Midterm (final)

Question 1

What’s motivation

Answer 1

Force acting within an organism to give behaviour its energy, direction, and persistence

Question 2

Describe the components of motivation

Answer 2

• Energy = strength and intensity of the behaviour
• Direction = the specific goal or aim of the behaviour, the end objective of the behaviour
• Persistence = behaviour is sustained over time

Question 3

What’s the nature of the force of motivation? Where does it come from?

Answer 3

• A bit mysterious
• Not an easy question to answer
• Longstanding question
• Question that predominated in the early study of psychology

Question 4

How does studying for an exam use the 3 components of motivation?

Answer 4

• Energy: intensity in which you’re engaging in the study
• Direction: you want to learn and get a good grade on your exam
• Persistence: either you’re tired, distracted, or procrastinating, or you feel energized and focused

Question 5

Describe grand theories of motivation

Answer 5

• A grand theory is an all-encompassing theory that seeks to explain the full range of motivated action
  (ex: why we eat, drink, work, play, compete, fear certain things, read, fall in love, and everything else)
• 2 early grand theories of motivation revolved around instincts and drives
• These were influenced by the rise of biological determinism (the belief that biological factors, such as genetics, brain structure, & physiology are the primary determinants of human behaviour)

Question 6

What breed of dogs is described as herding dogs?

Answer 6

• Corgis
• Putting a corgi’s instincts to the test
• Spoiled city corgi who has never seen a sheep in its life, will know what to do with sheep (how to herd)
• This dog is able to get all the sheep together
• Nobody has taught this dog how to do this
• This behaviour is a result of natural selection
• Short stature allows this dog to nip at the heels of the cattle
• Behavioural traits of corgi: heightened awareness of moving objects

Question 7

What are instincts?

Answer 7

• “Hardwired” or “programmed in” bits of behaviour
• Don’t require learning
• The organism comes equipped with this from the beginning
• Occur in response to some environmental trigger
• Performed automatically -> just need some sort of environmental trigger
• Ex: corgi’s herding instincts, spiders building webs, nest building in birds

Question 8

Describe early instinct theories

Answer 8

• Psychologists in late 1800s/early 1900s thought humans have instincts
• A lot of non-human animal behaviour is instinctive
• They didn’t think that the concept of instinct should be reserved for non-human animals
• Concept of instinct gained popularity due to influence of evolutionary theory
• It became very fashionable in science circles to describe human behaviour with regard to instincts
• William James and William McDougall

Question 9

Describe William James’ view of instincts

Answer 9

• Similar to reflexes (ex: sneezing) who are triggered by a stimulus
• Elicited by sensory stimuli
• Instincts are similarly triggered by a stimulus
• Occur “blindly” the first time (without prior knowledge of outcome)
• But subsequent behaviour may change through experience
• Recognized that there could be some variability with instincts
• 2 principles explaining variability in instincts:
  1) Learning can inhibit an instinct (ex: learning to control an instinctual reaction to fear)
  2) Some instincts are transitory (appear only at certain times, only active at certain points in development)
• James had classification of numerous instincts
• Examples: rivalry, pugnacity, sympathy, acquisitiveness, parental love, jealousy, play

Question 10

Describe William McDougall’s view of instincts

Answer 10

• Instincts are primary drivers of all human behaviour
• Argued that all human behaviour could be explained in terms of instincts
• Every instinct consists of 3 components:
• Cognitive: knowing of an object that can satisfy the instinct
• Affective: feeling/emotion that the object arouses in the organism
• Conative: striving toward or away from the object
• His approach grew a lot of criticism and even scorn in response
• Tendency to label every behaviour in a situation

Question 11

List McDougall’s classification of instincts

Answer 11

• Parental care
• Combat
• Curiosity
• Food seeking
• Repulsion
• Escape
• Gregariousness
• Sympathy
• Self-assertion
• Submission
• Mating
• Constructiveness
• Appeal
• Pugnacity
• Acquisition
• Play

Question 12

Describe the criticisms of early instinct theories

Answer 12

• No agreement concerning what types or how many instincts exist
• List grew to include 6000+ instincts by some estimates
• Nominal fallacy: naming does not equal explaining
• Circular reasoning
• Insufficient recognition of role of learning, lack of clear differentiation between instinct & learning
• Criticisms led to decline of instinct theory as a “grand theory” of motivated behaviour, but remained influential for later emerging fields of ethology and evolutionary psychology

Question 13

What’s ethology?

Answer 13

• Focuses on the study of animal behaviour in natural settings through systematic and objective observations (ex: fixed-action patterns)
• Much more systematic and precise in its definitions

Question 14

What are fixed-action patterns?

Answer 14

• Pre-programmed behaviours that are triggered by a specific stimulus (sign stimulus) and follow a predictable, fixed sequence (are stereotyped)
  – Ex: aggressive behaviour in betta fish

Question 15

What’s evolutionary psychology?

Answer 15

Study of how evolutionary processes have shaped the human mind (mental processes) and behaviours

Question 16

What functions of behaviour do the fields of ethology and evolutionary psychology emphasize?

Answer 16

Adaptive functions of behaviour

Question 17

What’s natural selection?

Answer 17

• Process through which certain traits become more or less common in a population over time due to pressures of the environment
• Thought to apply both to physical traits as well as behavioural traits

Question 18

Describe the 3 key components of natural selection

Answer 18

1) Variation: individuals in a population vary in traits (ex: size, colour, behavior)
2) Heredity: variation is passed down from parents to offspring (through genes)
3) Differential fitness: not all individuals in a population survive and reproduce equally
- Adaptations: traits that increase chances of survival & reproduction in a given environment -> gradually accumulate over generations

Question 19

Describe the caregiving example of genetic motive

Answer 19

• “Baby-like” features (big eyes, small chin & nose, large forehead) are sign stimuli for eliciting caregiving motivation (called “baby schema” or kindchenschema)
• ”Baby-faced” adults perceived as warmer,
  more naïve, and weaker
• Feel pity and protective urges toward those who are warm but incompetent
• Response to baby features evolved adaptation to ensure infants receive care & protection
• It’s so important not to miss a baby’s signals that we’re more attuned to these features
• Babies who are highly dependent on adults will rely on these features to get their attention

Question 20

Describe the aggression example of genetic motive

Answer 20

• From evolutionary perspective, aggressive behaviour may serve adaptive function in certain contexts
• 2 types of selection:
  1) Survival selection: some adaptations increase odds of survival
  2) Sexual selection: some adaptations increase odds of securing a mate and reproducing
• Intrasexual selection: driven by competition among individuals of same sex
• Intersexual selection: driven by mate choice
• Aggression as adaptation:
• Defense against predators & adversaries, competition for limited resources (survival selection)
• Competition for mates (intrasexual selection)
• Attracting mates (intersexual selection)

Question 21

Describe gender differences in aggression

Answer 21

• Cross-culturally, men dramatically more likely to engage in physical aggression than women
• Ex: 79% of violent crime committed by men
• Gender difference emerges early in development
• Evolutionary view: men’s greater propensity towards violence derives in part from their historically greater need to compete for mates
• The evolutionary view is very speculative

Question 22

Describe Ainsworth & Maner (2012) study on how mating motivation promotes aggressive motivation in men

Answer 22

• Mating motivation condition: list 5 things that made you feel sexual desire, write in detail about experience involving intense sexual desire
• Control condition: list 5 things that made you feel happy, write in detail about experience involving intense happiness
• Ps are then told they’re going to work on another task (an auditory reaction timed task with another P)
• As part of this task, when their partner makes a mistake, Ps can deliver a blast of noise
• Outcome measure: willingness to deliver blast of noise to partner on a subsequent task
• Findings:
• Men primed with mating motive assaulted same-sex (but not opposite-sex) partner with louder & longer blasts of painful noise
• No such effect for women
• Didn’t behave aggressively when given opportunity to assert social dominance through other means (told that they won a competition of physical strength)
• While aggression helps men assert their social dominance, aggression is costly
• Findings consistent with evolutionary view that men’s greater propensity towards aggression is partly driven by the need to compete for mates

Question 23

Describe the alternative view for the gender gap in aggression

Answer 23

• Gender differences in aggression could have something to do with the way boys and girls are socialized
• Men are socialized according to social norms that encourage physical aggressiveness
• Girls are seen as more passive
• Differences in treatment emerge early in life

Question 24

Describe Condry & Condry (1976) study on the gender gap in aggression

Answer 24

• Ps viewed same video of startled infant
• When told it’s a boy: “he’s angry”
• When told it’s a girl: “she’s afraid”

Question 25

What are cultures of honour?

Answer 25

• Ex: US South
• Place high value on social reputation, feel strong obligation to defend their honour against slights, often through aggressive means
• More likely to respond with anger and aggression to insult
• More accepting of violence in the defence of one’s honour

Question 26

Describe gender, aggression and culture

Answer 26

• Evidence that male aggression may be culturally conditioned
• Cultural influences shape aggressive behaviour
• Ex: cultures of honour

Question 27

Describe the lab study on cultures of honour

Answer 27

• Ps: male University of Michigan students who
  grew up in the North or South
• Bumped & insulted by a confederate in the hallway outside the lab
• Southerners:
• More likely to think their masculine reputation was
  threatened
• More likely to subsequently behave in an aggressive & domineering way
• No difference between Southerners and Northerners in the no threat condition (it’s not that southerners are more aggressive in general)

Question 28

Describe the field study on cultures of honour

Answer 28

• Employers across US sent letters from job applicants who admitted to killing
  someone in honour-related conflict or to theft
• Southern companies more likely to respond positively to murder (but not theft) relative to Northern Companies

Question 29

Why is a culture of honour more prevalent in certain regions, like the Southern US?

Answer 29

• Historically, based on a herding economy: wealth is tied to livestock (ex: cattle),
  which are vulnerable to theft (especially cattle since they’re mobile)
• Protection of livestock and land becomes crucial for survival and social status
• Threats to resources or honour often prompt aggressive responses to maintain status and prevent theft (don’t want to be seen as someone who can be pushed around in this tough environment)
• Not result of genetic differences, but differences in socialization:
• Parental modelling
• Peer reinforcement
• Cultural narratives & values

Question 30

Describe instincts and genetically programmed behaviour

Answer 30

• Motivated behaviours (ex: aggression, caregiving) have a genetic component and have been subject to evolutionary pressures
• However, subject to far greater variability, learning, and social and cultural influences than initial instinct theory would predict

Question 31

Describe drive theories

Answer 31

• Behaviour is motivated to the extent that it serves the bodily needs of the organism and restores biological homeostasis
• Everything in our body has to be just right for things to go well and for us to survive
• Bodily deficits experienced psychologically as internal states of tension called a drive

Question 32

What’s homeostasis?

