motivation.
59 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-433 | Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control | Frijda’s action-readiness theory applied to impulsive action. Automatic appraisal of concern pertinence elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to change a self–object relation, with control precedence. Emotions differ by mode of action readiness. Events draw several appraisals at once, and the resulting states of readiness interact, so impulse control and much emotion regulation are themselves emotional. Purposive impulsive action is grounded neurally in anticipating an action’s sensory effects (PPC, premotor, cerebellum), with frontostriatal circuits for stopping. | Read |
| NOTE-438 v2 | A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation | 128 experiments on interesting tasks, separate meta-analyses for free-choice behaviour and self-reported interest. Tangible rewards expected for engaging in, completing or doing well at a task undermine free-choice intrinsic motivation (d from −0.28 to −0.40), and less so self-reports; unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards do not; positive feedback enhances, except for children’s free choice. The pattern fits cognitive evaluation theory and contradicts Eisenberger and Cameron’s helplessness and learned-industriousness account. | Read |
| NOTE-439 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Needs in SDT are innate psychological nutriments, identified functionally by the costs of their thwarting, not by individual differences in their strength. The three needs organize findings on intrinsic motivation and internalization, predict that both the “why” (autonomous vs controlled regulation) and the “what” (intrinsic vs extrinsic aspirations) of goals affect well-being, and explain need substitutes and rigid defences when needs are thwarted. Autonomy is self-organization, defended as an evolved, domain-general design feature. | Read |
| NOTE-440 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | The authors set out nine criteria a basic psychological need must meet, separate need frustration from mere lack of satisfaction, review need frustration’s costs (ill-being, compensatory behaviour, need substitutes) and propose it as transdiagnostic, review the interplay with sleep, food, sex and safety, map need-supportive and need-thwarting practices on a circumplex, and argue that the needs are universal in their effects (“output side”) while the practices that satisfy them vary (“input side”). Novelty, morality and beneficence are weighed as fourth needs and not yet admitted. | Read |
| NOTE-441 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | SDT’s autonomy is “regulation by the self”: acting with reflective endorsement, graded along the internalization continuum, compatible with external influence, dependence and a single option. Ryan and Deci align it with phenomenological and hierarchical (Frankfurt, Dworkin) accounts and use that definition to answer behaviourist, social-cognitive, reductionist, nonconscious-priming, choice-overload and cultural critiques. Autonomy lies not in being an uncaused cause but in the capacity to “reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). | Read |
| NOTE-442 v2 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | SDT’s canonical short statement. Social contexts that support competence, autonomy and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation and let people internalize and integrate extrinsic regulations; controlling, rejecting or overchallenging contexts undermine intrinsic motivation and leave regulations external or introjected. Autonomy is graded: four kinds of extrinsic motivation lie on a continuum of relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell’s quasi-simplex). Basic needs are defined by their consequences for well-being, and need-deprivation is offered as a principal source of distress and psychopathology. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-446 | The Expected Value of Control: An Integrative Theory of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Function | The paper proposes that dACC estimates the expected value of control: probability-weighted payoff of a control signal minus an intrinsic cost rising with its intensity. dACC uses that estimate to specify the identity and intensity of the control signal, which lPFC and subcortical structures (STN, LC) implement. The account unifies conflict monitoring, reward and prediction-error responses, effort costs and the override of defaults. It is a synthesis without a fitted model, and it leaves open how EVC is computed and what the cost function is. | Read |
| NOTE-448 | Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model | Sheldon and Elliot’s integrated model of goal striving. Self-concordance (identified + intrinsic − introjected − external reasons) predicts sustained effort, effort fully mediates attainment (Study 1 β = .02 ns vs .76; Study 3 β = .08 ns vs .72), attainment predicts change in well-being more strongly when goals are self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), and accumulated daily autonomy, competence and relatedness partly mediate attainment’s effect on well-being (Study 3). Three correlational student samples; SEM fits reached after adding paths the modification indices suggested. | Read |
