model A. Like other models in the natural sciences model A allows us to analyze system's behavior and make conclusions. These must stand up to experimental tests and if proven, they prove the model i.e. our understanding of the relationships between the model's constituent components.
The following article presents an attempt to interpret the model A control behavior within the framework of Control Theory.


Piatnitski V.V.

Control emotions and model A

Abstract: The paper is putting forward a hypothesis that from the viewpoint of the System Socionics the control mechanism of biological systems is realized through emotional states. It is proposed to call such emotions “control emotions”.

In order to introduce you into the subject of this article I suggest you to remember a recent vivid episode when you were experiencing an emotion of anger, resentment, dismay, interest, desire, aggression, revulsion, attraction, envy (jealousy), fear or panic.

If we pay enough attention to our lives we’ll notice that such emotions are not so much rare – we experience them many times a day in most ordinary circumstances. What is more important, and what probably skip out attention, is that our whole lives are effectively guided and, we can even say, determined by such emotions. We are following directions that attract us and avoiding those that we don’t like. Those are the two poles: attraction and rejection which from the standpoint of the System Socionics, are sufficient to effectuate control over a goal-oriented activity.

Socionics as a science that studies information interaction of psyche with the world is modeling such a goal-oriented activity with help of the model A, using it as a substitute of the psyche. As has been shown by V.D.Ermak [1], model A can be regarded within the paradigm of control theory. From this point of view, psyche must have at least two “buttons” – attraction and rejection, which would be guiding it in its operation, i.e. would effectuate target locking for the benefit of the carrier of the psyche.

In this context we shall understand control as influence of the outside world (super system), which is realized through mechanism of attraction/rejection and serves for direction of a psyche carrier for reaching a certain goal.

Such control is present in the model A at different levels. If we are considering blocks, then the two control buttons (attraction and rejection) are realized through super-Id and super-Ego respectively. Indeed, operation of super-Id is often described by the formula: “I want it”, due to the characteristic reactions towards desirable (attractive) information. Whereas super-Ego is processing information which is perceived as unpleasant (though probably useful) and its operation is characterized by the “I must” formula.

At the level of functions, control over model A is effectuated through functions four (pain function) and five (suggestive function). The function four sometimes is called “point of least resistance” (PLR) and its reactions consist in avoiding unpleasant (painful) information related to the respective information element. To the contrary, function five is unconsciously “seeking for” information (related to the information element it is processing), which looks interesting and attractive.
Examining these functions in terms of dimensionality one can see that the control nature of the functions is enabled exactly by their one-dimensionality i.e. by the fact that they process information only with reference to the “experience” dimension, which favors for highly polarized operation of the type: “mine/not mine”, “good/bad”, “accept/reject”, “like/dislike”.

In practice one could experience the control by doing the self-observation exercise described in the beginning of this paper. By setting a task to monitor the mentionned emotions during a day and by tracing connections of such emotions to our actions we’ll see that at any moment when an emotion arises we tend to make a certain choice. In other words, emotions suggest a corridor within which we can move. When doing such quite simple observation we can get a feeling of the operation of TIM model’s control emotions , so to speak, “from inside”. According to my observations a big deal of the control occurrences has emotional nature. Sometimes these emotions are quite obvious and we feel them so acutely that we desire to get rid of them as quick as we can, but sometimes they take form of momentary preferences that guide our lives like underwater currents.

Hypothesis:Control effect produced by information processing functions is subjectively perceived as emotions causing attraction-rejection, which we propose to call control emotions.

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