How emotional factors influence visual organization remains incompletely understood, particularly beyond early sensory processing. Across three experiments, we investigated whether emotional facial expressions modulate perceptual grouping and whether individual affective factors contribute to this modulation. Participants judged the global orientation of stimuli defined by visual contrast while fearful, happy, or neutral faces served as task-irrelevant primes. Study 1 replicated the contrast-dependent reduction in grouping-related decision efficiency reported by Han and Humphreys (1999). In Studies 2 and 3, primes produced emotion-specific effects. Happy faces slowed responses, particularly under low-contrast conditions, whereas fearful faces were associated with faster and more uniform responses when emotional context was stable. Individual differences in mood and interoceptive awareness predicted performance primarily under happy or neutral conditions but showed minimal influence under fearful priming. Together, these findings indicate that fear and happiness modulate perceptual grouping in a context- and state-dependent manner, highlighting how external emotional cues and internal affective states jointly shape perceptual organization.
Active student participation is considered adaptive for students’ learning and teachers’ motivation. However, students’ negotiation attempts with teachers, as one aspect of active participation, are not always successful. Possibly, the adaptiveness of negotiation depends on how teachers react to it. The current study examined factors shaping teachers’ appraisals and responses to student negotiation, including students’ negotiation style, teachers’ authoritarian beliefs, and symptoms of burnout. Using a vignette-based experimental design, 286 teachers (77.6
This study aims to deepen the understanding of motivational drivers that shape leadership effectiveness by adopting a neo-configurational perspective. Drawing on McClelland’s theory of human motivation, we investigate how need for power (nPow), need for achievement (nAch), need for affiliation (nAff), and activity inhibition (AI) combine within leaders to enable two outcomes of leadership effectiveness: leadership satisfaction and career success. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data from 70 leader-follower dyads, we identify multiple alternative motive configurations that contribute to leadership effectiveness. Specifically, two configurations—termed the Bureaucratic (nPow, nAch, AI) and the Relaxed Leader ( nPow, nAff, AI)—are sufficient for very high leadership satisfaction. For career success, we find three sufficient configurations, each highlighting the presence of either AI, nPow, or nAff which are complemented by the absence ( ) of other motives or AI. These results demonstrate that leadership effectiveness is driven by multiple distinct configurations of motives, underscoring the causal complexity inherent in motivation-based leadership effectiveness. In doing so, this study contributes to motivation literature by reframing McClelland’s theory as a neo-configurational theory.
When financial incentives become too psychologically prominent in employees’ minds, they transform from motivational tools into sources of pressure that undermine the very performance they aim to enhance. This study advances both self-determination theory and compensation literature by introducing incentive salience – the cognitive prominence of compensation – as a key determinant of whether rewards are experienced as controlling. Drawing on self-determination theory, which distinguishes between rewards perceived as informational (supporting competence) versus controlling (pressuring compliance), this two-wave field study (N = 335) investigates how total annual income and income salience differentially affect employee outcomes through psychological need frustration. We also examine whether managerial autonomy support moderates these relationships. Results reveal opposing effects: higher income is associated with lower frustration of competence and relatedness needs, indirectly enhancing task performance and subjective well-being. Conversely, greater income salience directly increases frustration of all three basic needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), leading to detrimental outcomes including reduced in-role and extra-role behavior, lower innovative behavior, increased unethical behavior, and diminished subjective well-being. While autonomy support strongly reduces need frustration as predicted, it operates independently rather than interactively with compensation effects. For compensation researchers, these findings reveal psychological need frustration as the mechanism explaining when prominent rewards backfire. For SDT scholars, we operationalize salience as a measurable antecedent of rewards’ controlling function. For practitioners, results demonstrate that making compensation too cognitively prominent transforms it from supporting performance to frustrating basic human needs, ultimately harming both productivity and employee well-being.
Children with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD) and ADHD demonstrate difficulty attributing emotions to facial expressions. We investigated how facial emotion judgments are psycho-mechanistically altered in DMDD+ADHD (N = 18) compared to age-matched children with ADHD (N = 15) and healthy controls (HC; N = 19). The participants’ ages ranged between 6 and 15. Participants distinguished the valence of facial expressions when feedback was congruent versus incongruent. The DMDD+ADHD group exhibited difficulty in differentiating affective stimuli compared to the ADHD and HC groups. Drift-diffusion modelling revealed that the information-processing efficiency of children with DMDD+ADHD for angry faces was insensitive to the type of feedback. Notably, regardless of feedback type and facial expression valence, children with DMDD+ADHD exhibited reduced efficiency in integrating evidence compared to HCs. The ADHD group demonstrated greater efficiency in processing angry facial expressions with congruent feedback than the DMDD+ADHD group. These results demonstrate impaired decision processes in DMDD+ADHD, characterized by inefficient cue integration, specifically in response to negative emotional stimuli, and by the insensitivity of the DMDD+ADHD group’s performance to feedback type.
