We conducted a preregistered randomized controlled trial to evaluate a weekly cost reduction intervention in an undergraduate chemistry course (N = 1,688). The intervention aimed to reduce cost by prompting students to engage in motivational regulation strategies each week. Students in the intervention condition rated their likelihood of using eight strategies and described how they would apply one during the following week. We examined intervention effects on weekly and final cost perceptions, motivational regulation, science, technology, engineering, or mathematics career intentions, and academic performance. Students in the intervention condition reported lower final loss of valued alternatives cost compared with the control group, though other preregistered main effects were not observed. The intervention was particularly effective for first-generation college students, who showed consistent benefits across motivational and academic outcomes. Findings underscore the potential of motivational regulation for reducing perceived costs in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics courses, although highlighting that intervention effects are context-specific and moderated by student characteristics.
Self-regulation often involves managing conflicts between immediate desires and long-term goals, yet individuals frequently deviate from their goals without necessarily abandoning them. A key question is how such goal-inconsistent behavior is interpreted and integrated into ongoing goal pursuit. Although creativity has been linked to both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes, little is known about how creative cognition shapes these interpretive processes and their motivational consequences. The present research examined whether creativity is associated with justificatory processes that influence indulgent behavior and subsequent goal engagement. Across four studies (total N > 1,700), I investigated how creativity-conceptualized as the capacity to generate alternative interpretations-relates to self-licensing and self-regulation. Study 1a showed that trait creativity was associated with greater endorsement of functional, but not dysfunctional, self-licensing. Study 1b demonstrated that temporary engagement in creative cognition was associated with differences in how individuals justified indulgent behavior. Study 2 further indicated that this association emerged primarily when justificatory considerations were made salient. Finally, Study 3 showed that higher trait creativity was associated with greater short-term indulgence alongside stronger subsequent engagement with long-term dietary goals. Together, these findings suggest that creativity is related to self-regulation not simply through increased indulgence but through its role in shaping justificatory cognition-specifically, how individuals interpret and integrate goal-inconsistent behavior. Rather than exerting a uniform effect on behavior, creativity appears to influence motivational dynamics by shaping the meaning of deviations from one's goals.
Cognitive control involves adapting to varying conflict levels, a process influenced by both extrinsic evaluative feedback and intrinsic need for cognition (NFC). The present electroencephalography study investigated how NFC and evaluative feedback interact to shape control engagement. Participants performed a two-part Stroop task involving a default control context and a subsequent free-choice engagement phase. Behaviorally, in the default control context, NFC facilitated conflict processing, whereas evaluative feedback and NFC interacted to shape the overall performance. Crucially, in the subsequent free-choice task, high-NFC participants consistently preferred high-conflict tasks. Event-related potential results revealed a complementary neural signature. High-NFC participants were associated with enhanced sustained control mobilization for conflict slow potential. Comprehensive analyses including the neutral baseline revealed a distinct neural decoupling from failure-avoidance signals, manifested as attenuated reward positivity sensitivity to safety outcome (i.e., "neutral" feedback), particularly under negative-feedback condition. These findings demonstrate that NFC appears to shape a resilient, goal-directed motivational style by shifting the locus of control from external validation to internal challenge.
This article traces the development of Julius Kuhl's research program on motivation and personality over the past 50 years. Starting in the 1970s with a then innovative computational approach to achievement motivation, Kuhl shifted the focus from mental contents (expectancy, value) to the functional analysis of dynamic and content-free processes underlying motivation and personality, which led to the development of action control theory. His action-theoretical perspective and empirical work culminate in personality systems interactions (PSI) theory, which integrates insights from personality, motivation, emotion, cognitive, social, and clinical psychology, as well as neuroscience. PSI theory explains many aspects of human behavior and experience (e.g., action control and self-growth) in terms of the temporary and/or chronic activation of four cognitive macro systems (i.e., intention memory, extension memory, intuitive behavior control, object recognition), which is subject to (even subtle) changes in positive and negative affect. Therefore, affective shifting and the ability to self-regulate affect (action vs. state orientation) are central resources for personality functioning and an integral part of PSI theory. Insights from PSI theory have been widely applied in clinical, educational, counseling, and organizational psychology.