| NOTE-454 | Sophisticated Inference | Expected free energy evaluated recursively over the beliefs an agent would hold after each plausible outcome turns active inference into a pruned tree search over belief states, formally analogous to Bellman recursion. Small simulations show it planning through short-term costs (an aversive cue; a maze barrier needing horizon four) and exploring by novelty. Its scalability is argued from pruning, not demonstrated; its first-principles grounding is cited, not developed. | Read |
| NOTE-463 | Model-based and model-free Pavlovian reward learning: Revaluation, revision, and revelation | The paper argues that Pavlovian prediction has a model-based form. A cue that predicted disgusting salt was instantly “wanted” in a novel salt appetite, before retasting, with mesolimbic activation. That needs identity-specific prediction revalued by current state, which no model-free cache provides. It proposes “defocusing” of the predicted outcome as a model-based source of apparent habit. It argues dopamine can carry model-based evaluations. A kappa-transformation model fits the data but is described as phenomenological, and no algorithm is offered. | Read |
| NOTE-587 | Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: The myth continues | The authors of the 1994 rival meta-analysis re-analyse 145 studies. They accept several of Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s corrections, and code reward contingencies by what participants were told rather than by cognitive evaluation theory’s categories. Result: no overall effect on free choice; enhancement on low-interest tasks; on high-interest tasks, undermining only for expected tangible rewards loosely tied to performance, or earned at less than the maximum; neutral or positive effects for rewards tied to a standard or to beating others. All of it is small. | Read |
| NOTE-706 | Han et al. — From gut microbiota to host appetite | A narrative review, not systematic, by animal-nutrition scientists, of how gut-microbe metabolites and proteins may regulate host appetite. The mechanisms are plausible and mostly shown in rodents. The human evidence is associations in eating disorders and obesity, and prebiotic or metabolite trials that conflict across populations and durations. The authors say so. The framing is mutualist: no microbe “interest” in host eating is argued. | Read |
| NOTE-949 | Slovic — the construction of preference | A review, from an award address, of the preference-reversal literature. Normatively equivalent elicitation procedures (choice against pricing, choice against matching) give systematically different orderings, and about 90% of reversals violate procedure invariance rather than transitivity. Two mechanisms explain them: an attribute weighs more when it is compatible with the response scale, and the prominent attribute weighs more in choice than in matching. Slovic concludes that for important, complex and unfamiliar options preferences are constructed on the spot in elicitation. The evidence is about the response under each procedure; nothing in it tests whether a constructed preference persists or changes later judgements. | Read |
| NOTE-1096 | Flayelle et al. — A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours | A narrative review and a taxonomy. Design features of six kinds of online service are linked, mostly by cross-sectional, qualitative or indirect evidence, to loss of control. They are sorted by the learning and control process each exploits. Model-free: reinforcement schedules and personalized triggers. Model-based: overvaluation, interference with deliberation, partial goal fulfilment, cognitive biases. Providers select features by their effect on use and revenue, and personalize them under informational asymmetry. For the record it maps closely onto the parts of the potential account: features that strengthen a cue-keyed ranking, move its reference course, falsify the user’s reading of progress, or pre-empt the other perspectives. | Read |
| NOTE-1102 | Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology | A commentary. Control theory adds to goal talk the need to perceive the present state and compare it with the goal. Psychopathology arises where the loop’s input, reference value, comparison or output is extreme or biased. The five factors are sensitivities to classes of goals. Valence tracks the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value, so approach and avoidance can each produce either sign. Confidence, doubt and disengagement lie outside the loop, in expectancy-value theory. | Read |
