A Cybernetic Perspective on Psychological Wellness.

This article presents a comprehensive cybernetic framework for understanding psychological wellness, conceptualizing it as a set of goal states that humans actively regulate through cybernetic mechanisms such as feedback, feedforward, and passive blocking. It integrates key cybernetic concepts—including variety, channel capacity, and internal models—to explain how individuals maintain psychological wellness amid environmental disturbances. The framework unifies diverse psychological theories and research traditions by illustrating how these mechanisms underlie phenomena like meaning-making, anticipatory coping, mindfulness, and maladaptive goal pursuit. The article also discusses implications for research design, emphasizing idiographic and dynamic approaches to capture within-individual regulatory processes, and suggests future directions including social regulation and learning mechanisms. Overall, it argues that cybernetics offers an indispensable, unifying perspective essential for advancing the conceptualization and study of psychological wellness.