Answer 32

• Process by which organisms maintain stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment
• Ex: must maintain specific temperature, pH, blood sugar & sodium levels

Question 33

Describe Freud’s Drive Theory

Answer 33

• Freud was one of the early figures in the study of motivation
• All behaviour serves purpose of satisfying biologically based bodily needs
• Emphasized that recurring biological conditions like hunger generated build-up of psychic energy
• Nervous system aims to maintain low energy state and these inevitable urges disrupt this ideal state
• Energy build-ups create psychological discomfort (anxiety)
• Prolonged build-up could threaten physical & psychological health
• Drive is an emergency signal compelling action to reduce discomfort and restore balance
• Drive’s source: a bodily deficit occurs (ex: blood sugar drops & a sense of hunger emerges)
• Drive’s impetus: the intensity of the bodily deficit grows & emerges into consciousness as a psychological discomfort (anxiety)
• Drive’s object: seeking to reduce anxiety & satisfy the bodily deficit, the person searches out & consumes a need satisfying environmental object (ex: food)
• Drive’s aim: if the environmental object successfully satisfies the bodily deficit, satisfaction occurs & quiets anxiety, at least for a period of time
• Argued that there are 2 general categories of drives: eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct)
• Defensive strategies

Question 34

Describe Freud’s 2 general categories of drives

Answer 34

1) Eros (life instinct):
- Drive for life, survival, reproduction, & pleasure
- Food, water, sleep, sex, nurturance, affiliation
2) Thanatos (death instinct):
- Drive for rest, inactivity, return to inanimate state
- Often expressed through aggression, destruction, and self-harm

Question 35

What are defensive strategies (according to Freud)?

Answer 35

Learned strategies for managing sexual and aggressive drives, allowing them to be channeled in socially acceptable ways

Question 36

Describe Hull’s Drive Theory

Answer 36

• Drive = pooled energy source composed of all current bodily deficits/disturbances
  (ex: food, water, sleep and mate deprivation; tissue damage/pain)
• Hull was an experimental psychologist who used the experimental method to test his hypotheses
• Used modern scientific method to build & test his drive theory
• This theory lends itself to testing
• According to this theory, high vs. low motivation could be predicted & experimentally manipulated
• If you deprive an animal of food, sleep, or water, the drive should increase according to the level of deprivation
• Key premises:
• Behaviour is motivated by drive reduction
• “Drive is an energizer not a guide”
• It energizes behaviour but it doesn’t direct how behaviour will unfold
• Habit, rather than drive, directs behaviour
• Ex: hunger tells you that you should act, but it doesn’t tell you whether you should eat a salad or a sandwich
• What will guide this is habits
• Habits derive from learning -> relief following drive reduction reinforces habit
• Overtime, behaviours that lead to drive reduction will become habitual
• “Drive, cue, response, reward” -> drive energizes behavioural search for a stimulus (cue) that, when attained (by response) reinforces (rewards) that behavioural response
• Later, added 3rd cause of behaviour: incentive motivation
• Incentive motivation = value of stimulus (quantity or quality)
• The value of a stimulus is going to affect someone’s motivation
• Ex: some food is more appetizing and 100$ is more rewarding than 50$
• Strength of behaviour is a function of:
  1) Drive (biological motivation like hunger)
  2) Habit (probability of the motivated behaviour acquired through learning)
  3) Incentive (environmental motivation - reward)

Question 37

Describe the limitations of the drive approach

Answer 37

1) Not all motivations arise from physiological deficits
- Ex: rats will explore new environments even when not hungry or thirsty
- Humans will voluntarily subject themselves to food deprivation in order to lose weight, sometimes to a dangerous extent (eating disorders)
- Later theories of human motivation emphasize psychological needs (ex: need for affiliation, for achievement)
- We’re motivated by factors other than biological needs
2) External and environmental factors are underemphasized

Question 38

Today, psychologists focus on narrower questions related to motivation, like what?

Answer 38

• How do rewards influence motivation?
• What role do emotions play in persistence?
• How does social connection shape motivation?

Question 39

Describe Jeremy Bentham’s perspective on pain and pleasure

Answer 39

• “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do” (1789)
• Believed that all human behaviour derives from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain

Question 40

What’s psychological hedonism?

Answer 40

Perspective arguing that people are motivated to act in ways that increase pleasure & decrease pain

Question 41

What’s a reward?

Answer 41

• Something an animal will work to achieve/obtain
• May be food, social approval (in humans), money

Question 42

Primary vs Secondary rewards

Answer 42

• Primary rewards: naturally rewarding & biologically essential (ex: food, water,
  warmth, sexual gratification)
• Not things that you learn to appreciate, you just do
• Secondary rewards: learned rewards that gain importance through repeated associations with primary rewards (ex: money)
• No inherent survival value
• Gain value and learn these through experience

Question 43

What’s pleasure?

Answer 43

• Subjective hedonic value of rewards
• Ex: feeling when you eat tasty food or hug a friend

Question 44

What’s punishment?

Answer 44

• Something an animal will work to avoid
• Ex: a painful stimulus (like a painful shock)

Question 45

Primary vs Secondary punishments

Answer 45

• Primary punishments: naturally aversive, threaten survival (ex: physical injury &
  tissue damage)
• Don’t have to be taught to find it aversive, you just do
• Secondary punishments: learned punishments that acquire aversiveness through repeated associations with primary punishments (ex: financial loss, bad grades)
• Ex: auditory cue that a shock is coming, cop lights flashing behind you will you’re speeding

Question 46

What’s pain?

Answer 46

• The subjective hedonic and motivational response to punishing stimuli
• Subjective feeling experience of discomfort and the drive to avoid this punishing stimuli
• Subjective, conscious experience of discomfort or distress
• Ex: if you stub your toe and you have a throbbing ache in your toe, this is pain
• Pain involves sensory, affective, and motivational components

Question 47

What’s subjective utility

Answer 47

• Personal value or satisfaction an individual assigns to an outcome based on their preferences and circumstances
• How much something is worth to you personally
• How useful is the stimulus to you

Question 48

Describe subjective utility with regards to pain and pleasure

Answer 48

• Rewards produce pleasure and positive affect but they don’t always produce pleasure and punishments don’t always cause pain
• The relationship is not always straightforward
• Ex: in a cake eating competition, the last slice of cake may feel more like a punishment than a reward because of satiation
• Ex: scratching skin until it’s red and bloody would generally be a punishment (breaking skin tissue is a punishment) but if you have a really itchy bite, then scratching this itch can feel pleasurable
• Context matters and plays a major role in how we experience these

Question 49

Describe homeostasis and subject utility

Answer 49

• Organisms constant strive to maintain optimal internal equilibrium (homeostasis)
• Hedonic feelings (pleasure & pain) exist to encourage behaviours that help optimize internal balance
• Pleasure and pain can be thought of as being driven by homeostatic utility
• The state of the body at any given moment is going to determine the hedonic value of a stimulus
• Pleasure guides us towards stimuli that help restore/maintain homeostasis
• Pain signals deviation from homeostasis
• Alliesthesia: subjective hedonic value of stimulus is tied to extent to which a stimulus contributes to or disrupts homeostasis
• A stimulus will be experienced as pleasurable or painful depending on how it affects the body’s homeostatic balance

Question 50

What’s alliesthesia?

Answer 50

• Subjective hedonic value of stimulus is tied to extent to which a stimulus contributes to or disrupts homeostasis
• A stimulus will be experienced as pleasurable or painful depending on how it affects the body’s homeostatic balance
• Ex: food (ex: cake competition)
• Ex: water -> if you wake up in the middle of the night parched, then the water is pleasurable but if you drink too much water, then you may feel some discomfort or pain
• This is adaptive because these pain sensations are going to promote appropriate behaviours (avoidance and defensive) that are going to drive us to take action

Question 51

What’s the International Association for the Study of Pain’s definition of pain?

Answer 51

An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage

Question 52

What’s nociception?

Answer 52

• Neural detection & transmission of info about tissue damage
• Involves sensory receptors (nociceptors - located in various locations (ex: skin, joints)) that respond to thermal, mechanical, & chemical stimuli
• Once activated, these sensory receptors send electrical signals to the brain and spinal cord
• These signals can also occur under anesthesia and the brain doesn’t recognize them as painful
• Occurs without conscious awareness
• Nociception does not equal pain (not the same thing although they’re related)

Question 53

Pain vs Nociception

Answer 53

• Can have pain without nociception (ex: phantom limb, neuropathic pain)
• Can have nociception without pain (ex: withdrawal reflex, anesthesia, high-adrenaline situations (ex: soldiers in combat))
• During extreme focus, high stress or high adrenaline situations, individuals might sustain injuries but not feel the pain until later
• Psychological state, context, expectations, and meaning ascribed to pain can alter perception
• The meaning we assign to the pain is based on how others react, the expectations of the pain is going to influence how we react

Question 54

What’s phantom limb?

Answer 54

Individuals who have had a limb amputated can still feel pain in their missing limb

Question 55

What’s neuropathic pain?

Answer 55

Pain that arises from dysfunction in the nervous system rather than tissue injury

Question 56

Describe the 2 components of pain

Answer 56

1) Sensory-discriminative component: provides info about intensity, quality, and location of pain
- Processed in primary and secondary somatosensory cortices and posterior insula
- Somatosensory cortices lay out a map of the body and include all sorts of areas of the body which helps localize the pain
2) Affective-motivational component: relates to emotional experience of the pain (how distressing or unpleasant is it?) & drives motivation to escape or stop painful experience
- Processed in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI)
- Ex: if neighbour is playing loud music, the sensory component would be how loud the music is, the affective component would be how much it bothers you
- Evidence of dissociation: individuals who have lesions or damage to the dACC or insula can feel the pain but it doesn’t bother them (no emotional component), hypnosis

Question 57

Why does pain matter, why is it important?

Answer 57

• Not being able to experience pain may be problematic
• Ex: Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, Neural Alarm System, Social Pain

Question 58

Describe Congenital Insensitivity to Pain

Answer 58

• Rare genetic disease characterized by complete inability to perceive pain
• They tend to have a very difficult life
• Case studies of individuals with CIP:
• Repeated injuries (ex: fractures, burns, oral wounds due to self-biting)
• Infections from untreated wounds
• Reduced life expectancy
• Pain is crucial for protecting from injuries

Question 59

What’s the function of pain?