| NOTE-1106 | The Emotion Process: Event Appraisal and Component Differentiation | The evidence for the emotion process, organised by appraisal criterion and by the component appraisal drives. Appraisal criteria predict action tendencies, physiology and expression better than emotion categories do. Intrinsic valence and goal congruence have partly different signatures and combine multiplicatively. Control amplifies goal-congruence effects. Coherence among components is proposed as the mark of an episode at one threshold and of awareness at a second. No negotiation among perspectives: appraisal is a profile of criteria that drives patterned responses. | Read |
| NOTE-1108 | Levels of valence | A framework, not a study. Valence is located at two levels. Micro-valences are the outcomes of separate valenced appraisal checks, and they can conflict. Macro-valence is a one-dimensional integration of them and of other inputs, and it is what choice needs. The paper’s work is in the paths between the levels, and above all in the integration rules, from weighted sums to lexicographic and elimination strategies that need no trade-offs. Intrinsic pleasantness and goal conduciveness are separate checks, and the paper grounds the separation in Berridge. | Read |
| NOTE-1109 | Berridge and Robinson — Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction | An invited review of the incentive-sensitization theory by its authors. ‘Wanting’ and ‘liking’ have dissociable brain systems. Drugs can sensitize the ‘wanting’ system so that it is lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts while ‘liking’ stays flat or falls. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose cognitive desire, run without report, and grow in abstinence, and the theory is being extended, on weak evidence, to behavioural addictions. For the record it is a mechanism for proxy-keyed potential in persons. It also shows that the addict case CLAIM-433 settles holds only if the sign of valence is read along the proxy. | Read |
| NOTE-1110 | Berridge and Kringelbach — Pleasure systems in the brain | A review. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ is measured without report by taste reactivity, homologous across species, and is generated by small opioid hotspots. Dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ and leave ‘liking’ alone, and sensitized ‘wanting’ can grow while the drug becomes less pleasant. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without felt pleasure. For the record, this is the sharpest test so far of “valence is potential”. Read as written, the identity fails, and the dissociation calls for a hedonic marker measured apart from control. | Read |
| NOTE-1114 | Motivational trade-offs and modulation of nociception in bumblebees | A motivational trade-off in an insect. Bees given heated (55 °C) 40% sucrose feeders against unheated alternatives of 10–40% fed from the heated ones less as the alternatives got sweeter, and more steeply than without heat. Choice ran on learned colour cues, so the modulation is central. The authors take it as consistent with pain, not proof of it. One cost level, four resource levels in separate groups; graded at that cost, silent on a threshold in cost. | Read |
| NOTE-1117 | The power of goal-directed processes in the causation of emotional and other actions | A reversal of the default in dual-process models of action and emotion. Goal-directed processes, which select the action option with the highest expected utility, can be fast and automatic, so they, not stimulus-driven habits or appraisal-to-action-tendency links, are the default cause of action. Most of the competition that decides behaviour is between goal-directed processes, and values and expectancies settle it. Emotional actions are those whose tendencies have control precedence because the goals at stake are highly valued, so emotional episodes are decision processes with higher stakes. | Read |
| NOTE-1124 | Gollwitzer & Sheeran — Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis | A meta-analysis of 94 tests (1990–2003, 8,461 participants, mostly students and laboratory tasks) finds that adding an if-then plan to a goal intention raised goal attainment by d = .65 against the goal intention alone, across four problems of goal striving, with large effects on cue accessibility and on the immediacy, efficiency and non-conscious running of the planned response in small sets of tests (k = 1 to 7). Plans are said to delegate control “to specified situational cues” while staying dependent on an active goal. Publication bias was checked only by comparing published with unpublished tests; the 2024 meta-analysis of 642 tests finds it substantial. | Read |
| NOTE-1131 v2 | Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer — The when and how of planning: 642 tests of implementation intentions | A meta-analysis of 642 tests (294 reports to September 2019). Forming implementation intentions improved behaviour (d = .27), cognitive performance (.47), affect regulation (.66) and social judgement (.52), pooled d = .36; publication bias was substantial, and a robust Bayesian estimate is d = .15, small and highly heterogeneous. Contingent if-then plans beat schedule plans (.43 against .29); rehearsing the plan once helped, recording it hurt, and effects were large only when motivation was high. A taxonomy of cues and responses finds nearly every kind effective. | Read |