Disgust is an adaptive emotion that evolved to protect organisms from pathogens by motivating avoidance of contamination cues. Accumulating evidence suggests that disgust may influence memory for contamination-relevant information. The present research examined whether disgust learning is associated with changes in episodic memory across temporally related experiences using a category-conditioning paradigm. Across two experiments with undergraduate participants (Study 1: N = 61; Study 2: N = 59), neutral object categories were paired with either disgusting or neutral images, allowing emotional value to generalize broadly across category members. Study 1 showed that objects from disgust-conditioned categories were recognized more accurately (ηp² = 0.074) and with a marginally more liberal response bias (ηp² = 0.051) than neutral-category objects across learning stages. In addition, objects presented during conditioning were remembered better than those presented beforehand (ηp² = 0.084). These effects did not increase across longer retention intervals, suggesting that the observed memory differences were not strongly moderated by delayed consolidation processes. Study 2 examined whether disgust-conditioned categories would also be associated with memory differences for subsequently encountered category exemplars and new associative pairings. Objects from disgust-conditioned categories were again remembered more accurately (ηp² = 0.087), including those encountered after conditioning. In contrast, food items paired with disgust-conditioned objects were evaluated as less appetizing (Cohen’s d = − 0.324) but remembered less accurately (ηp² = 0.095) than foods paired with neutral objects, which may reflect prioritization of avoidance over detailed encoding, potentially via adaptive biases favoring memory for appetitive cues. Together, these findings are consistent with the possibility that disgust learning influences memory and evaluation across related category exemplars and learning contexts.
Although prior cross-sectional research highlights the benefits of course-related humour, longitudinal evidence examining the mediating roles of socio-emotional and motivational factors in student emotions and motivation remains unexplored. Hence, this study examines how different types of perceived teacher humour are associated with student emotions and intrinsic motivation through teacher-student relationship and the interestingness of instruction in a longitudinal mediation framework. A sample of 1,273 9th-grade students (52.1
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) posits that basic psychological needs—autonomy, relatedness, and competence—must be satisfied for optimal psychological health (Ryan Deci, 2017). Emerging research highlights the distinct role of group need satisfaction in motivation and well-being, particularly for minoritized individuals (Kachanoff et al. 2020a). While prior work has explored personal need satisfaction in relation to Black Lives Matter (BLM) engagement (Audet et al., 2022), little is known about the contribution of group need satisfaction and frustration. To assess the extent to which group needs explain unique variance beyond personal need satisfaction/frustration, Black Canadian young adults (n = 226) were surveyed at 5-month intervals between July 2020 and June 2021. Participants completed self-report measures on personal and group need satisfaction/frustration, BLM engagement, pandemic and BLM impact, and subjective well-being. Hierarchical linear regressions revealed that group needs were uniquely associated with several indicators of engagement and adjustment, with need satisfaction and frustration having significant but opposite effects on Black young adults’ adaptation to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the BLM protests over time. Personal need satisfaction was also related to outcomes but only via need satisfaction, not need frustration. Subjective well-being was only predicted by personal need satisfaction. These findings suggest that group-level need satisfaction/frustration plays a distinctive role in adjustment.
In this study we explored the dynamic relationships between emotion valence and empathic accuracy, with the goal of shedding light on how empathic accuracy is both predicted by and predicts emotion valence during interactions. To do so, we analyzed data from a lab study wherein leader-follower dyads engaged in a discussion about positive and negative experiences they had had together, and subsequently reported on their own emotions, their emotion valence and the emotions and emotion valence they perceived in their partner. This resulted in 24 repeated observations per dyad member, nested within 49 dyads (Ntotal = 2352), which were analyzed using longitudinal actor-partner interdependence models within the dynamic structural equation modeling framework. Our analyses revealed that a leader’s own emotion valence, as well as the valence perceived in their partner, positively predicted their own empathic accuracy at a later time point. We found no relationship between empathic accuracy and emotion valence at a later time point for either leaders or followers. Our results underscore the role that power may play in the effect of emotion valence on displays of empathic accuracy.
Negative appearance-related self-conscious emotions are theoretically linked to poor cognitive and motor performance. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether a propensity for experiencing negative appearance self-conscious emotions (trait shame, guilt, envy, and embarrassment) influenced motor adaptation on a visuomotor rotation task when appearance monitoring was primed among young adults. Participants (N = 72; Mage = 22.47 ± 4.33 years; 69
Implicit motives provide a valuable construct for motivational research, that allows to explain diverse behaviours but comes with high manual effort for being assessed. In this work, we present an automatic approach to measure motive imagery in Picture Story Exercise (PSE) stories and running text. We compare two machine learning models, one based on the marker word approach and one grasping sentences more holistically with a sentence embedding, and find the latter to outperform the first on a dataset of unseen PSE stories, reaching a correlation with human coders of >.80 on persons’ motives. We further demonstrate the embedding model’s capabilities by showing correlations of the automatically encoded motive scores with related behavioural outcome criteria on large amounts of unseen longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study. Among others, motives encoded by the model at participant’s age eleven are associated with sports activity, academic achievement and voluntary work years and decades later. Our research raises hopes of using machine learning to encode implicit motives in written text, which would facilitate further research by lowering manual effort of implicit motive assessment by orders of magnitude.
The emotional enhancement effect of memory (EEM), evidenced by the prioritization of negative over neutral information in episodic memory, has primarily been attributed to arousal- and valence-based mechanisms. Recent research, however, has provided evidence suggesting that arousal and valence alone are not sufficient to explain more nuanced emotion memory effects. Here, we proposed that the survival relevance of different affective information could also contribute to the enhancing effects of emotion on memory. In two studies, we assessed whether individuals’ single-item and associative memory differed for negative information that varied in survival relevance (i.e., threat- and disgust-related images versus annoyance-related images) and neutral information. We found partial evidence that survival relevance selectively increased recognition accuracy, specifically for disgust-related items and the paired contexts associated with threat-related items. These findings emphasize the utility of exploring additional mechanisms (e.g., survival relevance) that work in concert with arousal and valence to further elucidate the processes that underlie the interaction between emotion and memory.
In two preregistered studies (N = 312), we aimed to test whether inducing participants’ attention towards the perpetrator or victim of a moral violation would trigger different emotional responses. Fictional situations were created to focus either on the victim’s (e.g., a person being tripped on the street) or the perpetrator’s experience (e.g., a person tripping another). Participants were presented with a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions and asked to judge as quickly as possible whether the emotional reactions of third parties depicted in different facial expressions were consistent with what would be expected regarding the misconduct. We hypothesized that focusing on the perpetrator would stress their poor moral character and elicit distancing reactions typical of moral disgust, while focusing on the victim would emphasize the harmful act and the victim’s resulting personal distress, aligning more closely with moral anger. Results provided only partial support for these predictions. While anger responses tended to be consistent across conditions, the predicted anger–disgust contrasting outcome as a function of focus was not consistently observed: Study 2 did not replicate the interaction effect observed in Study 1. Interestingly, sadness was a recurrent response in the victim focus condition, suggesting that empathy-related emotions may co-occur with moral condemnation. Overall, the findings suggest that third-party moral appraisals reflect a broader emotional range that combines anger, disgust, but also sadness.
Boredom is a discrete achievement emotion with important downstream consequences, yet longitudinal evidence on how personal goals and perceived classroom goal structures (CGS) jointly shape boredom remains scarce. Addressing this gap, this study tests time-lagged links from achievement goals to subsequent boredom and the reverse paths, and examines whether these dynamics vary by students’ perceived CGS. Using three waves of data from 726 Taiwanese seventh graders, we estimated four 2 × 2 achievement goal cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs) to test reciprocal associations, followed by multi-group comparisons (mastery-oriented vs. performance-oriented CGS) to evaluate the moderating role of the perceived CGS. Results showed short-term reciprocal associations between mastery-approach goals and boredom, and stable effects whereby boredom predicted increases in performance-avoidance goals and decreases in mastery-approach goals over time. Multi-group models indicated that, relative to a performance-oriented CGS, a mastery-oriented CGS amplified the boredom-reducing effect of mastery-approach goals and exacerbated the boredom-enhancing effect of performance-avoidance goals. These findings underscore the importance of aligning students’ personal goals with classroom climates to mitigate boredom and demonstrate how motivation and context jointly shape students’ emotions over time.
Perceiving a lack of control over one’s environment can impair cognitive performance and may reduce willingness to invest cognitive effort. Across two experiments (N = 624), we tested whether experimentally induced uncontrollability decreases subsequent effort-based choice and whether monetary rewards offset this effect. Uncontrollability was induced using Behavioral Helplessness Training, and effort-based choice was assessed in a Voluntary Task Switching paradigm in which participants could choose between repeating a task or switching to an alternative. The Voluntary Switch Rate served as the primary behavioral index of choosing the option treated as more cognitively demanding, that is, as requiring greater cognitive control. We used a shape/location variant in Experiment 1 and a letter/number variant in Experiment 2 with double registration and 20
The expression of emotion is a crucial part of everyday social interaction. This may be especially true of deaf populations. Studies show that the perception of emotions can differ between deaf and hearing people. On the one hand, sign language knowledge may contribute to more accurate identification of facial expressions (Goldstein Feldman, 1996). On the other hand, deaf people can experience delays in emotional perception, as a result of delays in language exposure (Martins et al., 2019; Ziv et al., 2013). But no study to date has compared the production of emotional expressions by deaf and hearing adults. Our study is the first of its kind with the goal of determining specifically whether sign language knowledge and deaf experience lead to differences in the production of emotional expression of deaf and hearing individuals. We recruited 45 participants, representing three groups: (1) hearing non-signers (speaking), (2) hearing signers (in two conditions, signing and speaking), and (3) deaf signers (signing). The participants performed a language-related task eliciting emotional sentences in which the emotion and its expression were congruent. Our study is unique because we used facial tracking technology and machine learning techniques to describe and distinguish the four emotional conditions produced — sadness, happiness, anger and neutral. The results of the study show that deaf and hearing individuals differ in systematic ways, demonstrating that each group can be classified accurately based on their emotional expressions.
Research on supplemental work has yielded mixed findings, linking it to both ill-being (e.g., exhaustion and recovery impairments) and potential benefits (e.g., increased performance and psychological detachment). What remains unclear are the processes that elicit supplemental work and how it affects ill-being. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), we develop a dynamic spillover framework that positions supplemental work as a behavior elicited by basic psychological need frustration (NF) in the work domain. We propose that supplemental work carries costs by increasing NF in the non-work domain, thereby disrupting cross-domain need balance and ultimately increasing next-day exhaustion at work. Results from an experience sampling study (141 employees, 2440 observations) supported our hypotheses: within-person increases in work overload predicted subsequent NF in the work domain and supplemental work. Competence frustration, in particular, triggered subsequent supplemental work that was associated with increased NF in the non-work domain and higher next-day exhaustion. These findings add to the notion of a detrimental pathway of supplemental work and highlight the importance of dynamic, cross-domain need frustration processes in understanding its consequences for employee well-being.
Self-determination theory’s tripartite model of psychological need states posits that psychological needs can exist in three states—satisfied, dormant, or frustrated—and that these states have different origins and different influences on human functioning. In three studies, we sought to deepen our understanding of these three states, especially the overlooked dormant state. In Study 1, using a sample of 751 U.S. high school students, we refined the original Three States Questionnaire (TSQ) into the psychometrically stronger TSQ2, and we developed both full (TSQ2) and short (TSQ2s) forms. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that the TSQ2’s satisfied state predicted effective functioning, dormant predicted diminished functioning, and frustrated predicted defiant functioning and, further, that the much shorter TSQ2s retained 90
The present research examined the role of achievement goals in the development of science motivation among adolescents participating in the Summer Science Program, a 6-week experiential science program in which participants (N = 197) engaged in authentic research in astrophysics, biochemistry, and genomics. In this longitudinal study we tracked the development of participants’ endorsement of incremental task mastery (ITM) goals in relation to their perceptions of competence in the program. Results of latent growth curve modeling indicated that participants’ ITM goals grew significantly and unconditionally over four measurement occasions. Perceived competence was also a positive time-varying predictor of ITM goals at waves 3 and 4, and we observed a significant decrease in the rate of increase in ITM goal endorsement when controlling for competence perceptions. Our findings highlight the importance of attending to developmentally specific motives in understanding how and why adolescents develop proficiency in science.
Gratitude serves as positive feedback for givers of kind acts, reinforcing their motivation for further such acts. However, this gratitude-kindness cycle depends on givers’ perception of recipients’ gratitude—a stage that has received little empirical attention. The present research examined whether givers of small acts of kindness to strangers underestimate recipients’ gratitude. Across three scenario-based studies, I found consistent evidence of gratitude underestimation. Study 1 revealed that givers predicted lower gratitude than recipients actually experienced, regardless of the type of kindness. Study 2 suggested that this underestimation was attributable to givers’ pessimistic inference rather than recipients’ overreporting. Study 3 further showed that this tendency disappeared when recipients verbally expressed their gratitude. These findings suggest that givers’ perception of recipients’ gratitude constitutes a bottleneck in the prosocial cycle, potentially undermining their prosocial motivation. Importantly, this bottleneck can be resolved through simple verbal acknowledgment. Exploratory mediation analyses did not yield consistent effects, suggesting that the mechanism underlying underestimation warrants further investigation.