Answer 59

• Neural/body’s alarm system
• Serves as a warning system for present or potential harm and therefore ensures our survival
• Pain is our body’s way of telling us to pay attention to something that could cause tissue injury or death and take appropriate action
• Captures attention, heightens arousal & awareness
• Supersedes other goals
• Drives action in the short and long term (avoidance, escape, fight-or-flight, solicitation of support)
• Promotes recuperation & healing
• Facial expressions of pain have a consistent stereotypical pattern -> they evoke sympathy from observers

Question 60

Describe the adaptive value of belonging

Answer 60

• Adaptive trait: characteristics that evolve overtime and help organisms survive and reproduce (ex: sharp claws, camouflage, social affiliation (in humans))
• One of the key adaptive traits that helped our ancestors survive is belonging
• Group living served as multi-purpose survival tool:
• Help hunting large game & foraging
• Sharing food
• Defensive vigilance and greater strength against predators and hostile outgroups
• Help caring for offspring
• Access to mates

Question 61

Describe the Social Pain Hypothesis

Answer 61

• Belonging to a group used to be a matter of life and death:
• Individuals who stayed with the group were more likely to survive and reproduce
• Those who isolated themselves were at greater risk of harm or death
• In this context, belonging to a group isn’t just beneficial to survival it’s actually crucial for survival
• Physical pain mechanisms may have been borrowed to support affiliation:
• Social pain (ex: responses to rejection or exclusion) may have evolved from physical pain to promote group cohesion and ensure we remain socially connected
• Pain could signal the need to stay with the group, encouraging cooperation, reconciliation, and survival

Question 62

Describe Cyberball

Answer 62

• Paradigm for studying social exclusion
• Experience of feeling left out
• This hurts and is unpleasant
• Can be used in fMRI
• Experimenter got invited to toss a ball with people and they eventually turned their backs on him and stopped tossing him the ball
• Led him to develop cyberball experiment

Question 63

Describe the neuroimaging evidence of cyberball

Answer 63

• Cyberball exclusion related to increased activation in dACC and AI
• Magnitude of neural activation correlates with both self-reported feelings of social exclusion & observer-rated social distress
• Other paradigms showing increased dACC and/or AI activation in response to social pain:
• Viewing photograph of rejecting ex-partner
• Viewing photograph of deceased relative
• Artwork conveying sense of loneliness & social disconnection
• Viewing disapproving facial expressions (for individuals high in rejection sensitivity)
• Negative social evaluations

Question 64

Describe the evidence of shared sensitivity to physical and social pain

Answer 64

• Greater baseline sensitivity to physical pain predicts greater sensitivity to social exclusion
• Genetic variant related to greater physical pain sensitivity (OPRM1 118G) related to:
• Greater trait rejection sensitivity
• Greater self-reported subjective & neural
  reactivity to Cyberball exclusion
• More sensitivity to hurtful partner behaviour (ex: being ignored, criticism)

Question 65

Describe how factors that increase/decrease social pain should have parallel effects on physical pain

Answer 65

• There’s overlap between social and painful factors
• Factors that decrease social pain have parallel effects on physical pain
• Social support decreases physical pain (ex: during labour, thermal pain tasks in lab)
• In one study, women experienced less pain in a pain study while holding their partner’s hand or simply seeing a picture of them
• Reflected in decreased signalling in dACC and AI in response to pain task
• Factors that increase social pain -> a bit complicated
• Cyberball exclusion has been shown to lead to pain hypersensitivity, with Ps who feel most excluded reporting highest pain ratings
• Intentionally inflicted pain hurts more than incidental pain (ex: if someone steps on your foot intentionally, this may feel more aversive)
• Some evidence says that this is true
• But social exclusion has also been linked to hypoalgesia (reduction in pain)
• May depend on paradigm, context, motivational factors
• Social & pain responses mirror each other (ex: analgesia coincides with emotional numbing)

Question 66

Describe how factors that increase/decrease physical pain should have parallel effects on social pain

Answer 66

• Factors that decrease physical pain have parallel effects on social pain
• In a study, researchers had Ps take Tylenol and followed them throughout 3 weeks and had them fill out a daily diary of how they felt
• Ps taking Tylenol (vs placebo) report lower levels of hurt feelings in daily life, exhibit less dACC and AI activation during cyberball exclusion
• Factors that increase physical pain have parallel effects on social pain
• An inflammatory challenge (endotoxin injection) increases interpersonal sensitivity and neural reactivity to social exclusion
• Inflammation: immune system response that happens more locally if you have an injury
• Part of fighting off the intruder and bringing new cells to fight the infection
• Can use endotoxin to trigger inflammatory response and make Ps more sensitive to physical pain

Question 67

What are the behavioural consequences of pain?

Answer 67

• The purpose of pain is to motivate adaptive behaviour (ex: fight-or-flight, support solicitation)
• What about social pain?
• Neuropsychological evidence:
• In animals, dACC lesions lead to decreases in separation distress, deficits in social behaviour (maternal behaviour, social interest, proximity seeking)
• Less research in humans, but case studies of cingulotomies (ACC lesions) suggest social disinhibition, reduced concern about opinions of others, decreased self-consciousness
• Experimental evidence that social pain drives affiliative behaviour:
• Example:
• Increased desire to work with others on a task
• Increasing effort on subsequent group task
• More likely to sign up for a “friend matchmaking service”
• Provide more positive evaluations & allocate more monetary rewards to a novel partner
• Pay more attention to social information (social monitoring) (ex: selective memory for explicitly social events)

Question 68

What are some caveats of the behavioural consequences of pain?

Answer 68

• Likely to engage in affiliative behaviour only to the extent to which we see target as a viable source of social connection
• Those who are particularly fearful of negative social evaluation less likely to affiliate after rejection
• After rejection, tend to direct affiliative efforts towards novel partners but not those responsible for the rejection (may even derogate rejectors)
• Like physical pain, social pain has also been shown to lead to aggressive (”fight”)
  responses
• Aggressive response may be particularly likely when defensive distance is low

Question 69

Describe the pursuit of pleasure

Answer 69

• Pleasure motivates us to pursue rewarding experiences that promote well-being, survival, and reproduction (ex: food, social bonding, sex, exploration)
• Like pain, the experience of reward is a multifaceted construct (can be used to refer to either the object or the experience of engaging with the object)
• When referring to the experience, can be subdivided into the following:
• Something we want (something we will work to achieve)
• Something we like (something that gives us pleasure - that hedonic feeling)
• These components are dissociable both at a biological level and behaviourally, but they’re interrelated, they often co-occur and sort of bolster each other (ex: if a stimulus brings us pleasure, we’ll want it more next time)

Question 70

Liking vs Wanting

Answer 70

• Anticipating and actively seeking something good (wanting) is different from actually receiving and enjoying something good (liking)
• Although these 2 components often go hand-in-hand, they are dissociable at the behavioural and neural level

Question 71

Describe wanting

Answer 71

• The desire for a reward, sense of anticipation
• Typically measured by amount of effort individual will exert to obtain the reward
• Positive affect in a very activated sense
• Ex: cat playing with a laser pointer (the reward can never be consumed or obtained but the pursuit continues endlessly)
• To want something is synonymous with being motivated to get it

Question 72

Describe the rewards of beauty

Answer 72

• Facial beauty is considered a primary reward (inherently and naturally rewarding)
• Ex: sensitivity to facial beauty emerges early in life -> infants prefer looking at attractive faces over unattractive ones
• Evolutionary perspective: it’s been argued that facial beauty signals health, fertility, & greater genetic fitness
• This makes it a biologically important cue for mate selection
• One marker of attractiveness is facial symmetry
• We tend to have a preference for this
• There’s some research suggesting that facial symmetry is linked to better health and that health issues can actually lead to a decline in facial symmetry
• Neuroimaging research shows that the brain processes facial attractiveness similarly to how it processes other rewarding stimuli, such as food, money, or drugs
• People both report ‘liking’ attractive faces and will expend effort to view them (‘wanting’)

Question 73

Describe Chelnokova et al. (2014) study on the rewards of beauty

Answer 73

• Study that tried to tease apart wanting and liking in humans
• Interested in responses to facial beauty
• For wanting, you might do a simple button press task where Ps have to keep pressing on a button to keep the image on the screen
• Ps who want to look at attractive faces will keep pressing that button for more attractive faces compared to less attractive faces
• If you want to assess liking, then you can just ask the Ps questions
• Ex: ask how much they like the face, how attractive they find it, how pleasurable they find it
• This is not always an option
• Ex: we can’t ask non-human animals or babies how much they like something

Question 74

Describe liking

Answer 74

• The subjective feeling of pleasure we experience when we receive a reward
• “Hedonic gloss” on a stimulus
• Liking, or pleasure, is amplified during state of deprivation
• Not strictly about the objective features of a stimulus but also about its utility to us relative to our homeostatic state
• Can use spontaneous facial expressions as indicators of liking in non-human animals and humans that can’t talk (babies)
• Ex: sucrose ‘liking’ positive facial expressions

Question 75

How can we tease apart liking and wanting in babies and animals

Answer 75

• Simple but reliable measure for this is facial expressions
• We have distinct responses to pleasurable stimuli (ex: sweet foods) and these are remarkably similar across a number of species
• Ex: sucrose ‘liking’ positive facial expressions

Question 76

What’s dopamine?