In real-world settings, performing successive tasks of varying difficulty and motivational value often leads to cognitive fatigue. Although several theories address issues related to the direction or initiation of goal-directed behavior, extensions grounded on motivational intensity theory specifically predict effort intensity. According to motivational intensity theory, for tasks with known and fixed difficulty, effort increases proportionally with perceived difficulty, as long as success is possible and the required effort is justified by success importance. The present study examined whether avoidance instruction-designed to elevate the upper limit of potential motivation-could modulate the relationship between cognitive fatigue and effort. Participants completed a sequential-task paradigm while effort-related cardiovascular responses, specifically the preejection period, were recorded. Consistent with our hypotheses, following a prolonged fatigue-induction period, participants in the avoidance-instruction condition exhibited a significant physiological rebound, exerting higher effort and achieving superior performance on a subsequent difficult task. In contrast, participants without avoidance instruction showed a decline in effort. Crucially, subjective fatigue remained high across groups, suggesting that although cognitive fatigue inflates perceived task difficulty, it does not necessarily lead to disengagement. Instead, sufficiently potent motivational stimuli, such as avoidance-based instruction, can justify the high mobilization of resources required to perform despite prolonged cognitive engagement.
Extreme endurance challenges require considerable persistence from individuals to pursue self-set goals under prolonged physical strain and psychological discomfort. In the present work, we addressed the question of whether walkers' reasons or motivation for pursuing their goals predicts their mental experiences and performance in the context of an extreme endurance challenge. Using cluster-analytical techniques, we identified profiles involving different combinations of motivations for goal pursuit in a sample of 1,057 walkers (M-age = 43.34 years, 40.6% female) who participated in a 100-km trail. Participants completed surveys on their mental experiences before, during, and after the trail, and performance was objectively measured through scanned tracking data registered by the organization. Four distinct motivation profiles emerged. The good-quality profile, characterized by high autonomous and low controlled motivation, consistently reported the most favorable outcomes. The high-quantity profile, which combined high levels of both autonomous and controlled motivation, was associated with a mixed pattern, showing both benefits and costs. The low-quantity profile, low on all motivational types, displayed better outcomes than the poor-quality profile, which was marked by high controlled and low autonomous motivation. The poor-quality profile exhibited the most maladaptive mental outcomes, along with the lowest walking distance, highlighting the psychological and performance-related costs of controlled motivation in this endurance context. These findings emphasize that the type or quality of motivation for pursuing self-set goals is more critical than the amount or quantity of motivation, even in extreme endurance settings.
Motivational theories highlight the central role of individual differences in emotional responses to motive-relevant cues. Prior studies have examined positive affective contingencies, which describe the tendency to feel pleasure in response to motive-congruent rewards. The present research shifts focus to negative affective contingencies (NACs), defined as the tendency to experience negative emotions in response to threats to motive satisfaction, and examines them specifically in the affiliation domain. Across two studies (N = 299 and N = 672), we employed a scale-based and a picture-based measure of affiliation-specific NACs. Both measures were reliable, correlated moderately with each other and with affiliation-specific positive affective contingencies, and were linked to the affiliation motive, fear of rejection, attachment insecurity, and conflictual processing of the motivational individuation conflict. Importantly, NACs moderated emotional responses to experimentally induced social exclusion, highlighting their relevance for understanding interpersonal vulnerability. These findings establish NACs as a relevant and measurable construct within the affiliation motive domain.
Implicit motives are dispositions that facilitate learning in the service of incentive attainment and disincentive avoidance, with attentional orienting being one likely outcome of such learning processes. This assumption was put to the test in an eye-tracking study (N = 90 for Experiment 1; N = 138 for Experiment 2, after exclusions) that investigated the role of the implicit need for power (nPower), the capacity to derive pleasure from influencing others, in the acquisition of attentional bias via stimulus-driven learning. nPower, measured using a Picture-Story Exercise, facilitated Pavlovian learning of objects that predicted the occurrence of dominance cues. In contrast, we found no clear evidence for motive-modulated instrumental learning of saccadic eye movements, possibly due to features of our design. Overall, our results suggest that the behavioral expression of nPower's orienting function in the context of dominance-related cues is shaped by Pavlovian learning.
