Motivation and Emotion最新文献

While there is anecdotal evidence and some scientific support for the value of having multiple paths to reach one’s life goals, recent work concerning backup plans argues that their mere availability undermines commitment to and performance in the originally chosen path. In this paper, we evaluated this phenomenon amongst college students (N = 345) entering their first term with an already available family-based alternative life path. As expected, entering into college with an available family-based alternative life path led to a decrease in study commitment over the first semester and indirectly predicted lower end-of-semester grades through this reduction in commitment. However, results indicate that this only occurred when students reported experiencing an action crisis at the end of their first semester. If students did not report having an action crisis, an available family-based alternative life path did not influence study commitment and predicted a higher end-of-semester GPA. Ultimately, findings highlight the major role action crisis plays in the influence an alternative life path has on path trajectory.

Boredom signals a lack of meaning. Gratitude promotes feelings of meaning in life. We proposed accordingly that gratitude, by engendering meaning, shields against boredom. Specifically, we hypothesized that gratitude prevents boredom by increasing perceptions of meaning in life. We tested this hypothesis in five studies (N = 954). Study 1 revealed that grateful people are less prone to boredom. Studies 2a and 2b demonstrated that grateful people are less prone to boredom, and this relationship is statistically mediated by elevated meaning in life. Study 3 found that dispositional gratitude also predicted less state boredom in response to a behavioural task, via heightened perceptions of meaning in life. In Study 4, experimentally induced gratitude reduced boredom through increased perceptions of meaning in life. The findings demonstrate gratitude’s role in effectively reducing and preventing boredom by boosting the feeling that life is meaningful.

Abstract

Research on attention allocation in OCD has exclusively used obsession-provoking threat stimuli, showing sustained attention over neutral ones. Recently, however, a study contrasting neutral stimuli with stimuli depicting the completion of compulsive acts (end-states stimuli), which is associated with a reduced anxiety (negative reinforcement), showed similar results. Yet, as relative to neutral stimuli end-state stimuli were also OCD-related, these results may still reflect obsession-related distress rather than relief brought on by stimuli signaling compulsion completion. Also, end-states stimuli were not systematically validated. In Study 1, participants rated the subjective discomfort experienced when viewing traditional obsession-provoking threat pictures and novel end-states pictures. We first compared participants with high (HOC) and low (LOC) levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and then clinically diagnosed OCD participants and matched healthy controls. In study 2, we compared gaze patterns of HOC and LOC participants while freely viewing 2-by-2 matrices directly contrasting two threat and two end-state stimuli. Study 1 showed a larger difference in experienced discomfort when viewing the end-state stimuli, compared to threat stimuli, for both OC groups compared with their respected control groups. Study 2 showed that while LOC participants demonstrated no difference in dwell time on threat vs. end-state pictures, the HOC group allocated more attention toward the latter. Both groups were more prone to fixate first the threat pictures. Task reliability was high. Attention allocation in OCD may also be affected by cues signaling the completion of compulsive acts.

Teachers, parents, and other feedback providers commonly express positive emotions to stimulate learning. When students’ performance is below expectations, however, feedback providers may be inclined to express negative emotions. How these different emotional styles shape students’ development remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the effects of music teachers’ positive versus negative emotional expressions on their students’ musical performance. We draw on emotions as social information (EASI) theory, which postulates that the effects of emotional expressions depend on targets’ information-processing motivation (which determines whether feedback is extracted from emotional expressions) and agreeableness (which determines the perceived appropriateness of positive vs. negative expressions). We followed music teachers and students during regular learning sessions. One week before the sessions, we assessed students’ dispositional information-processing motivation and agreeableness. Immediately after the sessions, students reported on their teachers’ emotional expressions during the session, and teachers rated the performance of students on two musical tasks. An outside expert evaluated recordings of a subset of these performances. Consistent with the EASI framework, students who were confronted with stronger positive emotional expressions of their teachers performed better to the extent that they were lower on information-processing motivation and higher on agreeableness. Conversely, students who were confronted with stronger negative emotional expressions performed better to the degree that they were higher on information-processing motivation and lower on agreeableness. These findings indicate that both positive and negative emotional expressions of teachers can benefit students’ performance, depending on the student’s personality. We discuss implications for feedback, emotions and education.

Research shows that in university education programs, students’ motivation decreases over time, which is associated with indicators of reduced academic success, such as student dropout rate. Consequently, researchers have analyzed motivation change and explored the options available to universities to maintain a high level of motivation among students. Using Person-environment fit theory, our research suggests that perceived support offered by lecturers and instructional quality influence students’ subject interest. We conducted a longitudinal design of 823 participants from Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University and estimated a latent change score model using data collected between the participants’ first and second academic years. Our findings suggest that perceived support from lecturers mitigated the decrease in subject interest. Moreover, our results support the hypothesis that universities can attenuate the decreasing change of subject interest from students. Our findings are contextualized with reference to contemporary research in the field and we offer practical suggestions for maintaining high motivation among students.

Recent work has found that undergraduate students’ perceptions of their peers’ intelligence mindsets can either promote or hinder their sense of belonging, motivation, and challenge-seeking behaviors in their courses. In the present exploratory set of studies, we examine what specific behaviors signal to students that their peers have either growth or fixed mindsets. Using open-ended (Study 1) and closed-ended (Studies 2–3) measures, we identify five categories of behavior that signal peers’ mindsets to students: verbal or explicit messages, how much effort their peers exert, their peers’ willingness to help, how competitive their peers are, and the extent to which their peers are self-deprecating. In Study 3, we also find that students’ perceptions of their peers’ growth mindsets in a specific STEM course are associated with higher belonging, and lower emotional cost, self-handicapping, and procrastination in that course, replicating and extending previous work. Implications for college STEM instructors are discussed.

While the extent to which individuals engage in and enjoy cognitive abilities, commonly known as need for cognition (NFC), has been suggested to promote adaptive behaviors associated with well-being, there has not been a systematic examination of the strength of the relationship between NFC and well-being. This meta-analysis sought to examine the association between NFC and well-being. Based on 108 effect sizes extracted from 52 samples (50 records), a small to medium positive relationship (r = .20, 95% CI [.16, .23], p < .001) between NFC and well-being was observed. Sub-group analyses revealed that NFC was associated with different aspects of well-being, including life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, purpose in life, self-acceptance, personal growth, environmental mastery, positive relations with others, autonomy, depression, anxiety and stress (|r|s = [.07, .45]). Exploratory moderation analyses showed that age moderated the relationship between NFC and well-being, whereby the positive relationship was stronger in younger samples. The gender proportion of the sample also moderated the relationship between NFC and well-being for certain specific measures of well-being, whereby the positive relationship between NFC and well-being was stronger among females.