Answer 76

• One of the substrates of liking and wanting
• Long considered the “pleasure molecule”
• Now know that this hypothesis is not very well supported -> not really accurate to describe it as a pleasure molecule
• Now understood as playing larger role in motivation or
  “wanting”, rather than “liking”

Question 77

Describe the dopamine-based reward circuit

Answer 77

• Begins in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), where
  dopamine is synthesized
• Primary source of dopamine
• Released into the nucleus accumbens (NA): brain’s “pleasure centre”
• Plays a part in other aspects of reward as well (ex: reinforcement, motivation, driving behaviours that are associated with achieving rewards)
• Circuit extends to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is involved in a lot of higher level cognitive functions (ex: decision making, planning, self regulation)
• In the context of the reward system, the PFC helps to process the subjective experience of pleasure and to guide behaviours based on expectations of future rewards
• Helps evaluate the long term consequences of actions
• Can help regulate the intensity of the motivation for a reward based on factors like risk, delay, etc.
• Also extends to orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), key for evaluating reward value of stimuli
• Plays some role in decision-making
• Ties this together with previous experience and helps you figure out how pleasurable an object, action, or outcome will be based on past experience and helps with subsequent learning as well (ex: adjusting reward values if conditions change)

Question 78

Describe how dopamine works in reward

Answer 78

1) Dopamine release & positive prediction error (prediction error = difference between what we expect and what actually happens)
- Positive prediction error happens when the outcome is better than expected
- Dopamine is important for signalling prediction errors
- Dopamine release is greatest when a reward is:
- Unexpected (surprise)
- Under-predicted (better than expected)
- It’s about that discrepancy so a very attractive and yet highly expected stimulus is not going to produce that much dopamine release
2) Dopamine release and anticipation
- Dopamine release is greater during the anticipation of a reward (ex: thinking about eating chocolate chip cookies or anticipating making money) than during actual receipt of the reward (ex: eating cookies or receiving money)
- Dopamine is more about learning and motivating goal-directed approach behaviour than signalling enjoyment

Question 79

Describe endogenous opioids and hedonic feelings

Answer 79

• Endogenous (“originating from within”) opioids play larger role in “liking”/pleasure
• “Opioids for hedonic experience and dopamine to get ready for it” (title of paper in this area)
• Dissociation between liking and wanting -> not perfect, opioids do appear to play some role in wanting as well but they seem to be more important for liking
• Opioid and dopamine system closely related neuroanatomically (high density of opioid receptors in a lot of the same regions as dopamine circuit) and interact in complex ways
• Pharmacological methods: can examine the role of endogenous opioids in hedonic feelings by administering opioid antagonists (ex: naltrexone or naloxone), substances that block endogenous opioid signals and diminish the hedonic response to rewards
• Can also use neuroimaging methods like PET to look at opioid release in response to some stimulus & correlate extent of opioid release with subjective feelings during the task
• Can also combine these 2 methods to give us a fuller picture

Question 80

What are some examples of the rewarding activities that opioids mediate pleasure from?

Answer 80

• Eating tasty foods (also underlie the increase in enjoyment of consuming food in a deprived state)
• Aerobic exercise (“runner’s high” - sense of pleasure/well-being after aerobic activity)
• Consuming drugs (not just opioids) and alcohol (cocaine, nicotine, alcohol have all been linked to underlying endogenous opioid processes)
• Winning money
• Sexual behaviour
• Social play (in non-human animals, tbd in humans)
• The young of a variety of species spend a lot of time engaging in social play (rough and tumble kind of play) that is thought to be very important for proper development of the young
• If you deprive animals of this they’ll have all sorts of problems when they get older
• Important for humans too -> neglecting children of social play might be damaging to their development
• Very enjoyable for animals and some of that enjoyment seems to be related to opioid processes
• Connecting with others/social bonding
• Ex: in a study, Ps were given nice notes from someone close to them and some of the Ps received opiate receptor antagonist naltrexone beforehand and when they did, this would blunt some of the enjoyment that they got from reading the notes
• In another similar study, they showed Ps pictures of their loved ones and found same result
• Found naltrexone decreases reward obtained from reading affectionate notes from close others or looking at their pictures
• Viewing beautiful faces
• May be involved in other rewarding activities, like exploration

Question 81

Describe the pain-pleasure dilemmas

Answer 81

• A lot of what we know about pain and pleasure derives from the study of each of them in isolation
• If we only look at these in isolation, we overlook how they interact in everyday real-world decision-making
• Pain & pleasure work together to optimize internal homeostatic balance
• While pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance generally enhance survival, they can
  sometimes compete with each other (ex: large reward may be accessible only at the price of some pain)
• Ex: an athlete might push through physical pain to achieve victory
• Understanding interplay of pain and pleasure is crucial for understanding decision- making & goal selection

Question 82

Describe the Motivation-decision model of pain

Answer 82

• Influential model
• Integrating reward and pain
• Subjective interpretation of a sensory event can be understood as manifestation of unconscious decision process
• Subjective utility
• This model suggests that our brain is constantly making unconscious decisions about whether to pay attention to pain or ignore it based on what’s most important for survival in the moment
• Decisions are based on what is most crucial for survival in the moment
• Factors influencing the decision:
• Internal state (ex: hungry, tired, injured) -> homeostatic info
• Sensory input (what is happening in your environment?)
• Threats and rewards (are there any dangers or opportunities nearby?)
• Basic idea: if something more important than pain is happening, the brain can reduce pain signals to allow us to focus on that bigger priority

Question 83

What’s a classic example of the motivation-decision model of pain

Answer 83

• You have an injured mouse (injury potentially leading to pain) but there’s a predator close by
• At this point, your best bet might actually be freezing and what you don’t want to be doing is desperately flailing around and drawing attention to yourself
• It might actually be adaptive to have an analgesic response kicking in
• There’s tissue damage that’s happened but there’s something more important going on (predator) and so we can’t be responding to the pain right now
• Dealing with the immediate threat (predator) first and then if the mouse manages to get away, that pain response is finally going to kick in and this will drive restorative and recuperative behaviour
• If there’s a bigger threat going on, it might not always be good to feel pain in the moment
• Human example: soldiers injured at war will only feel the pain of their injury later due to analgesic effect

Question 84

Describe the mechanisms of pain reduction

Answer 84

• Consistent with the motivation-decision model of pain, a variety of rewarding stimuli have been shown to reduce pain in humans and non-human animals
• Ex: sweet foods and drinks, pleasurable odours, pleasant music (particularly music you like), sexual behaviour, & social support
• An analgesic response might happen if there’s some sort of bigger threat present but also if there’s some reward present
• Sometimes you might want to hold out for the reward
• Some of these effects have been shown to be opioid-mediated
• Ex: naltrexone reverses increase in pain tolerance that typically follows consumption of sweet substances
• Endogenous opioids produce both stress- and pleasure-induced analgesia (suppression of pain) -> example of neurobiological mechanism interfacing between pain & pleasure

Question 85

Describe the function of reward expectation with regard to the motivation-decision model of pain

Answer 85

• Consistent with the motivation-decision model of pain, expectation of reward reduces pain
• Ex: when hungry rats learn that a painful electric shock predicts a food reward, show attenuation of pain response to the shock
• Such suppression of pain reversible with opioid antagonist administration like naloxone or naltrexone
• Not necessarily about experiencing reward in the moment
• Balancing going on of the hedonic value of the food reward and the shock
• If the shock is too severe, it’s actually not going to work
• Because they’re hungry, the food reward is worth even more to them
• In humans, striking example of this is placebo analgesia (reduction in pain that occurs after a person is given a placebo, an inert substance which has no effect but which the person believes will attenuate their pain)
• Clinicians report being very struck by how sometimes seemingly little relationship there seems to be between individuals’ experience of their objective level of injury or tissue damage or disease progression and their subjective experience of pain
• Ex: in studies of chronic pain patients, strongest predictors of clinical outcomes (ex: pain) are expectations about effectiveness of treatment
• If you go into pain treatment expecting that it’ll work, chances are you’ll have greater reductions in pain and related outcomes compared to individuals who don’t have these expectations about treatment
• Placebo drives expectations
• Expectations are very powerful
• Expectation of reward gives rise to analgesia
• Evidence for opioid mediated modulation of placebo analgesia:
• Reversible by opioid receptor antagonists
• Neuroimaging studies have found that the magnitude of placebo analgesia positively correlates with increased opioid release in the brain, particularly in the pain-related brain regions
• The more opioid release the greater the analgesic effect in response to a placebo

Question 86

Describe the relationship between dopamine and placebo analgesia

Answer 86

• Dopamine also appears to play a role in analgesia in situations where reward is expected
• Some research showing that the introduction of placebo treatment associated with activation of DA neurotransmission in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc)
• Magnitude of placebo-induced DA response predicts subsequent development of placebo-induced analgesia in pain trials
• The Ps who mount a greater DA response are also the ones who experience more analgesia following placebo
• Researchers also had Ps engage in another task where they could play this game where they could get money and found that individuals who show stronger NAcc responses during anticipation of a monetary reward will in a subsequent task show stronger placebo analgesia responses during pain task
• If you’re someone who has strong reward expectations (perhaps at a dispositional level), you’ll probably have a stronger analgesic response to a placebo treatment

Question 87

Describe the inhibition of reward by pain

Answer 87

• Related phenomenon predicted by the model is the suppressive effect of pain on the ability to experience pleasure
• Pain decreases engagement in rewarding activities, like eating tasty foods
• By decreasing reward pleasantness & attenuating normal reward-seeking behaviour, pain ensures that necessary action is taken to protect the individual
• In humans, high degree of co-morbidity between chronic pain and depression, which is characterized by inability to enjoy everyday pleasures (anhedonia)

Question 88

What’s anhedonia?

Answer 88

Inability to enjoy everyday pleasures

Question 89

What are common neurobiological substrates for pain and pleasure?

Answer 89

• Opioids and dopamine are important for regulating both pain and pleasure and mediating interactions between the 2, resolving pain-pleasure dilemmas
• See overlap between pain and pleasure processing at the level of neural regions as well
• Ex:
• ACC important for pain but also represents size, value and probability of rewards, as well as effort required to obtain them
• Insula encodes taste and food cravings, linked to felt satisfaction during a task and more broadly, involved in encoding interoceptive signals communicating internal body state so it makes sense why it’s important for pain but also why it’s important for homeostatic calculations
• Amygdala is involved in both pain/threat processing, as well as reward
• Some scholars argue that it’s not clear whether we can find regions in the brain that are involved with pain but not pleasure and vice versa

Question 90

Why do we sometimes seek out painful experiences?

