Psychological Needs Flashcards
Psychological Need:
- The psychological refers to the social
- a psychological nutrient that is critical to mental health, personal growth, and overall well-being
- psychological needs promote optimal performance (in our complex social situation)
5 criteria for defining a psychological need
3 needs that meet the criteria:
- psychological
- essential: leads to growth and lack of it leads to ill-being
- inherent: provide adaptive advantages
- distinct: not related to other needs
- universal: common to the species regardless of culture, SES, etc…
With these, researchers came up with three specific needs that fit these criteria: autonomy, competence, and relatedness
Autonomy: volitional action/agency
doing something of our own free will, voluntary, feeling a sense of control in our life
Self-Determination Theory:
SDT proposes that intrinsic motivation (doing things for the sake of doing things) is supported or comes about when people have their psychological needs met
- Deci & Ryan
What does it mean when needs are thwarted?
- needs are frustrated
- that something got in the way of them/ prevented them
- puts people at risk for maladaptive behaviour and ill-functioning
Autonomy
- the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior
- when we are in the driver’s seat and determine what we want to do
- experienced when the decision-making process to engage in an activity is informed by our interests, preferences, desires, and values
ex: Jeffry had no interest in becoming a medical doctor, so he decided to switch to psychology despite going against parent’s wishes
- he aligned behavior with his sense of self
Autonomy: Self-endorsement/ownership
What we do aligns deeply with what we feel and believe (behaviors align with values)
Autonomy Influence: perspective taking
- putting yourself in the shoes of the other person that you are helping
- can’t support what someone wants to do (their free will) if you don’t take a moment to understand what that is
- while not imposing your own personal objectives
Autonomy Influence: helping to clarify the personal importance of choice
Making sure that person knows that what they are choosing to do is coming from their choice, not you, you’re not pushing them
Autonomy Influence: providing explanatory rationals
Explaining not “that” it would be good to do something but “why” it would be good to do something
Autonomy Influence: acknowledging and accepting expressions of negative affect
acknowledging negative emotions and feelings the person may have towards an activity, accepting complaints as valid
ex: if a child really doesn’t want to participate in a running activity
- it is a motivational issue to be solved instead of dismissed
- thinking of ways to make something more enjoyable for them
Autonomy Influence: using invitational language
behaviour is volitional (voluntary), “you might consider” over “you must”
Autonomy Influence: displaying patience
sometimes the pace of progress doesn’t go at the speed you’d like but in a supportive role you have to acknowledge and work with that person at their own pace
The paradox of choice + what are characteristics of a good choice?
having too many choices actually limits our freedom
even though having more choices seems better, it is only better up to a certain extent
ideally, a choice should be
- not overwhelming
- unconstrained (desirable)
- meaningful
Reactions to autonomy frustration
- Reactance: increased desire to enact a behaviour, due to a restriction in behavioural freedom
Ex: when you tell a teen what not to do, they are more wanting to do it
Learned helplessness: when people come to expect that outcomes are independent of their behaviour
- When our environments repeatedly signal to us that no matter what we do, we don’t have control over what happens to us, so we create expectations (stop engaging in behaviours that would be necessary to solve our problems even when the keys are right there in front of us)
Competence:
the psychological need to be effective in one’s interactions with the environment
- when we do things, we want to be able actually to do them
- having skills and capacities that grow and extend
- doing things that are difficult but that are necessary, important, and useful to us
Flow:
- state of feeling extremely competent
- a subjective state where people feel completely absorbed and focused on a task
- a positive thing
- arises when there is an optimal match between skill and activity challenge (i.e., both are moderate-to-high)
benefits = greater enjoyment, better performance
What are the two dimensions to a flow state?
- Level of Challenge
- Level of Skill
- When an activity is moderate-high in challenge and you have moderate-high skill this is a flow state
- skill and challenge are matched
- flow arises when there is an optimal match between skill and activity challenge (i.e., both are moderate-to-high)
Competence Support: Clear expectations
cannot know whether they are competent in a certain thing if you don’t convey to them what they should be doing (good performance vs. poor performance)
Competence Support: Guidance
provide road maps - let them know if they’re doing the thing correctly and the way they should be doing it (while letting them know how well they’re doing and how they can improve)
Competence Support: Zone of proximal development
- the gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with help
- a space where learners can grow with support from more knowledgeable peers or adults
- What a learner can do with SOME help
EX: tumbling
- Started with things the child could do on their own and worked up to things that needed some assistance until the child could do it on their own
Competence Support: Scaffolding
- When we are learning and building a skill, we start with a lot of support and we eventually remove those supports
Ex: tumbling with a ton of mats and removing a mat each time you reach a milestone until you complete the full-skill
Competence Support: Feedback
Properly convey to them if their performance is good, what they should work on next and how to advance from being a good performer to a great performer
Feedback: Cognitive Evaluation Theory
What are 2 aspects of the theory?
The effect of an external event on intrinsic motivation depends on two aspects of the event:
1. Controlling aspect (feedback re: autonomy): will likely include info that supports autonomy
2. Informational aspect (feedback re: competence): includes info that discusses how you’re progressing towards your goal, will inform the learner about the steps necessary to improve
- external events that increase autonomy and competence will increase intrinsic motivation
what are 2 phrases that demonstrate that not all feedback is equal and good?
praise:
1. “You did a good job, just as I expected of you”
- doesn’t support autonomy
- “You did a good job because you did X, Y, Z”
- emphasizes the autonomy of the learner as well as providing informational feedback
Failure Tolerance and Values of Failure
It is important to foster a tolerance for failure cause it can often be frustrating and cause avoidance
Values in failure include:
- Prompts people to identify causes and remedies
- Prompts people to improve their coping strategies
- Prompts people to recognize the need for advice and support
Reactions to Loss of Competence: Self-Serving Attributional Bias
- the tendency to take credit for one’s successes, but deny personal responsibility for failures
- blaming external factors
Ex: I failed that exam cause the professor sucks
Reactions to Loss of Competence: Self-Handicapping Behaviour
- when failure is anticipated, people may create barriers to their own performance/success; creates external factors which can then be blamed in the event of failure
Ex: if you skip class all semester and have a midterm coming up, you may not study and instead go out every night - when you then fail you say it’s not cause you were a bad student but because you were “busy”
Relatedness
- the psychological need to establish social connections with others
- experienced when one feels loved, valued, and appreciated by others
Relatedness-Support
Responsive interactions
- Understanding – communicates authenticity (make sure that someone knows we understand them and want to understand them)
- Validation – communicates liking and acceptance
- Caring – communicates concern for one’s well-being
Benefits of Relatedness Satisfaction
- Engagement
- ex: dropout rates in students decrease - Personal growth
- e.g., resilience to stress, self-esteem - Internalization (integrating an external request into something you want to do) and intrinsic motivation
- ex: when someone you trust tells you to do something you’re more likely to do it cause you trust that it’s good for you and you internalize it - Health and well-being
Reactions to Relatedness Frustration
- Hurt feelings (social pain and physical pain affect the same area of the brain)
- Emotional numbness
- Impaired cognitive functioning
- Aggression
- Poor mental health outcomes
