Motivation and Emotion

Negative affect (NA) has been robustly linked to poorer psychological health, including greater depressive symptoms, personal burnout, and perceived stress. These associations, known as affect-health links , have been postulated by our research team to vary with different levels of negative affect valuation (NAV), such that people who evaluate NA states as more pleasant, helpful, appropriate, and/or meaningful may show weaker affect-health links. Another affect valuation construct is ideal NA , which is the degree to which people ideally want to experience NA states (i...

We examined the role of impression management motives and utility beliefs in predicting suppression. In Study 1, 222 participants were assigned one of four motives (warmth, competence, pro-hedonic, control) during a job interview and reported their strategy use. In Study 2, 150 participants completed 9 days of experience sampling surveys assessing momentary emotion regulation motives and strategy use. In both studies, participants reported suppression utility beliefs. Lab results suggested a decreased preference for suppression when pursuing warmth motives over competence motives...

Research suggests that people's capacity to successfully pursue hedonic goals is at least as important for well-being as trait self-control. Extending this research, we tested whether trait hedonic capacity is related to more time spent with hedonic goal pursuit (i.e., hedonic quantity) and whether this explains its positive relationship with well-being. Second, we explored whether this may come at a cost for people's performance. Results show that people with higher trait hedonic capacity do spend more time with hedonic goal pursuit (Study 1 and 2)...

The dualistic model of passion proposes two passion types, harmonious and obsessive, representing adaptive and maladaptive passion, respectively. Studies suggest interpersonal experiences explain harmonious passion benefits and obsessive passion negative consequences. However, research has not examined passion among individuals with clinically elevated suicide risk, nor the associations between passion types and suicide-related outcomes. The present study presents a conceptual model linking the dualistic model of passion and the interpersonal theory of suicide constructs [specifically, thwarted belongingness (TB) and perceived burdensomeness (PB)]...

Forecasts about future emotion are often inaccurate, so why do people rely on them to make decisions? People may forecast some features of their emotional experience better than others, and they may report relying on forecasts that are more accurate to make decisions. To test this, four studies assessed the features of emotion people reported forecasting to make decisions about their careers, education, politics, and health. In Study 1, graduating medical students reported relying more on forecast emotional intensity than frequency or duration to decide how to rank residency programs as part of the process of being matched with a program...

This study pays attention to within-person fluctuations in meaningful work and its antecedents and consequences. Considering self- and other-oriented dimensions as crucial pathways to meaningful work, effects of daily perceived autonomy support and prosocial impact on one's meaningful work were examined. A daily diary study was conducted in which 86 nurses from varied hospitals reported their work experiences for 10 consecutive workdays (860 occasions). Results of multilevel modeling showed that both day-level perceived autonomy support and prosocial impact were positively related to day-level meaningful work, which served as the mediator between them and work engagement...

The present research aimed to better understand individual differences in attitudes towards emotions with a focus on anger. We report findings of four studies conducted with American and Polish individuals. Results showed that individuals who have more positive attitudes toward anger are higher in trait anger (Studies 1-4), are more likely to think about getting revenge (Study 1), and expect that getting revenge will make them feel good (Studies 1-2). In addition, these individuals are lower in agreeableness and lower in the tendency to engage in avoidance when angered (Studies 1-4)...

In contrast to teachers' positive emotions, such as enjoyment and enthusiasm, teachers' negative emotions and the regulation of negative emotions have received limited empirical attention. As the most commonly experienced negative emotion in teachers, anger has to date demonstrated mixed effects on teacher development. On the one hand, habitual experiences of anger (i.e., trait anger ) exhaust teachers' cognitive resources and impair pedagogical effectiveness, leading to poor student engagement. On the other hand, strategically expressing, faking, or hiding anger in daily, dynamic interactions with students can help teachers achieve instructional goals, foster student concentration, and facilitate student engagement...

UNLABELLED: Research has shown that we are endowed with a remarkable capacity to motivate ourselves in the absence of extrinsic incentives (i.e. intrinsic motivation). However, little research has been conducted to investigate whether we accurately appreciate the power of intrinsic motivation. The current research aimed to examine the metacognitive accuracy of the extent to which people can motivate themselves without performance-based extrinsic incentives. Participants were presented with a relatively long and repetitive task without extrinsic incentives, and before doing the task, they were asked to predict their motivation on completion of the task...