Answer 90

• If avoiding pain is important for survival, then why do so many people engage in painful or potentially harmful activities voluntarily
• Ex: might train very hard at the gym to the point of actual physical pain and we eat spicy foods
• Pain may enhance pleasure
• Pain relief as a reward (opponent-process model)
• Pain heightens sensory experience and awareness (ex: after acute pain, individuals sometimes report greater enjoyment of pleasant stimuli, such as tasty food)
• Pain serves as a distraction from unwanted thoughts and feelings, high levels of self-awareness (why some people may engage in self-harm)
• Pain may demonstrate virtue, affirm identity, and restore virtue/integrity when an individual feels that they have compromised their moral standing
• The ability to tolerate pain is often admired
• Something ennobling about suffering especially in various religions
• Ex: self-flagellation to repent yourself from sin

Question 91

Describe how pain may enhance pleasure

Answer 91

• Pain provides an important contrast for the experience of pleasure
• Idea that predates modern neuroscience
• 18th Century philosopher Pietro Verdi argued that pleasure is relative to pain and the greatest pleasure is derived from the relief of pain and discomfort
• A couple centuries later, neuroscience research buries this out
• Pleasure is understood within the context of pain, and the relief of pain is itself a pleasurable experience
• Even negative stimuli may be experienced as rewarding in the context of more negative stimuli
• Ex: experience of moderate pain can be perceived and reported as pleasant when compared to alternative outcome of intense pain (relative relief)
• Because of that contrast
• Ex: people who suffer from eczema might subject themselves to things that are really painful like submerging their skin under really hot water which would normally be painful but for them it serves to alleviate the more unbearable pain that they’re experiencing from their eczema
• The hot water is pleasurable/rewarding in contrast
• Pain as a homeostatic drive
• The more we move towards homeostasis, the more pleasurable it’s going to be

Question 92

Describe pain relief as a reward

Answer 92

• Relief from pain is a positive hedonic experience
• Series of studies where researchers used different pain induction paradigms
• Lab study where Ps were subjected to painful tasks (application of heat, skin irritant capsaicin)
• When painful sensation is suddenly terminated, a sense of relief and positive affect results
• Lack of stimulation following the offset of pain is a positive hedonic experience (experience of pleasure)
• The more intense the pain, the more intense the relief and the pleasure

Question 93

Describe the Opponent-Process Model

Answer 93

• Emotional reactions are regulated by the brain to maintain hedonic balance (doesn’t like deviations too much in either direction)
• Strong emotional reactions (both pleasure and pain) are countered by an opposite emotional reaction
• Pleasure is going to be countered by pain and vice versa
• Can help explain things like thrill-seeking behaviours (ex: roller coasters, skydiving, horror movies)
  1) Emotionally Powerful Stimulus → Initial Reaction (State A):
• Peaks pretty quickly
• Ex: scary scene -> fear/anxiety
  2) Adaptation Phase → Decline of State A:
• After the peak, the intensity of fear/anxiety gradually declines and levels off
• This happens because the brain begins to counteract the fear with an opposite emotional response (state B)
• Steady level of State A = State A – State B
• If the stimulus provoking state A is suddenly removed, state A is going to terminate abruptly, but state B is going to keep going for a while
  3) Peak of State B After Stimulus Ends:
• Once the fear-inducing stimulus is gone, the full force of relief and excitement (State B) is felt
  4) State B Slowly Fades until emotions return to baseline (zero)

Question 94

State A vs State B in the Opponent-Process Model

Answer 94

• State A:
• Develops very quickly
• Closely associated with intensity of stimulus that produced it (direct response to that stimulus that triggered it)
• Ceases when triggering stimulus is removed
• State B:
• Develops slowly (slower onset)
• Produced as a reaction to State A
• Slow to decrease (slower offset)
• Continues for some time after State A is removed
• Becomes more intense with repeated experience
• Because steady State A = A – B, repeated presentations of stimulus that triggered State A so the state B counterreaction is getting stronger but will lead to a reduction in hedonic intensity of State A
• So if you keep watching horror movies, you’ll feel less fear overtime, but more of that sense of relief and wellbeing
• What happens if you keep getting exposed to this type of stimulus over and over again
• Process B gets more powerful so process A gets cancelled out

Question 95

Describe some real-life examples of the opponent-process model

Answer 95

1) Addiction
- Drug initially causes pleasure (State A)
- Over time, withdrawal (State B) grows stronger, leading individuals to continue drug use to avoid pain/withdrawal, not for pleasure
- Environmental cues associated with drug administration/drug injection can become conditioned to compensatory psychological process (process that opposes the effects of the drug)
- Overdose risk is higher in new settings
- This explains why overdoses are more likely in unfamiliar environments
- True in humans and non-human animals
- Systematic research of this: if you give rats morphine over and over again, they’re going to develop a condition tolerance of morphine in environmental situations that signal the impending morphine administration
- So in contexts where they’ve learned to associate with the morphine administration, they’ll have opposing physiological mechanisms kicking in
- But if they’re removed from these environments and placed in novel environment, they’re going to have higher mortality rates
2) Love/attachment
- Intensity of the joy we feel from the partner diminishes but the pain of separation actually grows more intense
- Sense of anxiety over losing a person becomes more intense
3) Thrill-seeking (ex: skydiving)
- Some work looking at parachutists
- Beginners feel fear (State A) and relief after landing (State B)
- Repeated jumps reduce fear and amplify post-jump euphoria (can last for several hours afterwards)
4) Pain relief
- Rapid offset of pain can feel pleasurable
- Why people sometimes seek out pain

Question 96

What’s the peak-end rule?

Answer 96

• Phenomenon that when we think back on an emotional experience, what we tend to remember is not the overall amount of emotion we experienced but rather what we experience at the peak and at the end
• The most intense positive or negative moments (the “peaks”) and the final moments (the “end”) of the experience are most heavily weighted in our recollections of the experience

Question 97

Describe the implications of the opponent-process model on memory

Answer 97

• Peak-end rule
• Ex: pain study where Ps required to immerse one hand in cold water:
• Short trial: 14°C for 60 sec
• Long trial: 14°C for 60 sec and then 15°C for
  additional 30 sec
• Asked which trial would you rather repeat?
• Most chose to repeat 2nd trial
• They remembered this experience as being less aversive at the end, rather than the whole experience
• Positive after-effects following an experience of pain/exertion may re-shape our memory of the entire experience
• Ex: running uphill then downhill
• Remember it as a positive experience

Question 98

Our construals (interpretations) of events and experiences play an important role in shaping what?

Answer 98

They play an important role in shaping motivation & behaviour

Question 99

What are needs?

Answer 99

• A fundamental, innate requirement or condition that is essential for growth, well-being, and effective functioning of an organism
• Needs energize and direct behaviour
• If needs aren’t met, this is going to stunt development and affect the psychological and physical wellbeing
• Drive theories: internal state of tension pushes individuals to take action to satisfy their needs & restore homeostasis
• These theories take a passive view of human nature, assume humans are passive and forces push them to act
• This doesn’t seem to capture the full extent of our human nature

Question 100

What are biological needs?

Answer 100

• Basic requirements for physical survival (ex: thirst, hunger, sleep, pain, temperature regulation)
• These needs allow for bodily wellbeing

Question 101

Describe Harry Harlow’s puzzling puzzle study

Answer 101

• Around mid-20th century
• Study of which the results couldn’t be easily explained in the context of existing motivation theories
• Pretty much as soon as they placed the monkeys in the cage with the puzzle they saw something interesting
• Monkeys weren’t shown any incentive/reward to do the puzzle
• Also no alleviation of biological need
• Monkeys played with these puzzles very vigorously
• Monkeys’ puzzle-solving behaviour could not be explained in terms of drives or external incentives
• “Solution did not lead to food, water, or sex gratification”
• Harlow proposed another type of drive: “the performance of the task provided intrinsic reward”
• Intrinsic reward = innate reward
• Harlow thought about what if we gave them a reward?
• “The introduction of food in the present experiment served to disrupt performance, a phenomenon not reported in the literature”
• Getting a grape (reward) for solving the puzzle decreased monkey’s intrinsic interest in playing with the puzzle

Question 102

Describe Self-Determination Theory & Psychological Needs

Answer 102

• Key idea #1:
• Humans are inherently active and constantly engaged with their environment
• Active participants in their own lives
• Key idea #2:
• All humans possess 3 fundamental psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness)
• Key idea #3:
• Psychological need satisfaction provides essential nutrients for engagement, psychological growth and psychological well-being
• Key idea #4:
• Environments may either support or thwart psychological needs

Question 103

Describe the 3 fundamental psychological needs according to Self-Determination Theory

Answer 103

• Autonomy: sense of agency and control over our actions and decisions
• Competence: the need to feel effective
• Relatedness: the need to feel connected to others

Question 104

Need Supportive vs Need Thwartive

Answer 104

• Need Supportive or Need Thwartive in:
• Activity
• Relationship
• Environment
• Social Context
• Need Supportive leads to greater psychological need satisfaction which leads to:
• Engagement
• Agency & Initiative
• Intrinsic Motivation
• Internalization
• Learning, Performance, Achievement
• Skill Development
• Positive Self-Concept & Identity
• Prosocial Behaviour
• Positive Emotions & Wellbeing
• Health
• Need Thwartive leads to greater psychological need frustration which leads to:
• Disengagement
• Passivity & Apathy
• Amotivation
• Anti-Internalization & Resentment
• Problematic Relationships
• Acceptance of cheating as okay
• Antisocial Behaviour
• Negative Emotions & Ill-Being
• Illness

Question 105

Describe Intrinsic Motivation

Answer 105

• Motivation to engage in an activity out of one’s interest and enjoyment
• Not because we’re expecting a reward or punishment for doing it
• Performing the activity is its own reward
• Psychological need satisfaction promotes intrinsic motivation
• Linked to:
• Greater initiative and task persistence
• Creativity
• Deeper processing of information and better retention of information in memory
• Positive behaviour change
• More positive emotion, vitality, & well-being
• Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness support from the environment and one’s relationships lead to each of these accordingly which lead to psychological need satisfaction which lead to intrinsic motivation

Question 106

Describe extrinsic motivation

Answer 106

• Motivation to engage in activity due to some external outcome
• Not about enjoying the activity in its own right, but about what you get out of it

Question 107

Describe how our social environments may support or thwart need satisfaction, with downstream effects on intrinsic motivation

Answer 107

• Supportive Relationships and Social Contexts:
• Autonomy support
• Competence support
• Relatedness support
• Lead to need satisfaction:
• Autonomy satisfaction
• Competence satisfaction
• Relatedness satisfaction
• Leads to adaptive functioning, growth and well-being
• Thwartive Relationships and Social Contexts:
• Autonomy thwart
• Competence thwart
• Relatedness thwart
• Lead to need frustration:
• Autonomy frustration
• Competence frustration
• Relatedness frustration
• Leads to maladaptive functioning, defensiveness and ill-being

Question 108

What’s autonomy?