| NOTE-1259 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | A review, mostly of the author’s own work. Following Parfit, people who feel less connected to their future self treat it like a stranger and save less for it. Similarity to one’s self in ten years, chosen as overlapping circles adapted from Aron’s scale, predicted patient choices and assets; a future self represented neurally like another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47); seeing one’s age-progressed face raised saving; respect for the elderly tracked and raised saving. Directly reported liking and caring for the future self did not predict choice, but were near ceiling. The future self may extend, at life’s end, to one’s offspring. | Read |
| NOTE-1260 | Psychometric validation of the Loyola Generativity Scale in Chilean teachers: evidence for a three factor structure | 430 Chilean elementary teachers completed a Spanish Loyola Generativity Scale, McAdams and de St. Aubin’s 20 items on a 4-point scale. Four items were dropped for poor sampling adequacy. Of one- to four-factor solutions, three factors were retained (RMSEA = 0.043, CFI = 0.989, 55.1% of variance); four fit slightly better but were judged over-extracted. Its factors: Generative Inefficacy, three negatively worded items; Generative Action, eight items; and Generative Legacy, three items on symbolic continuity. Action and Legacy correlate .45. The authors call the analysis confirmatory, but it chooses the number of factors from the data. Only 14 of the 16 retained items appear in the final solution, without comment. | Read |
| NOTE-1261 | Generativity as a Route to Active Ageing | Two Heidelberg gerontologists read generativity, Erikson’s “concern in establishing and guiding the next generation”, as the psychological form of an ethical “joint responsibility” that lasts into very old age. They follow McAdams: generativity is driven by cultural demand and an inner desire, which is a need to be needed and a need for symbolic immortality, “to invest resources and potentials into things that outlive the self”. It is not altruism, and its motives can be selfish or altruistic. In 3,308 older adults in Mexico, Spain and Germany, generativity predicted optimism and life satisfaction. An intervention of intergenerational projects in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine raised generativity scores in old and young. No statistics are given. | Read |
| NOTE-1268 | Social Influence and Group Identity | A review of the group-identity account of social influence, grounded in self-categorization theory. Influence from a group need not be compliance for approval: when the group is a level of the self, in-group sources produce private acceptance, so influence is “partly self-influence”. Classic conformity, obedience, minority-influence, emergency, helping and contagion findings are reread as bounded by shared identity. Identification, prototypicality, intergroup threat and context moderate the effect. Isolation and anonymity strengthen group influence, and crowd members switch to a group identity rather than losing the self. The evidence is reported, not presented. | Read |
| NOTE-1271 | Managing the Terror of Publication Bias: A Systematic Review of the Mortality Salience Hypothesis | Re-runs Burke et al.’s meta-analysis of the mortality-salience hypothesis on a decade more data, with five tools for bias. Uncorrected, 635 effects give g = 0.81 (about r = .37), close to Burke et al.’s r = .35. Selection models (g = 0.36) and WAAP-WLS (g = 0.39) put the average near r = .18; PET-PEESE finds no positive effect. A p-curve of 825 focal tests finds evidential value at 25% average power; z-curve puts the expected replication rate at 19% and the expected discovery rate at 8%. Five of nine preregistered replications succeeded. True effects are so heterogeneous that 95% of them span r = −.47 to .66. The authors conclude some MS effects are real, the average is about half the published one, and most studies could not detect it. | Read |
| NOTE-1273 | Leaving a Legacy: Intergenerational Allocations of Benefits and Burdens | Six experiments on intergenerational allocation. Framing a climate decision as leaving burdens rather than using up benefits raised concern with one’s legacy, felt responsibility and affinity toward future generations, ethical concern and moral emotions. In allocation tasks people favoured themselves more with benefits than with burdens, but only when the other person would receive the resource in the future, and only when they themselves were a party to the trade-off. Perceived ethical considerations accounted for the first condition. The authors read this as legacy concern, the wish to extend the self beyond death. Legacy concern was measured only in the attitude studies, never alongside an allocation. | Read |
| NOTE-1279 | Activating the legacy motive mitigates intergenerational discounting in the climate game | A climate collective-risk game with 30 groups of six. When saving the group’s endowments paid the players the next day, 9 of 10 groups reached the target; when it paid for trees for future generations, 2 of 10 did; with three messages added to activate the legacy motive (death awareness, the powerlessness of future generations, and paying forward a past generation’s sacrifice), 7 of 10 did. Each message raised investment. The messages restored a fair-share norm rather than extra giving. No manipulation checks and no control message, so which mechanism worked is unknown. The authors call the legacy motive a way of leveraging self-interest. | Read |
| NOTE-1282 | Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruism | Sober and Wilson argue, from parental care, that natural selection would favour an ultimate desire for the child’s welfare over hedonism, on grounds of reliability. Stich grants that evolutionary and psychological altruism are independent. He rejects their arguments from imperfect belief–affect correlation, from the engineering cost of strong affect, and from redundancy. He takes seriously the fourth: hedonism depends on beliefs linking helping to one’s own feelings, and beliefs can be undermined. But if those links are sticky sub-doxastic states, hedonism is as reliable as altruism, so the argument leaves egoism open. | Read |
| NOTE-1293 | Responsibility to Future Generations: A Moral Reframing Strategy for Combatting Climate Change | Felt responsibility to future generations is held by most people in 33 of 34 European countries and is nearly unrelated to ideology, age and gender. In US samples it is endorsed more than responsibility to cut one’s own climate contribution, is half as tied to conservatism (r = −.21 against −.45), and predicts self-reported proenvironmentalism. A preregistered experiment (N = 3,175) found five brief interventions each raised it a little; a letter to a person born today did most, a longtermist text least, and reflecting on past generations’ sacrifices raised it without raising responsibility for climate. Nothing measures how far the self extends, and responsibility is not separated from caring. | Read |
| NOTE-1297 | I Belong, therefore, I Exist: Ingroup Identification, Ingroup Entitativity, and Ingroup Bias | One experiment, 48 Italian students. Writing about one’s own death, against writing about reading a book, raised identification with Italians, perceived entitativity of Italians and in-group bias against Germans; the bias came entirely from rating Italians higher. Identification and entitativity are distinct (r = .59) and each mediated the effect on bias, through their shared variance; the Sobel tests were marginal. The authors propose that a group seen as a real entity lets people project themselves beyond their death, so that even dying for it can serve the self, but they do not separate this from terror management’s worldview defence. | Read |
| NOTE-1298 | The Afterlife (Tanner Lectures I and II) | Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures. “The afterlife” is the survival of other people after one’s death. Few would be indifferent to the earth’s destruction thirty days after their death, or weigh its goods against its evils. Many projects would lose their point, and in an infertile world, where no one dies early but no one more is born, even enjoyments might. Humanity’s survival matters to us in its own right and as a condition of other things mattering. In that respect it matters more than our own survival or our loved ones’. Scheffler reads this as our dependence on future people, not altruism toward them, and as showing that individual valuing presupposes humanity as an ongoing project. | Read |
| NOTE-1312 | The Concept and Psychological Consequences of Symbolic Immortality | A 1991–92 ANU master’s thesis testing Rank’s claim that people need to feel they transcend death, through children, an afterlife or creative work, and Lifton’s two added modes, nature and experiential transcendence (a mystical expansion of the self). 440 Australians aged 18 to 88 rated vignettes as consolation in imagined terminal illness. Having a mode, such as children, predicted accepting it, and so did religious affiliation; education lowered acceptance. The secular modes went with accepting death as final. The modes predicted death anxiety, neuroticism and personality only weakly; Rank’s sex-difference and neuroticism hypotheses failed. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1315 | Social identity theory | A textbook chapter. Social identity is the part of the self-concept that comes from group membership “together with the value or emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1978). Categorization is always self-relevant, and the motive for a positive social identity drives comparison with out-groups; that identity serves needs for certainty, self-esteem and meaning. Low-status members choose individual mobility, collective action or social creativity by permeability, legitimacy and stability. Identification has cognitive, affective and behavioural components. At work, identification is said to matter more than “selfish concerns” of interdependence. An imagined common in-group raised children’s helping of an immigrant classmate. | Read |
| NOTE-1316 | The impact of place and legacy framing on climate action: A lifespan approach | 988 American adults, aged 18 to 87 and sampled evenly by age, wrote for 5–7 minutes about what they wanted future generations to remember them for (Legacy), about a place they loved and climate change (Place), or how to scramble eggs (Control). Both tasks raised pro-environmental intentions and hypothetical donations, small effects equal across age groups. The Legacy task raised an eight-item Legacy Motivation Scale, which partly mediated its effect. But the Place task raised legacy motivation too, the Legacy task raised love of nature, and with both mediators in one model love of nature carried at least as much of the donation effect. The scale’s items mix wanting to be remembered with self-regard and felt responsibility to future generations. | Read |
| NOTE-1322 | Many Labs 4: Failure to Replicate Mortality Salience Effect With and Without Original Author Involvement | Twenty-one labs at 18 US universities replicated Study 1 of Greenberg et al. (1994), in which writing about one’s own death raised preference for a pro-US over an anti-US essay author (d = 1.34, N = 59). Half the labs used a protocol designed with the original authors, half built their own from the paper. With 17 labs and 1,550 usable participants, the pooled effect was Hedges’ g = 0.07 (95% CI −0.03 to 0.17), with no heterogeneity across labs and no difference between protocols, under each of three preregistered exclusion rules. The expert-advised labs alone reached g = 0.08 to 0.19, none significant. The question of whether expertise aids replication went untested, because there was no effect for it to aid. | Read |
| NOTE-1429 v2 | Abuhamdeh — Investigating the flow experience | A conceptual review finding 24 operationalizations of flow in 42 studies, 17 without enjoyment. It argues flow should be measured as Csikszentmihalyi defined it, a discrete, highly enjoyable state distinct from its conditions, and that plain absorption is task involvement, not inherently enjoyable. It reports, and rejects by argument, the view that flow is emotionless or enjoyed only afterwards. It does not show by data that flow is positive during the episode. | Read |
| NOTE-1438 v2 | Thürmer, Scheier & Carver — Coasting and shifting | Two experiments in which false feedback put one of two competing task goals (speed, accuracy) ahead of or behind target. Running ahead on one goal lowered later performance on it and raised performance on the other, so the overshot goal lost its hold to its rival; an if-then plan to ignore one’s feelings removed both effects. It is the closest the record has to a test of Carver’s thesis that positive affect lowers a goal’s priority, with small effects, one-tailed contrasts, and no check that the plan changed affect. | Read |
| NOTE-1442 | Fulford, Johnson, Llabre & Carver — Pushing and coasting | A 21-day experience-sampling study of 24 people (12 with bipolar I disorder in remission) found that progress ahead of expectation on a self-chosen goal was followed by less effort on it (b = −0.34) and progress behind expectation by more (b = −0.25 on the undershoot vector), and that the bipolar group coasted less. It restates Carver 2003’s thesis that positive affect lets a goal take lower priority, but measured neither affect nor any shift of effort to other goals, so it bears on that thesis only through the behaviour it predicts. | Read |
| NOTE-1450 | Orehek, Bessarabova, Chen & Kruglanski — Positive affect as feedback | Positive affect, induced by pictures after students promised to do something for someone close, lowered the goal’s activation and the stated intention to pursue it when competing goals were salient, and raised both when they were not. So positive affect lowers a goal’s priority only under competition; alone, it strengthens the goal. The affect was incidental, not generated by progress, and Experiment 1’s measure is one reaction time per person. | Read |
| NOTE-1500 | Ryan et al. — We know this much is (meta-analytically) true | A narrative synthesis of 60 meta-analyses bearing on self-determination theory, written by its co-founder and colleagues, not preregistered. It finds the support concentrated in cognitive evaluation, organismic integration and basic needs theory; one or two meta-analyses each for causality orientations and goal contents; none for relationships motivation theory, and none of basic-need frustration. Most pooled effects are cross-sectional correlations with high heterogeneity. Integrated regulation is not separated from identified regulation in the meta-analyses it reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1502 | Sheldon, Elliot, Kim & Kasser — What is satisfying about satisfying events? | Three studies (N = 315, 352 across the USA and South Korea, 233) asked students for their most satisfying event of the last month, week or semester and rated ten candidate needs within it. Self-esteem, autonomy, competence and relatedness were the most salient in every sample and the strongest correlates of event affect; in simultaneous regressions self-esteem was the largest unique predictor in Studies 1 and 3 (β = .28, .38). The authors concluded “there may be four fundamental psychological needs, not three”, and called treating self-esteem as an outcome “imprudent”. Security emerged in unsatisfying events; money–luxury was last throughout. | Read |
