Motivation and Performance

• Philosophical viewpoints:

  • Determinism: Every event is an unavoidable and necessary consequence of prior circumstances
  • Dualism: Mind and body are different
  • Monism: Mind and body are the same
• Mind-body problem:

  • Material world (body/brain) vs. immaterial world (mind)
  • Dualism perspectives: Interactionistic and Parallelistic dualism
  • Monism perspectives: Mentalistic monism (idealism) and Materialistic monism
  • Most supported viewpoint is Materialistic Monism, where the mind is a construction of the brain
• Defining motivation:

  • Regulatory approach: People as responders, core concept of homeostasis, needs leading to behavior, drive
  • Purposive approach: People as purposeful beings
• Motivation is a process that energizes, directs, and regulates behavior (Roberts, Treasure, & Conroy, 2007)
• The hedonic axiom states that organisms are driven to avoid aversive outcomes and to attain pleasant outcomes
• Ways to establish the positivity of an outcome include preferences/choices, maximum effort, persistence, and self-reporting
• Core concepts:

  • Need: Necessary condition for well-being, innate property of an organism
  • Goal: Mental representation of a pleasant outcome, influencing evaluations, emotions, and behavior
  • Reward: Incentive or Reinforcer
• Homeostasis is the body's need to maintain stable internal conditions under varying circumstances
• Eating behaviors are regulated by feedback loops and can be influenced by visual cues and social habits
• Homeostatic regulation involves negative feedback loops to maintain internal stability
• Hedonic (reward-based) regulation can override homeostatic regulation in certain situations
• Classical conditioning processes include Acquisition, Extinction, Generalization, Discrimination, and Spontaneous recovery
• Classical conditioning can help understand phenomena like food preferences, aversion to certain foods, social behavior, and treatments such as systematic desensitization and aversion therapy
• Pleasant or unpleasant events in social interactions can be conditioned responses influenced by classical conditioning principles
• Treatments like systematic desensitization and aversion therapy are derived from classical conditioning principles
• Other physiological needs besides food include drinking, temperature regulation, and sex, all important determinants of behavior and survival
• Psychological needs include: autonomy, competence, and relatedness
• Psychological needs generate the desire to interact with the environment for personal growth, social development, and psychological well-being
• Autonomy is the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in behavior initiation and regulation
• Autonomy subjective qualities:

  • Internal perceived locus of causality
  • Volition (feeling free)
  • Perceived choice over one’s actions
• Motivational styles:

  • Act in an autonomy supportive way or a controlling way
  • Autonomy supportive behavior nurtures inner motivational resources, communicates value, and provides rationales
• Controlling motivational style examples:

  • Directives, commands
  • Incentives and rewards
  • Compliance requests
  • Should, must, have to statements
• Autonomy supportive style behavioral examples:

  • Listening
  • Building interest
  • Encourage participation and effort
  • Praise progress, mastery
  • Offer progress enabling hints
• Key environmental conditions for competence:

  • Optimal challenge and flow
  • Structure and guidance
  • Information and feedback
  • Failure tolerance
• Flow is a state of concentration involving holistic absorption in an activity
• Feedback is essential for determining effectiveness/competence and can come from the task itself, comparison of performance, or evaluation of others
• Growth mindset intervention benefits:

  • Improved grades
  • Greater engagement and effort
  • More positive strategies
  • Less negative strategies
• Teachers with growth mindset give more encouragement, concrete strategies, and less favoring of boys
• Promoting a fixed mindset:

  • Praise for intelligence, talent, and effortless success leads to avoiding challenging tasks
  • Results in losing motivation and confidence when tasks get hard
  • Impaired performance on and after difficult tasks
  • Tendency to lie about scores
• Promoting a growth mindset:

  • Praise for challenge seeking, hard work, dedication, and learning from mistakes (process praise)
  • Improves failure tolerance
  • Removes ego threat
• Relatedness:

  • The need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with people
  • Key environmental conditions include emotionally positive interactions and relationships involving caring, liking, acceptance, and appreciation
  • Communal relationships that support needs
• Effects of social exclusion on physical pain:

  • Increased aggression, self-destructive behavior, risk-taking, and cookie consumption
  • Decreased self-control, work productivity, concentration, prosocial behavior, and willingness to help others
  • Reduction in affective forecasting and empathizing with others' suffering
• Psychological needs:

  • Important for well-being like physiological needs
  • Regulate internal state through homeostasis and negative feedback loops
  • Have physiological correlates and motivational effects
  • Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are intertwined
  • Quality of motivation can be heightened by stimulating autonomy, competence, and relatedness
• Self-Determination Theory:

  • Three psychological needs: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness
  • Person x environment interaction
  • Social contexts that support psychological needs: autonomy, competence, relatedness