Answer 108

• The psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behaviour
• Autonomy need satisfaction is characterized by a sense of volition and self-endorsement
• Genuine, unpressured willingness to engage in an activity without feeling coerced or pressured
• Sense of ownership and personal causation over one’s behaviour and actions
• A sense of “I’m doing this because I want to” rather than “I don’t really want to be doing this. I’m only doing this because I have to, not because I want to”

Question 109

What are the different motivating styles with regard to autonomy?

Answer 109

• Autonomy support: an interpersonal tone of understanding
• Neutral
• Controlling: interpersonal tone of pressure

Question 110

Describe the autonomy-supportive motivating style

Answer 110

• Basic attitude: consideration
• Interpersonal tone: understanding
• Take the other person’s perspective
• Support interest & intrinsic motivation (can do this by encouraging the pursuit of personal interests & intrinsic goals and by presenting activities in need-satisfying ways)
• Support value & internalization (can do this by providing explanatory rationales, acknowledging and accepting negative feelings and relying on invitational language)

Question 111

Describe perspective-taking

Answer 111

• Seeing the situation/the world as if you were the other person (from their perspective)
• Foundational component of autonomy support that enables the other components
• Ex: cannot support one’s interests without first understanding what those interests are
• Benefits:
• Communicates interest & concern, helps build trust & understanding
• Fosters sense of social connection
• Improves communication
• But quite difficult

Question 112

Describe the challenges to perspective-taking

Answer 112

• Dual judgment model of empathy gaps postulates that perspective-taking entails 2 steps:
  1) Imagine how we would feel in someone else’s situation
  2) Try to adjust for differences between ourselves and the other person
• Challenge with 1st step: misjudging ourselves
• Tend to exhibit cold-hot empathy gap (when in a relatively calm or “cold” emotional state, tend to underestimate how strongly we’ll feel in a highly emotional or “hot” situation)
• If we don’t understand people’s struggles, then we can’t understand how they feel
• Challenge with 2nd step: insufficient adjustment
• Tend to overestimate the extent to which others share our opinions, beliefs, preferences
  (false consensus effect)
• We do this because we tend to believe that we see the world objectively, so “reasonable” people should share our perspectives and reactions
• Perceiving similarity feels like a shortcut to understanding; but just because someone resembles us or has had similar experiences, does not mean we will accurately infer their feelings and motivations

Question 113

What’s the false consensus effect?

Answer 113

We tend to overestimate the extent to which others share our opinions, beliefs, preferences

Question 114

What are some solutions for the challenges of perspective-taking?

Answer 114

• Effective perspective-taking requires going beyond assumptions, acknowledging empathy gaps, and practicing active listening
• Active listening: communication technique that requires fully engaging with what the speaker is saying by:
• Asking clarification questions
• Paraphrasing what the speaker said to confirm understanding
• Paying attention to nonverbal cues
• Communicating care and concern, avoiding negative or judgmental reactions
• Not just thinking about what we’re going to answer

Question 115

Describe the importance of choice

Answer 115

• Even if activity is not inherently exciting, giving individuals freedom to make their own decisions can boost engagement and satisfaction
• Examples:
• Classroom projects
• Allowing students to choose what they’ll learn
• Might be good to be given some autonomy by working on projects, choosing the topic from what interests you the most in the course
• Workout routines
• You might feel more engaged if your trainer gives you some choice (ex: when you’re going to workout)
• Medication adherence
• Something people may struggle with (especially older people)
• Autonomy-supporting doctor will learn your routine and provide you with this sense of choice
• What if it’s not possible to provide a choice?
• Most critical component is the feeling of choice
• Even trivial choices, or the illusion of choice, provide benefits

Question 116

Describe Cordova & Lepper (1996) study on the effect of choice on motivating children to learn math

Answer 116

• Motivational challenge: how to motivate children to learn math?
• Elementary school children given computer math learning program with a science-fiction or fantasy theme
• Feeling-of-choice condition: customize game (ex: name your own spaceship and the alien spaceship)
• Led to higher levels of liking for the game, intrinsic motivation & task persistence, attempts to use more complex operations, more learning

Question 117

Describe Langer & Rodin (1976) study on the incorporation of choice with elderly nursing home patients

Answer 117

• Motivational challenge: how to prevent mental and physical health declines in elderly nursing home patients?
• Possible cause: transition to nursing home entails loss of autonomy, which contribute to declines in engagement and physical and psychological well-being
• The provision of choice as an important autonomy strategy
• The researchers speculated that at least part of this decline is due to loss of autonomy
• Everything for them is handled by someone else (ex: meals)
• They tested the idea that restoring these residents’ autonomy would increase their wellbeing
• Patients were randomized to 2 conditions (choice vs control condition)
• The difference was in the phrasing of permissions
• Choice condition is emphasizing the availability of choice and the sense of responsibility to make a choice
• Choice condition could choose if they wanted a plant and which one they wanted and they were responsible for taking care of it
• Control condition were given a plant as a gift and the nurses took care of it
• Researchers tracked the Ps for a week
• Results:
• Residents in choice group (vs control):
• Reported feeling happier and more active
• Spent more time engaging with other residents and with staff
• Exhibited improvements in mental and physical well- being
• Were less likely to pass away within 18 months
• Striking results considering the manipulation was so subtle and minor
• Takeaway: freedom of choice is essential to our well-being

Question 118

Is choice always beneficial?

Answer 118

• Although the illusion of choice can yield benefits, there still has to be some kind of meaningful and personally-relevant thing going on
• If it conflicts with the autonomy then it doesn’t work as well
• Not all “choices” promote a sense of autonomy, and some may even leave individuals feeling controlled
• Ex: overt or even subtle pressure to pick a particular option negates benefits of choice and doesn’t promote autonomy
• For choice to have psychological & performance benefits, it must be meaningful and aligned with an individual’s interests and values
• Ex: picking from a number of uninteresting options will not yield benefits
• Another alternative is making the other option extremely unattractive
• Not a real choice and is disconnected from a sense of autonomy
• When we feel like we’re being controlled, this threatens our autonomy and limits intrinsic reward
• Having too few options to choose from may not be beneficial
• In some studies, Ps are technically autonomous to choose but the researchers are pressuring them to pick a certain option
• In these studies we don’t see the same benefits
• Too many choices may be overwhelming (the “tyranny of choice”):
• Decision fatigue, uncertainty and anxiety, regret
• The type of choice is going to matter (is it relevant to the task at hand, is it meaningful to us)
• Regret over options we didn’t pick
• Ex: online dating and having to choose from long list of people
• Some have argued this has led to their dissatisfaction with online dating
• Ex: employee participation in 401(k) retirement plans decreases when more fund options are offered
• When you have a lot of choices to choose from, people end up not participating
• Barry Schwartz: “[it is] self-determination within significant constraints – within ‘rules’ of some sort – that leads to well-being, to optimal functioning”
• There’s probably a sweet spot for the amount of choice
• Choice may also feel overwhelming when we lack the requisite skill or knowledge to make a choice
• Ex: if asking a patient to choose between treatment plans but they don’t know the plans and the risks and benefits
• They should have the info needed to make an informed choice
• With children, a choice should be developmentally relevant
• Some choices are intrinsically problematic

Question 119

Do we always want choice?

Answer 119

• According to Deci, lack of desire to make one’s own choices may stem from history of controlling interactions with others
• “if you control people enough, they may begin to act as they want to be controlled” (focus it outward)
• Research example:
• Experimenter acted in either authoritarian or supportive way towards elementary school children
• Children then given opportunity to choose on anagram task
• Children who had been exposed to authoritarian experimenter expressed less desire for choice
• Deci speculates that there’s this fear of evaluation if they make the wrong choice

Question 120

What’s a way to find meaning in uninteresting activities?

Answer 120

Internalization

Question 121

What’s internalization?

Answer 121

• The psychological process through which a person transform a formerly externally prescribed way of thinking or behaving into an internally-endorsed one
• Ex: grudgingly cleaning your room because your mom asked you and then seeing the value of having a clean room
• Strategies:
• Provide explanatory rationales
• Acknowledge and accept negative feelings
• Rely on invitational language

Question 122

Describe the internalization strategy of explanatory rationales

Answer 122

• Explaining the “why” and “because” behind the task
• Ex: “Doing this activity has been shown to be useful. The benefit is “”. This benefit occurred because …”
• The motivational question shifts from:
• Do you want to revise your paper? (no, it’s boring) to:
• Do you want to improve your writing? (yes, it’s important)

Question 123

Describe the internalization strategy of acknowledging and accepting negative feelings

Answer 123

• If you’re faced with something you don’t want to do and you’re struggling, it’s natural that you’ll feel some resistance (anxious, stressed, frustrated)
• An autonomy supportive style involves acknowledging and validating negative feelings, and taking on a collaborative approach to addressing their underlying cause
• Support for relatedness needs promotes internalization
• A harsh or dismissive response is likely to create friction & resistance, perpetuate negative affect, and impede internalization
• Helpful if you can acknowledge those feelings and validate them

Question 124

Describe the internalization strategy of relying on invitational language

Answer 124

• Instead of using pressuring language
• Invitational language suggests rather than demands
• “You must do this now” vs. “You might find it helpful to try this”
• Flexible, non-controlling, leaves room for choice while encouraging action (not just about permissiveness)
• Supports need for autonomy

Question 125

What are the benefits of giving autonomy support?

Answer 125

• Psychological need satisfaction
• Intrinsic motivation
• Efficacy
• Evaluations at work
• Job satisfaction
• Agency and initiative
• Passion for one’s profession
• Relationship satisfaction
• Well-being
• Less burnout (emotional exhaustion)
• Improved health
• Longitudinal intervention studies provide evidence that adopting an autonomy supporting style leads to benefits overtime for the support provider
• Following teaching interventions where they are giving more autonomy support, see gains in:
• Need satisfaction
• Autonomous motivation to teach
• Adoption of intrinsic goals
• Passion for teaching
• Job satisfaction & vitality
• Declines in emotional and physical exhaustion

Question 126

What does control look like?

Answer 126

• Telling others what to think, feel, and do
• Inducing guilt or pressure
• Countering or trying to change negative feelings
• Using pressuring and demanding language, pushing for compliance
• Controlling behaviour through incentives like rewards and punishments

Question 127

What are some major issues with relying on pressure and control or using the controlling approach

Answer 127

• Thwarts the individual’s psychological needs (feel like they have to give up their own personal goals, values, and interests just to comply)
• Creates long-term motivational problems
• Promotes negative emotions like guilt and anxiety
• Harms relationships

Question 128

Do punishments work? Do they suppress undesirable behaviour?