Selecting tasks that match features of one's motivational state (e.g., performing an eager brainstorming task under a promotion focus) can lead to enhanced performance (e.g., regulatory fit; Higgins, 2000). To do so, people need insight into their motivational states. Drawing from research on metamotivation (Miele & Scholer, 2018), we propose that people use emotions to infer motivational states, which in turn guides strategic task selection. Seven experiments (four in the main text and three in the Supplemental Materials) explored this possibility using a task selection paradigm in the context of regulatory focus theory. Participants chose between tasks requiring eagerness versus vigilance as a function of emotions that differed in regulatory focus (promotion: cheerful, dejected vs. prevention: quiescent, agitated) and self-regulatory effectiveness (success: cheerful, quiescent vs. failure: dejected, agitated) dimensions. Experiments 1-3 revealed that task selection was guided primarily by the self-regulatory effectiveness dimension: participants preferred eager versus vigilant tasks when experiencing success (cheerful and quiescent) versus failure emotions (dejected and agitated). Albeit to a lesser degree, they were also sensitive to the regulatory focus dimension, preferring eager versus vigilant tasks when experiencing promotion (cheerful) versus prevention (calm) success emotions. Experiment 4 tests our proposed mechanism more directly by exploring whether people infer motivational states from emotions. We discuss alternative explanations, potential limitations, and implications.
Although extensive research has examined the impact of the social context on motivation, relatively less attention has been given to individuals' capacity to regulate their own motivation in the absence of external influences. Grounded in self-determination theory, the present research investigates the effectiveness and antecedents of situational autonomy- and control-oriented Self-Motivating Strategies (SMS) in shaping individuals' task experience and behavior. Study 1 (N = 169; M-age = 19.3; 72% female) examined whether the use of situational autonomy- and control-oriented strategies differentially relate to individuals' experience (interest, boredom), performance (accuracy, reaction time), and persistence in a boring computer task, as well as whether the situational use of these strategies is influenced by individuals' habitual reliance on these strategies. Study 2 (N = 216; M-age = 18.91; 89% female) additionally explored the effects of an experimental induction of both types of SMS. Both studies demonstrated that autonomy-oriented strategies helped to sustain interest, improved task accuracy, and fostered greater task persistence, whereas control-oriented strategies increased boredom and predicted slower reaction times. In addition, while both types of situational strategies were predicted by their corresponding habitual use, control-oriented SMS were significantly heightened after an experimental induction. These findings underscore the differential effects of SMS, suggesting that not all strategies to maintain and uplift one's motivation are equally effective. We discuss theoretical and practical implications, emphasizing the benefits of fostering autonomy-oriented strategies while minimizing reliance on control-oriented strategies.
High self-control is widely valued and linked to health, occupational success, and well-being. Despite its popularity as a research topic, major conceptual ambiguities remain. Such inconsistencies are not trivial: they obscure whether researchers study the same phenomenon, weaken construct validity, and produce conflicting findings. Clarifying what self-control is – and is not – is therefore essential for theoretical progress. Key issues concern whether self-control is best understood as an ability or a personality trait, and whether we should conceive of effortless habits as self-control processes. Another key issue is that some conceptualizations of state self-control (momentary attempts to regulate behavior) show little overlap with trait self-control (being generally good at regulating behavior), although they should be conceptually aligned. Further confusion arises around what constitutes self-control conflict: some definitions include any motivational conflict between goals, others limit it to intertemporal choices where short-term and long-term benefits are opposed, and some require affective components such as desire. This article outlines these definitional problems and proposes clearer conceptual boundaries as a foundation for future theoretical and empirical work and proposes that self-control deals with “intentionally avoiding or attenuating anticipated or resolving present conflicts between two response options in favor of the response option that benefits a more important goal or standard, even though the competing response option represents a momentarily dominant, affectively charged response tendency”.
The purpose of this research was to examine the role of passion and mastery goals in the self-growth process. Study 1 (Sample 1A: N = 633; Sample 1B: N = 247) validated a new measure of self-growth as a subjective assessment of continuous self-growth both within a specific activity (Contextual Self-Growth) and at the person level (Global Self-Growth) through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Study 1 also showed that harmonious passion (HP) was positively associated with contextual self-growth, while obsessive passion was weakly associated with it. In turn, contextual self-growth was positively related to global self-growth. Studies 2 (N = 817) and 3 (longitudinal design, N = 434) investigated the mediating role of achievement goals, particularly mastery goals, in the relationships between passion and self-growth. The results of Study 2 showed that HP promoted mastery goals that led to contextual self-growth. In turn, contextual self-growth predicted global self-growth. These results were fully replicated using a 9-month longitudinal study (Study 3). In addition, HP protected against the negative effects of performance-avoidance goals on self-growth (Study 2 only). In contrast, obsessive passion led to self-growth via performance-approach goals, and hindered self-growth via performance-avoidance goals (Study 2 only). In sum, these findings highlight the importance of differentiating between contextual and global self-growth as an outcome, as well as the more adaptive role of HP and mastery goals in fostering both contextual and global self-growth.
