Maarten Vansteenkiste, Richard M. Ryan and Bart Soenens (2020), Motivation and Emotion 44(1):1–31 — DOI-10.1007/s11031-019-09818-1
Key takeaways
- Criteria for a basic need (Table 2, p. 4). Five basic (psychological, essential, inherent, distinct, universal) and four associated (pervasive, content-specific, directional, explanatory). A candidate that appears only when another need is frustrated is “a need-substitute or a compensatory preference” (p. 5): self-esteem, security and power are examples.
- Frustration is its own dimension. “The absence of need satisfaction does not necessarily imply the presence of need frustration, whereas the presence of need frustration denotes the absence of need satisfaction” (p. 9). Frustration predicts ill-being beyond low satisfaction (p. 10).
- A transdiagnostic claim. Need frustration predicted adolescents’ depressive symptoms and eating pathology and “largely accounted for their co-occurrence” (Campbell et al. 2018a, p. 12).
- Universality without uniformity (pp. 17–20). Moderators change how strongly need satisfaction pays off, and which practices satisfy needs, but there is “no evidence for cross-over interactions”: nobody is found to gain from frustration (p. 19).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the current statement of the
needs half of SDT. It extends Deci and Ryan (2000), LIT-558: it
opens by saying that paper “formally identified the needs for autonomy,
competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs” (p. 1) and builds
its criteria on that paper’s functional definition (p. 1, citing Deci & Ryan
2000; Ryan & Deci 2017).
Its psychopathology claims bear on the record’s batch on psychological treatment. Its claim that need frustration is a transdiagnostic process is a rival to, or a companion of, the claim that psychological inflexibility is one (THEORY-050); NOTE-440 says which.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.