Answer 128

• Punishment (or the threat of punishment) may lead to compliance in the short term
• However, has a number of side effects:
• Undermines need for autonomy & impedes internalization
• Negative emotionality
• Impairs relationship between punisher and punishee
• Negative modeling of how to cope with undesirable behaviour in others
• Corporal punishment has been linked to serious issues like antisocial and criminal behaviour, aggression, poor mental health (not sure about directionality of this relationship)

Question 129

What’s compliance?

Answer 129

• Conforming to an expectation, request, or rule without necessarily adopting the underlying value or motivation behind the behavior
• Want to avoid a consequence but not necessarily because you care about it

Question 130

According to Deci, what are the 2 types of controlled behaviour?

Answer 130

Compliance and Defiance

Question 131

What’s defiance?

Answer 131

• Doing the opposite of what you are expected to do just because you are expected to do it
• Defiance is not autonomous or authentic behaviour (you are still being controlled by external forces) -> not freely chosen
• Compliance and defiance can co-exist within an individual even if one is dominant

Question 132

Describe Deci’s first study

Answer 132

• Edward Deci was inspired by Harlow’s monkey puzzle study and wondered whether a similar principle applied to humans and could explain children’s waning interest in learning over their school years
• Experiment held over 3 consecutive days
• Ps engaged with Soma puzzle where you have to take the pieces and make shapes/configurations out of them
• People generally like doing this
• Ps assigned to experimental or control group
• 1st session: replicate the Soma (puzzle) configurations (both groups)
• 2nd session:
• Experimental groups: paid $1 (today, ~$8.50) for
  each configuration they replicated
• Control group: no pay
• 3rd session: no pay (both groups)
• Key outcome measure: what do Ps do when left alone halfway through the session?
• Halfway through the session he’d leave and act like he has something else to do for ~8 mins and would watch them through a one-sided mirror
• Specifically, amount of time spent playing with puzzle during free choice period
• Findings:
• Day 1: no difference b/w groups
• 2nd day: experimental group spent more time
  playing with puzzle
• 3rd day: experimental group spent less time playing with puzzle than control group, and less than they did on 1st day
• Human beings have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn”
• “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity”
• Rewards may boost extrinsic motivation
• But they decrease intrinsic motivation (overjustification effect)

Question 133

Describe Murayama et al. (2010) study on intrinsic motivation in the brain

Answer 133

• Ps assigned to reward or no-reward condition and perform moderately interesting task in 2 sessions
• Control condition: no payment
• Show activation in ventral striatum (VS) over both
  sessions
• Reward condition: payment in Session 1, no payment in Session 2
• VS activation in Session 1, but disappears in Session 2
• Less likely to engage in task during free choice period
• Negative relationship b/w amount voluntary play & decrease in VS activation

Question 134

What are the impacts of extrinsic rewards on learning?

Answer 134

• Extrinsic rewards interfere with process and quality of learning
• Focus shifts from mastery and learning to getting the reward
• Learn information at surface level, but at the cost of deeper conceptual understanding
• Poorer memory performance later on (likely due to more shallow encoding)
• Effects on persistence:
• When rewarded: persist only until reward criterion is obtained
• When not rewarded: persist until curiosity is satisfied and/or mastery is attained

Question 135

Intrinsic satisfaction is correlated with activation in what neural regions?

Answer 135

Correlated with activation in reward-related neural regions (the ventral striatum)

Question 136

Describe Grolnick & Ryan (1987) study on the impacts of extrinsic rewards on learning

Answer 136

• Elementary school children expecting to be tested on a passage display greater rote memorization, but less conceptual understanding
• Exhibit steeper decline in rote memorization following the test
• Also expressed feeling less interest in the passage and more pressure

Question 137

Algorithmic vs Heuristic Tasks

Answer 137

• Across different participant populations and different tasks, rewards have been shown to undermine performance on complex tasks requiring deep thinking, creativity, & problem solving (heuristic tasks) vs more straightforward algorithmic tasks where there is a clear “step-by-step” path to the solution
• Extrinsic rewards may increase output for algorithmic tasks, but hurt performance and intrinsic motivation on heuristic tasks
• “Rewards don’t undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”
• Modern economies increasingly rely on heuristic work

Question 138

Describe Glucksberg (1962) and Pink (2011) study on the impacts of extrinsic rewards on creativity and problem-solving

Answer 138

• Ps come into a room and see a table with 3 things on it (a box of thumbtacks, a candle, and matches)
• Their task was to mount the candle to the wall
• This took Ps a little while to figure out
• Task requires overcoming functional fixedness
• Control Ps: “We would like to obtain norms on time needed to solve the problem”
• Incentivized Ps: “The top 25% of the 5s in your group will win $5 each and the best will receive $20. Time to solve will be the criterion used.”
• Incentivized Ps took ~3 min longer to solve problem in challenging (heuristic) condition (tacks are in a box)
• But slightly (non-significantly) faster in easy (algorithmic) condition (dump out all the thumbtacks and box placed on the table separately)

Question 139

What’s functional fixedness?

Answer 139

Mental block that prevents us from seeing alternative uses for familiar objects, which can hinder problem-solving and creativity

Question 140

Describe Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett (1973) study on the impacts of extrinsic rewards on creativity and problem-solving

Answer 140

• 3-5 yo children at nursery school given chance to play with “magic markers”
• High initial levels of intrinsic interest to play with markers
• Assigned to 1 of 3 conditions:
  1) Expected reward (told that they were going to get a reward: “good player” ribbon)
  2) Unexpected reward (given ribbon but aren’t told about it beforehand)
  3) No reward
• Decline in intrinsic motivation in the expected reward group
• No longer interested in playing with markers at follow-up when no reward was offered
• Paintings made by this group rated as lower-quality by judges unaware of study hypotheses
• Subsequently replicated in other age groups
• Extrinsic (expected) rewards produce more quantity, but lower quality
• No detrimental impact on unexpected reward group
• “If-then” contingency key to undermining autonomy

Question 141

Describe Amabile et al. (1993) and Pink (2011) study on the impacts of extrinsic rewards on creativity and problem-solving

Answer 141

• Study looked at commissioned and non-commissioned works by professional artists
• Non-commissioned works by professional artists rated as more creative relative to commissioned works
• “Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are doing a piece for someone else it becomes more “work” than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself—be careful to do what the client wants.”

Question 142

How does The Adventures of Tom Sawyer depict the impacts of extrinsic rewards on creativity and problem-solving

Answer 142

• Episode in the book where the main character, a little boy, is tasked by his aunt to paint a fence
• To not have to paint the fence, he tricks other boys to paint the fence by telling them it’s really fun and gets them to pay him in marbles
• “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

Question 143

Describe the impacts of extrinsic rewards on creativity and problem-solving on popular content creators

Answer 143

• Often see creators explaining why they won’t be making videos anymore
• Ex: a content creator with ~19 million subscribers
• “I don’t like putting work first”
• Always talking about work with his partner or playing video games and thinking about work
• Monetized content takes away from the joy of the activity itself

Question 144

Why do extrinsic rewards have these effects?

Answer 144

• When we are given external rewards (or pressured or threatened), we lose our perception of autonomy and sense of ownership over our action
• Undergo a shift in our understanding of our motivation from an internal locus of causality to external locus of causality
• We no longer feel like the authors of our own behaviour
• Whereas when we enjoy an activity for its own sake, we feel a sense of freedom

Question 145

Describe the importance of autonomy

Answer 145

• The extent to which extrinsic rewards undermine creativity depends on the extent to which they limit autonomy
• Ex: when artists consider their commissions as “enabling” rather than “constraining”, their creativity is maintained (creating the art that they wanted to create)
• Some companies are increasingly focusing on autonomy-boosting interventions
• Ex: “20% time” at Google where you could spend 20% of your time where you could work on a passion project (whatever was interesting to you, non-assigned work) led to creation of products such as Gmail, Google Translate, & Google News
• Turns out to be very beneficial for the employees

Question 146

Describe the caveat to the negative impacts of extrinsic rewards

Answer 146

• Money matters
• Extrinsic rewards such as adequate & equitable pay, satisfactory working conditions, & job security can be considered “baseline” rewards
• Their presence does not necessarily lead to intrinsic motivation & better performance, but their absence undermines satisfaction and motivation
• If baseline conditions aren’t met, focus will be on the unfairness of the situation and/or financial anxieties
• The need for fairness is a very deep need ingrained in us
• Ex: Fairness study
• Put 2 capuchin monkeys side by side and they had a very simple task to do and if you give them both cucumber, then they are able to do this task 30 times over
• If you give grapes to one of the monkeys, then you create inequality between them
• The monkey receiving cucumbers gets upset and stops performing the task altogether
• Sense of unfairness has an amotivating effect
• “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table”
• To reduce controlling nature of monetary rewards, Deci argues they should be non-contingent
• Thinks bonuses tied with work performance are not a good idea

Question 147

Describe helping behaviour

Answer 147

• Helping others is another action we are often intrinsically motivated to do
• Helping behaviours emerge early in life: 20-month-old infants already have a strong tendency to help
• What happens if we are rewarded for helping behaviour?

Question 148

Describe Warneken & Tomasello (2014) study on helping behaviours in infants

Answer 148

• Treatment phase: control no reward condition
• The infant understands if you need help
• Test phase: child helps
• Another treatment phase/condition: child was given a material reward for helping
• She was given a toy
• Test phase: the child received an extrinsic reward for helping and once that extrinsic reward is taken away, the child does not want to help anymore
• Provision of extrinsic rewards (ex: a toy) diminishes intrinsic motivation to help

Question 149

Describe Warneken & Tomasello (2014), Mellstrom & Johannesson (2008) , Lacetera & Macias (2008) study on helping behaviours in adults

Answer 149

• In adults, provision of extrinsic rewards has similarly been shown to undermine prosocial behaviour
• Ex: blood donation study
• Volunteer (control) condition (not pressured, coerced or rewarded for donating blood): 52% of women donated
• Paid condition: 30% donated
• Option to donate to charity condition: 53% donated
• Not all rewards undermine donation
• In another study, giving time off work increased blood donations
• No effect for men

Question 150

Describe the impacts of extrinsic rewards on cheating and other forms of unethical behaviour

Answer 150

• External regulation in the form of rewards may increase cheating, dishonesty, & other forms of unethical behaviour
• We lose sight of the bigger picture (ex: our values)
• Ex: Deci’s story about signing out books from the library
• Research examples:
• Setting compensation goals can increase dishonesty when managers are paid a bonus for hitting certain targets (ex: with financial or time reports)
• Individuals less likely to report team member’s unethical behaviour in team-based reward systems

Question 151

Are all rewards bad?

Answer 151

• Rewards are not always bad: can be useful when trying to motivate ourselves or others to complete routine, boring tasks where intrinsic motivation is low
• But should avoid using them for intrinsically interesting tasks
• Reasons to proceed carefully even with uninteresting tasks:
• Extrinsic motivators interfere with process of learning
• Extrinsic motivators undermine quality of performance & creativity
• Once you introduce a reward, it’s hard to go back
• Can use interest- and value-enhancing strategies instead

Question 152

What’s competence?

Answer 152

• The psychological need to be effective in one’s interactions with the environment
• Reflects desire to exercise and extend one’s skills & capacities
• Hallmarks of competence need satisfaction: feelings of effectance, mastery, making progress

Question 153

Describe instrumentalities and competence

Answer 153

• Contingencies = if-then relationships between behaviour & outcomes in the world
• Instrumentalities = our beliefs or perceptions of contingencies
• Ex: your belief that if you study hard, you will get a good grade
• According to Deci, people need to see a connection between their actions and the outcomes they desire (instrumentalities) to experience motivation
• He argued that people living in a communist regime didn’t believe that hard work would lead to good outcomes so they thought “why try?”
• Outcomes may be either intrinsic or extrinsic
• Double-edged sword: instrumentalities may be a source of control, but it depends on how they’re used
• Missing piece: competence
• To feel fully motivated and engaged, must believe that our efforts matter (instrumentalities) and that we have the capacity to succeed (competence)

Question 154

What are the consequences of competence need satisfaction?

Answer 154

• Increased motivation and engagement
• Enhanced well-being and positive emotions, better psychological adjustment
• Increased self-efficacy and confidence

Question 155

What are the consequences of competence need frustration?

Answer 155

• Decreased motivation and engagement
• Reduced well-being, negative emotions, burnout
• Behavioural maladjustment (ex: procrastination, avoidance)

Question 156

What are the 4 key practices of competence support?

Answer 156

• Providing clear expectations
• Providing progress-enabling guidance
• Providing optimal challenges
• Providing informational feedback

Question 157

Describe providing clear expectations in competence support

Answer 157

• When people first begin an activity, they wonder:
• What should I do?
• What represents good performance?
• How good is good enough?
• Communicating clear expectations, such as a goal to strive for or a standard of excellence to pursue, answers these questions so that the person knows what competence functioning looks like in this situation
• It becomes clear what “a good performance” is

Question 158

Describe providing progress-enabling guidance in competence support

Answer 158

• As people engage in an activity or pursue a goal, they wonder:
• Am I doing this correctly?
• Can I do this well?
• How can I improve/how can I do better?
• Can help by offering how-to instructions, worked out examples, models to emulate, tips and strategies, scaffolding, resources, and reminders

Question 159

Describe providing optimal challenge in competence support

Answer 159

• Optimal challenges require you to stretch your capacities, but still feel achievable
• Research study example:
• 6th grade children given anagrams of varying difficulty (4-6 letters)
• Curvilinear relationship between task difficulty and task enjoyment, with moderately difficult problems being the most enjoyable
• Ex: The Goldilocks Dilemma

Question 160

Describe providing feedback in competence support

Answer 160

• As people display their skill and generate work products, they may wonder:
• Is this any good?
• What should I work on next?
• How can I advance from good to great?
• Constructive feedback helps people adjust and reorganize their strategies and performances into a clear path to future progress
• Without the benefit of a post-performance commentary, people may find it difficult to judge their performances and products (ex: “Was my performance any good?”)

Question 161

Describe how the trier task relates to the importance for providing feedback in competence support

Answer 161

• Ps come to the lab and are told that they have to give a speech to a panel of judges explaining why they would be a good candidate for a particular position
• The so-called behavioural experts judging their performance are very passive
• They don’t give any feedback (ex: don’t nod, don’t smile, don’t give negative feedback)
• Then make them perform other harder tasks
• This is a very unpleasant experience
• This is a commonly used stress paradigm
• Very good at evoking both subjective feelings of stress and physiological markers of stress
• Cortisol spikes after Ps present
• 2 key components:
  1) Being socially evaluated/judged by other people
• Sensitive to this given our need for relatedness
  2) We feel like we lack control in this situation
• Ps are deprived of feedback that they need to know where they stand
• This is very distressing and disorienting

Question 162

What are the elements of constructive feedback?

Answer 162

1) Quality assessment
* Highlight strengths and progress to boost confidence and motivation
2) Identifying weaknesses
* Be as specific as possible, avoid overgeneralizing
* Individuals with low self-esteem more likely to overgeneralize what they
hear (our perceptions also play a role)
3) Actionable advice
4) Encouraging self-reflection (Deci suggests this is probably where you want to start)
5) Bolster sense of control (want the other person to feel that this is something that they can improve on)

Question 163

Describe the conundrum of directive support

Answer 163

• Authentic competence comes from person’s own performance & effort, not external praise & rewards
• It’s not something that can be given
• Directive support (advice, reminders, problem-solving) can be useful, but may backfire and feel intrusive or controlling, undermining motivation and competence
• You’re guiding someone, you’re directing them
• Double-edge sword
• Autonomy support (listening, understanding, encouraging self-determination) may lead to better outcomes in goal achievement, goal internalization, resilience, and well-being
• Involves more empathy

Question 164

Directive vs Autonomous forms of goal support

Answer 164

• Prospective studies of the effects of directive vs. autonomous forms of support on goal progress (how these forms of support would promote or hinder their goals)
• Autonomy support = empathic perspective-taking (ex: “my friend understands how I see my goals”)
• Directive support = positive guidance (ex: “my friend reminds me what I need to be doing”)
• Ps listed multiple personal goals and were followed over period of 3 months
• Autonomy support significantly positively related to both self-reported and other-reported goal progress in both friendships and romantic relationships
• Mediated by experience of autonomy
• Autonomy support boosted one’s sense of autonomy
• Autonomy support also positively related to relationship quality and well-being
• Directive support not significantly related to better goal progress, or relationship quality or well-being

Question 165

What’s invisible support?

Answer 165

• Support that goes unnoticed by the recipient but nevertheless exerts positive effects on recipient
• Research has shown that sometimes the most helpful support is the kind of support that we don’t even notice receiving

Question 166

Describe Bolger et al. (2000) study on invisible support

Answer 166

• Daily diary study of couples where one partner was preparing for the NY State Bar Examination
• Partners: reported daily provision of emotional support
• Examinees: reported daily receipt of emotional support & emotional distress
• Results: reports of support provision associated with examinees’ decreases in depression while reports of support receipt associated with increases
• Most beneficial condition when support was provided, but not noticed by recipient (invisible support)
• Emotional support might potentially signal to us that we’re not competent for completing something
• Might undermine competence and motivation

Question 167

What kind of support is most beneficial?

Answer 167

• Findings are a bit mixed in the literature
• Directive support in the context of close relationships has either neutral or negative impacts on motivation and goal pursuit
• May be particularly detrimental for long-term goals (ex: selecting a career)
• Some of the most helpful support may be support we don’t notice at all
• However, effectiveness of both visible and invisible social support depends on extent to which the other person feels understood, validated, and cared for
• When offering support, you’re catering to the other’s needs
• Support must meet our relatedness needs and be tailored to our situation
• Effectiveness of support may also vary by context (ex: coaches vs. close others)
• Regardless, need to experience sense of autonomy over our decisions

Question 168

What’s Cognitive Evaluation Theory?

Answer 168

• Cognitive evaluation theory provides a framework for predicting the effects that any extrinsic event will have on motivation
• The theory explains how an extrinsic event (ex: money, grade, deadline) affects intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as mediated by the event’s effect on the psychological needs for competence and autonomy
• External events have 2 functions: control behavior or inform competence
• Which function is more salient, stimulating or most predominant in a situation determines how the external event will affect intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
• Events vary in the extent that they are controlled or informational

Question 169

Describe the 2 functions of external events (rewards) in the Cognitive Evaluation Theory

Answer 169

1) Controlling Function:
- “If you do X, then you get Y.”
- Decreases intrinsic motivation
- Interferes with quality of learning
- External regulation increases and self-regulation is undermined

2) Informational Function
- “Because you were able to do X, that means you are effective, competent.”
- Increases intrinsic motivation
- Enhances high-quality learning
- Enhances self-regulation

Question 170

What’s praise?

Answer 170

• Praise is a form of reward, but does not necessarily undermine intrinsic motivation
• Ex: in child helping study there was an additional praise condition, which didn’t negatively impact intrinsic motivation to help
• Praise can be used to control behavior (controlling type of praise)
• Ex: “Great job, you did exactly as I asked”
• This type of praise focuses on meeting external expectations rather than personal achievement
• It can feel pressuring and might reduce intrinsic motivation
• Praise can also be used to inform someone about their competence (informational praise)
• Ex: “That was an excellent presentation! You did a fantastic job explaining the complex data in a way that was easy to understand..”
• This type of praise highlights specific skills and effort, reinforcing a sense of mastery and competence
• It enhances intrinsic motivation

Question 171

What are the dimensions of a flow state?

Answer 171

1. Merging of action and awareness
2. Complete concentration on task at hand
3. Loss of self-consciousness
4. Distortion of temporal perception
5. Heightened sense of control
6. Autotelic experience

Question 172

Describe life history theory

Answer 172

• Individuals adapt their strategies based on environmental stability
• In unpredictable environments, people may prioritize immediate rewards (a “fast” strategy)
• In stable environments, people are more likely to invest in long-term goals (a “slow” strategy)

Question 173

What’s an autotelic experience?

Answer 173

• An experience that is rewarding in itself (intrinsically rewarding)
• Auto = self, telos = goal
• Not reliant on extrinsic rewards
• Csikszentmihalyi argues that flow experiences are so intensely rewarding that they become addictive in a sense, leading to neglect of other aspects of life
• Flow is not inherently “good” or “bad”

Question 174

What is the experience fluctuation model of flow? When are people more likely to experience flow vs anxiety, relaxation, boredom, arousal, and apathy/indifference?

Answer 174

• Flow = High challenge and High skill
• Anxiety: high challenge and low skill
• Relaxation: high skill and low challenge
• Boredom: medium skill and low challenge
• Arousal: medium skill and high challenge
• Apathy/indifference: low challenge and low skill