Empathic concern promotes prosocial behavior, but the effect of empathy is not the same for everyone. Scholars have extensively mapped the situational and personality factors that modulate the empathy-helping relationship, but only a few studies have examined the cognitive processes that link empathy with helping. Lockwood et al. (2016) found that individual differences in online simulation (the deliberate intention to imagine what another person is feeling) were associated with individual differences in the rates at which people learned how to benefit an anonymous other person in a two-armed bandit task (which we term prosocial learning). Across three experiments (N = 1,188; data collected between April 2021 and March 2024), we critically tested and extended this finding by asking participants to learn on behalf of real people in need, generalizing existing methods of prosocial learning to online research environments, conducted with participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Although each individual experiment provided only mixed evidence for the hypothesis that empathic concern is associated with prosocial learning, a mega-analysis that included data from all three experiments revealed that both state and trait empathic concern were weakly (but significantly) positively associated with prosocial learning. Although manipulations of empathy were unsuccessful, and had no effect upon prosocial learning, attempts to causally manipulate empathy were also ineffective, leaving the causal association between empathy and prosocial learning unclear. We also could not replicate the finding that online simulation was associated with learning.
Despite its pervasive presence in the general population, mental fatigue remains difficult to tackle from a scientific point of view. A promising framework consists of conceptualizing fatigue and fatigue recovery as a dynamic process resulting from effortful cognitive activities and rest periods, which in turn affects motivated behavior. The brain mechanisms underlying fatigue recovery during rest and its prolonged effects are, however, not fully elucidated. In this study, 19 healthy young adults completed two versions of a dual-task paradigm varying with difficulty level. The presence of mental fatigue was characterized through effort and motivation perception, and task performance (d’ and response bias indices from the signal detection theory). Participants further completed resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) during the recovery period following the tasks to assess how the functional connectivity of the brain was affected by the mental state induced by each task version. First, behavioral analyses showed that, compared with the easy condition, participants in the difficult task condition reported greater changes in effort perception and reduced motivation, indicative of a heightened mental fatigue state. This motivational decline was further associated with a more conservative response bias. Second, neuroimaging results showed reduced connectivity between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the right anterior supramarginal gyrus following the difficult vs. easy condition, with lower connectivity values associated with heightened effort perception. These findings underscore the interplay between fatigue, effort, and motivation, and suggest that persistent alterations in brain connectivity at rest may underlie the extended timescales of fatigue recovery.
Extensive research highlights anger's motivational role in driving punitive responses to unfairness. However, the impact of anger expression in group contexts of collective unfairness remains underexplored. This article presents two studies investigating how group members' angry expressions influence decision-making. In Study 1, we found that observing a peer express anger significantly increased participants' rejection of unfair proposals. In Study 2, we expanded this investigation by analyzing real-time emotional reactions and decision-making, demonstrating that peer anger facilitated group-level punishment. Mediation analyses revealed that this effect was mediated by observers' affective reactions and inferential processes. Computational modeling of behavior further revealed that participants dynamically incorporated partners' social-emotional signals into their decision processes. These findings underscore the critical role of interpersonal anger in shaping group dynamics, mobilizing social punishment, and driving responses to injustice.
In this commentary in honor of Julius Kuhl, I reflect on decades of dialogue and collaborations between his works in personality systems interactions theory and research within self-determination theory. Both frameworks are rooted in an organismic metapsychology, emphasizing human capacities for integration and self-regulation. I highlight several points of convergence: the role of autonomy support in facilitating adaptive functioning, especially among state-oriented individuals; the shared recognition that well-internalized goals yield vitality and more effortless willpower; and parallel findings in neuroscience linking self-access and awareness to more autonomous motivation. Although differences and critiques have occasionally arisen, personality systems interactions and self-determination theory remain "sibling theories," offering largely complementary insights into motivation and personality. This essay reflects on their intersections and underscores the value of open and thoughtful dialogues between theories in motivational science.