| NOTE-1507 | Slemp et al. — Interpersonal supports for basic needs, a meta-analysis | A psychometric meta-analysis of 881 samples (4,561 effect sizes, N = 443,556), over 70% cross-sectional, almost all recipient-reported. Perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness support each correlate strongly with satisfaction of all three needs (ρ = .44–.62) and negatively with their frustration (ρ = −.20 to −.55), and with autonomous motivation, life satisfaction and positive affect; weakly with performance (ρ = .14–.25). The three supports intercorrelate .67–.71; in a joint model, relatedness support carries relatedness satisfaction and autonomy support adds nothing to it (β = .007). Individualism moderated 2 of 18 relations; heterogeneity was very high (I² mostly above 90%). | Read |
| NOTE-1510 | Levine et al. — Need frustration, negative affect and depressive symptoms | Two cross-lagged panel studies of university students: three waves over the 2018–19 academic year (N = 379) and two waves six weeks apart at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 235). Need frustration (the nine dissatisfaction items of the BMPN) predicted later depressive symptoms (β = .13 and .17; .18) and later negative affect, while negative affect predicted neither later depression nor, at the first lag, need frustration; depression predicted later need frustration at the first lag of Study 1 (β = .20). Other-reported depression was predicted marginally (β = .14, p = .074). Self-report, single-construct outcome, no random intercepts in the reported models. | Read |
| NOTE-1513 | Chirkov, Ryan, Kim & Kaplan — Differentiating autonomy from individualism | 559 students in South Korea, Russia, Turkey and the USA rated their reasons (external, introjected, identified, integrated) for engaging in practices typical of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. For every type of practice, the relative autonomy of one’s reasons predicted a well-being composite (β = .24–.29), with no country × autonomy or gender × autonomy interaction. Vertical practices were far less internalized than horizontal ones (mean index 1.60 against 4.68). Cross-sectional self-report; the authors’ definition of autonomy as volition is the paper’s thesis and its measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1515 | Patrick et al. — Need fulfillment in relationship functioning | Three correlational studies of romantic relationships, mostly of women students. Perceived fulfillment by the partner of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness correlates with satisfaction (r = .72, corrected, N = 1,918), commitment, secure attachment and less defensiveness; relatedness is the strongest unique predictor of relationship outcomes; the partner’s fulfillment adds to one’s own in couples; and autonomous reasons for being in the relationship carry the association with post-disagreement satisfaction in a diary study. The autonomy and competence subscales correlate .96 once corrected. | Read |
| NOTE-1517 | Voigt — How hard decisions shape our preferences | An Opinion article, not a review: a “tentative, integrative neural process model” of how preferences form during choices between equally liked items. Value is computed (vmPFC), conflict detected (dACC); then, during the choice, how long an item is fixated predicts its choice and its later change in value, with precuneus allocating spatial attention bottom-up to a salient item and dlPFC holding it in working memory; the change lasts only for choices that are remembered (hippocampus). The evidence is correlational, mostly the author’s 2019 study. | Read |
| NOTE-1520 | Niemiec, Ryan & Deci — The path taken | 147 recent graduates, surveyed one and two years after college. Valuing intrinsic or extrinsic aspirations predicted attaining them (β = .51, .67). Attaining intrinsic aspirations went with well-being (β = .77) and against ill-being (β = −.66); attaining extrinsic ones, entered alongside, had no unique relation to well-being (β = .00) and a positive one to ill-being (β = .38). Change in need satisfaction mediated intrinsic attainment’s link to change in well-being. All self-report and correlational; extrinsic attainment’s zero-order correlation with well-being is positive (mean r = .19). | Read |
| NOTE-1522 | Ryan, Mims & Koestner — Reward contingency and interpersonal context | A review that sorts the reward studies into task-non-contingent, task-contingent, performance-contingent and competitively contingent rewards, and an experiment (N = 96, n = 16 per cell) in which a $3 performance-contingent reward given with controlling (“should”) feedback left less free-choice play than the same reward given with informational feedback (117 vs 229 s), and both rewarded groups played less than unrewarded groups given the same feedback. Felt pressure was higher under controlling conditions; mediation was not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-1523 | La Guardia et al. — Within-person variation in security of attachment | Three cross-sectional studies of undergraduates find most of the variance in attachment security within persons, across partners, and find relationship-specific satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness predicting relationship-specific security, also without the relatedness items. Relatedness predicts most, then autonomy, then competence. Mean security predicts well-being; variability across partners mostly does not. Need satisfaction and security partly mediate each other’s relation to well-being, and the authors say the direction is undetermined. | Read |
| NOTE-1525 | Kasser & Ryan — Further examining the American dream | Two cross-sectional self-report studies, 100 adults from Rochester households and 192 students. With the overall importance of all aspirations controlled, the relative importance of extrinsic aspirations (money, fame, image) goes with less self-actualization and vitality and more physical symptoms, and intrinsic aspirations (self-acceptance, affiliation, community, health) with the reverse; the two kinds load on separate factors. The paper does not test whether the pattern survives the reasons for pursuing the goals, and says that test would be interesting. | Read |
| NOTE-1526 | Ntoumanis et al. — SDT-informed health interventions, a meta-analysis | 73 experimental studies (58 RCTs, 30,088 participants) of health interventions designed on SDT. At the end of the intervention they raised perceived need support (g = 0.64), autonomy (0.37) and competence (0.31) satisfaction, autonomous motivation (0.30), health behaviour (0.45) and psychological health (0.29); relatedness (0.20), controlled motivation and amotivation did not change. Psychological health’s effect was gone at follow-up (0.14, ns). Effect-size meta-regressions link gains in need support and autonomous motivation to gains in behaviour; mediation was not tested, the number of SDT techniques predicted nothing, and need frustration was not an outcome. | Read |
| NOTE-1527 | Chen et al. — Need satisfaction, frustration and strength across four cultures | Two cross-sectional studies (Belgium and China, N = 683; Belgium, China, USA and Peru, N = 1,051) introduce the 24-item Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS). A six-factor model (satisfaction and frustration of each need) fits better than three factors and is metric-invariant across the four countries; satisfaction relates mainly to life satisfaction and vitality, frustration mainly to depressive symptoms; neither relation differs by country or is moderated by need valuation or need desire. Every satisfaction item is worded positively and every frustration item negatively. | Read |
| NOTE-1530 | Murphy et al. — The BPNSFS probably does not validly measure need frustration | An argument, with factor analyses of eight samples (N = 3,692), that the BPNSFS’s “frustration” scales are mostly negatively keyed satisfaction items with almost no thwarting content, so the satisfaction–frustration split in the scale is “likely primarily a method artifact caused by different item keying directions”. Factors sharing a keying direction correlate .64–.75; satisfaction and frustration of the same need correlate .17–.38; a higher-order model grouping by keying fits better than one grouping by need. The authors say the question cannot be settled with existing data, because keying and the purported construct are fully confounded. | Read |
| NOTE-1531 | Deci & Ryan — The General Causality Orientations Scale | The scale that founded causality orientations theory: twelve vignettes, each with an autonomy, a control and an impersonal response rated 1–7, summed into three subscales. In 636 students the subscales have α .69–.74 and are nearly independent (A–C r = .03, A–I −.25, C–I .27); retest over two months is .71–.78 (n = 51). Validity is a set of correlations in samples of 42 to 128, mostly as predicted, a few at p < .07, and behaviour is the weakest link. | Read |
| NOTE-1533 | Campbell et al. — Need frustration as a transdiagnostic process | In Belgian adolescents, a cross-sectional study (N = 284; the abstract says 248) and a two-wave study six months apart (N = 608) model need frustration, measured by the twelve BPNSFS frustration items, as the mediator between self-critical perfectionism and depressive and eating disorder symptoms. Cross-sectionally the depression–eating correlation falls from .50 to .42 with perfectionism and to a non-significant .18 with frustration added. In latent change models, correlated change of the two symptoms falls from .43 to .39 and then .24. This is the study LIT-561 cites as showing need frustration “predicted” the symptoms and “largely accounted for their co-occurrence and co-evolution across time”; it is mediation of correlated change between two waves, not temporal precedence. | Read |