Empirical research has demonstrated that individuals vary widely in how they view their emotions. We call the viewpoints that individuals have towards their emotions emotion perspectives. While many subdisciplines of psychology, such as social psychology and clinical psychology, have studied this topic, research thus far can be siloed, despite overlap in terms and constructs. The goal of the current special issue and this introduction is to describe the state of research on emotion perspectives, highlight common themes in streams of emotion perspective research, and present future directions for investigation...

The present study investigates the association between people's beliefs about emotion and their overall satisfaction with a social interaction. We focus on three specific aspects to examine this association: (a) utility beliefs-a dimension of emotion beliefs; (b) emotion expression-an emotion channel; and (c) four social emotions-anger, other-embarrassment, gratitude, and other-pride. We examine whether people's utility beliefs about expressing a social emotion can predict their evaluation of a social interaction when they express (vs...

UNLABELLED: The aim of this study was to broadly investigate the role of relationship-, self-, and partner-serving motivation in empathic accuracy in couples' conflict interactions. To this end, a laboratory study was set up in which couples ( n  = 172) participated in a conflict interaction task, followed immediately by a video-review task during which they reported their own feelings and thoughts and inferred those of their partner to assess empathic accuracy. We used both trait and state measures of relationship-, self-, and partner-serving motivation, and we experimentally induced these three categories of motivation...

While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation...

Despite the growing number of bicultural bilinguals in the world, the way in which multisensory emotions are evaluated by bilinguals who identify with two or more cultures remains unknown. In the present study, Chinese-English bicultural bilinguals from Singapore viewed Asian or Caucasian faces and heard Mandarin or English speech, and evaluated the emotion from one of the two simultaneously-presented modalities. Reliance on the visual modality was greater when bicultural bilinguals processed Western audio-visual emotion information...

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election required voters to not only form opinions of leading candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but also to make judgments about the integrity of the election itself and what-if anything-to do about it. However, partisan motivated reasoning theory (Leeper and Slothuus, Political Psychology, 35(Suppl 1): 129-156; Lodge and Taber, The rationalizing voter, Cambridge University Press, 2013) suggests judgments are often strongly influenced toward affectively desirable conclusions...

Social support for goals can be beneficial for goal pursuit, but often has unintended negative consequences for the recipient. We propose that action crisis-the state in which an individual is considering disengaging from a goal they are currently pursuing-may result in people experiencing more ambivalent reactions to goal support. Drawing on both experimental and longitudinal methods, we show that action crisis increases negative consequences of goal support, but does not reduce positive consequences of goal support...

Motivational states are important determinants of human behavior. Regulatory focus theory suggests that a promotion focus stimulates risky behavior, whereas a prevention focus fosters conservative tactics. Previous research linked counterfactual structure with regulatory focus. Extending this work, we predicted that additive counterfactual mindsets ("If only I had…") instigate risky tactics in subsequent situations, whereas subtractive counterfactual mindsets ("If only I had NOT…") lead to conservative tactics...

In the present research, the Cyberball ostracism paradigm was adapted for experimental goal disengagement (GD) research: the goal to belong to a particular group is first induced in participants (via social interaction) and then blocked (via social exclusion) to trigger GD processes. In an online group setting, we experimentally tested the procedure's suitability to investigate goal disengagement processes. A pilot study demonstrated successful induction of the goal to belong. In the main study ( N  = 180), exclusion from the group reduced participants' perceived goal attainability (indicating goal blockage) and desirability (indicating goal disengagement) and their well-being...

We tested whether a self-support approach to satisfy basic psychological needs to increase students' basic need satisfaction, mindfulness, and subjective vitality, and decrease their need frustration, coronavirus, and test anxiety during the novel coronavirus and university final exams. Three hundred and thirty students ( M age  = 21.45, SD  = 2.66) participated in this 6-day long experimental study and they were randomly allocated to either experimental (self-support approach, n = 176) or control (no-intervention) condition...

Compliance with health safety guidelines is essential during pandemics. However, political polarization in the U.S. is reducing compliance. We investigated how polarized perceptions of government leaders' autonomy-support and enforcement policies impacted security and internally-motivated compliance with national (Study 1a) and state (Study 1b) safety guidelines. We surveyed 773 Republicans and Democrats from four states (California, Florida, New York, Texas) during the first wave of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic...