Midterm (final) Flashcards

Question

What are cultures of honour?

Answer 1

- 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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

- 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)

Answer 4

- 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

Answer 5

- 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

Answer 6

- 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

Answer 7

- 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

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

- 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

Answer 10

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

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

- 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)

Answer 13

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

Answer 14

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

Answer 15

- "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

Answer 16

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

Answer 17

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

Answer 18

- 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

Answer 19

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

Answer 20

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

Answer 21

- 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

Answer 22

- 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

Answer 23

- 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

Answer 24

- 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

Answer 25

- 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

Answer 26

- 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

Answer 27

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

Answer 28

- 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)

Answer 29

- 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

Answer 30

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

Answer 31

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

Answer 32

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

Answer 33

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

Answer 34

- 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

Answer 35

- 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

Answer 36

- 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

Answer 37

- 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

Answer 38

- 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

Answer 39

- 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

Answer 40

- 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)

Answer 41

- 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)

Answer 42

- 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

Answer 43

- 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)

Answer 44

- 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

Answer 45

- 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)

Answer 46

- 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

Answer 47

- 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

Answer 48

- 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’)

Answer 49

* 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

Answer 50

- 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

Answer 51

- 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

Answer 52

- 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”

Answer 53

- 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)

Answer 54

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

Answer 55

- 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

Answer 56

- 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

Answer 57

- 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

Answer 58

- 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

Answer 59

- 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

Answer 60

- 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

Answer 61

- 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

Answer 62

- 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

Answer 63

- 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)

Answer 64

Inability to enjoy everyday pleasures

Answer 65

- 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

Answer 66

* 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

Answer 67

- 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

Answer 68

- 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

Answer 69

- 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)

Answer 70

- 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

Answer 71

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

Answer 72

- 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

Answer 73

* 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

Answer 74

They play an important role in shaping motivation & behaviour

Answer 75

- 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

Answer 76

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

Answer 77

* 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

Answer 78

- 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

Answer 79

- 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

Answer 80

- 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

Answer 81

- 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

Answer 82

- 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

Answer 83

- 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

Answer 84

- 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”

Answer 85

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

Answer 86

- 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)

Answer 87

- 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

Answer 88

- 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

Answer 89

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

Answer 90

- 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

Answer 91

- 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

Answer 92

- 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

Answer 93

- 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

Answer 94

- 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

Answer 95

- 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

Answer 96

Internalization

Answer 97

- 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

Answer 98

- 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)

Answer 99

- 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

Answer 100

- 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

Answer 101

- 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

Answer 102

- 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

Answer 103

- 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

Answer 104

- 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)

Answer 105

- 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

Answer 106

Compliance and Defiance

Answer 107

- 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

Answer 108

- 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)

Answer 109

- 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

Answer 110

- 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

Answer 111

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

Answer 112

- 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

Answer 113

- 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

Answer 114

* 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)

Answer 115

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

Answer 116

- 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

Answer 117

- 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.”

Answer 118

* 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."

Answer 119

* 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

Answer 120

- 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

Answer 121

- 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

Answer 122

- 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

Answer 123

- 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?

Answer 124

* 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

Answer 125

* 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

Answer 126

- 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

Answer 127

- 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

Answer 128

- 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

Answer 129

- 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)

Answer 130

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

Answer 131

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

Answer 132

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

Answer 133

- 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

Answer 134

- 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

Answer 135

- 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

Answer 136

- 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?”)

Answer 137

* 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

Answer 138

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)

Answer 139

- 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

Answer 140

- 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

Answer 141

- 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

Answer 142

- 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

Answer 143

- 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

Answer 144

- 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 - Motivationally relevant external events (ex: rewards, praise, evaluations, deadlines, competition) can enhance or undermine intrinsic motivation depending on context and how these external events are perceived - 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 - Predicts that: - Relatively controlling events frustrate autonomy & undermine intrinsic motivation - Relatively (positive) informational events satisfy competence needs & promote intrinsic motivation - Relatively amotivating events are those that frustrate both autonomy and competence needs - Any situation, including competitive situations, is going to be a blend of these elements and the impact that it'll have will depend on which is more salient in this particular situation

Answer 145

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

Answer 146

* 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

Answer 147

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

Answer 148

- 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)

Answer 149

- 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 - Ex: video games have a lot of these flow components - Flow is not inherently “good” or “bad” -> can have some bad consequences in some circumstances, but it does allow for an optimal engagement with life

Answer 150

- Flow = High challenge and High skill (higher than average) - Anxiety: high challenge and low skill (overchallenge) - 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 (ESM studies suggest that the largest contributor to this is watching TV -> we only spend ~7-8% of the time we watch TV in a flow state)

Answer 151

* Grew up in Europe during WW2, witnessed immense suffering & tragedy * Overarching question of his career: what makes life worth living? * Looked at flow state * Looked at why some people adapt better to certain life circumstances than others * He began his work by studying creative people, like artists and writers * These people dedicate lots of time to their craft * Found that the way in which different kinds of people discuss the way they feel when engaging with their passion was similar * Experience of being completely immersed in an activity and stepping out of space and time * Your very sense of existence is momentarily suspended

Answer 152

- Cross-cultural & cross-domain similarity in the kinds of experiences people found most enjoyable - AKA “being in the zone” - Characterized by profound shift in consciousness

Answer 153

State in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter

Answer 154

Moment-by-moment awareness of ongoing experiences occurring internally (ex: thoughts, emotions) and externally in the world around us

Answer 155

- By some estimates, spend ~50% of our day-to-day lives mind-wandering - The contents of our thoughts are decoupled from what we're doing - Research suggests that on average, tend to be less happy when mind-wandering than when we fully engage in an activity, regardless of which activity we're engaged in at the time (regardless of it being an activity we’re passionate about) - In flow state, there is a sense of oneness with the activity -> feel completely absorbed and engaged and feel a merging with the task at hand - Ex: a surfer might feel one with the wave - Action becomes spontaneous

Answer 156

- Attention is a limited cognitive resource - During flow activities, all attentional resources & skills are required to cope with challenges of the situation - All attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli, leaving no room in the mind for distractions or irrelevant information - No attention for anything else - People in a flow state may forget to eat - Individuals report being able to forget unpleasant aspects of life - Not worrying over anything, not ruminating over any argument

Answer 157

- Experience freedom from self-evaluation and concerns over how others evaluate the self - Reduction in spotlight effect - Allows for sense of union with one’s environment - Suggests that happiness and sense of achievement may be felt in retrospect, rather than during flow state

Answer 158

- General tendency to overestimate how much others notice and evaluate us - Feel like we're walking around with a spotlight on us - Acutely self-aware

Answer 159

- Experience distortions in time perception - We have an intuitive sense of time - Usually feels like time passes faster, but the reverse/opposite also occurs - "Time flies when you're having fun"

Answer 160

- People in flow state experience heightened sense of control over their actions and their environment - Fulfills our need to feel that our actions produce predictable and meaningful outcomes (behaviour-outcome contingencies) - Contributes to the intrinsically rewarding nature of the activity - Not second-guessing themselves - The behaviour feels both automatic and intentional

Answer 161

- An experience that is rewarding in itself (intrinsically rewarding) - Auto = self, telos = goal - Not reliant on extrinsic rewards

Answer 162

- Baumeister et al. (1998) - Dominant model for a very long time - According to strength model of self-control, all acts of self-control draw on a central, limited resource - Controversial: all of these various acts of self-control draw on a single pool of resources - A singular central resource which is finite - Analogy of fuel for your car: eventually fuel will run out - The same way fuel runs out, self-control also runs out - Researchers refer to this as ego-depletion - Some speculation about the nature of this fuel

Answer 163

- Suppression or overriding of automatic, habitual, or innate behaviors, urges, desires, or emotions that might disrupt goal-directed actions - We require self-control for all sorts of goal pursuits

Answer 164

- Exerting self-control in one domain depletes the ability to exert it in another domain - Fuel in car analogy

Answer 165

- The individual high in trait self-control is better able to resist temptations - They exercise self-control in the moment (state self-control) - They do this habitually/routinely which adds up to trait self-control - How they do this? - Maybe they employ methods used in Walter's study with the marshmallow task (ex: distraction)

Answer 166

- They brought Ps in for a study on "taste perception" - They told Ps to skip a meal before coming in so Ps are quite hungry - When they come in, there are chocolate chip cookies being baked in the room where Ps are so it smells amazing - Ps sit at a table and there's 2 foods displayed there - One bowl consists of chocolate chip cookies and the other bowl consists of radishes - Manipulation: Ps assigned to taste one of the 2 foods - In the radish condition, they're asked to eat at least a couple of the radishes - In the cookie condition, they're asked to eat at least a couple of the cookies - Ps in the radish condition had a pretty difficult time with this and had a hard time not eating the cookies - Exercising self-control - After this task, Ps were given a supposedly unrelated task where they had to engage with a puzzle - Wanted to see how Ps engage with this task after being assigned to specific conditions - Findings: - Radish eaters made fewer attempts and gave up sooner than chocolate chip eaters and control participants (who only joined the study for the puzzle task) - Researchers interpret this as if you use your self-control on one thing, you won't have enough self-control on another thing - This has been interpreted a bunch of times

Answer 167

- Theory suggests self-control is a finite resource, but studies challenge this idea - Motivation can override depletion effects - Ex: people perform just as well when given incentives (ex: money) -> if we start paying depleted Ps at time 2, we see that they perform just as well as Ps who weren't depleted at time 1 - Beliefs about depletion shape performance - Ex: if people are told a task was mentally exhausting (ex: researchers say that the background colour of experiment has been shown to be mentally draining), they struggle more afterward (show depletion effect); if told it was energizing (ex: researchers say the background colour of experiment has been shown to be energy boosting), they perform fine (don't show depletion effect) - Implicit theories of willpower matter - Those who believe willpower is unlimited don’t show depletion effects (ex: in some studies, it's been shown that a tough initial task boosts their performance in a later task) - Perhaps ego-depletion is less about ability and more about willingness to exert effort - Shift from "have to" activities to "want to" activities

Answer 168

- In the 2010s, there was the replication crisis - A large number of studies weren't replicating - Within psychology, ego-depletion research was really at the front and center of this - Hagger et al. (2010): - Conducted a large meta-analysis and found a moderate effect size (d ≈ 0.6), suggesting that exerting self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring self-control - Carter & McCullough (2014): - Re-examined the data and argued that publication bias inflated the effect size - When adjusting for bias, the effect shrunk to nearly 0, suggesting that ego depletion might not be a robust phenomenon - Hagger et al. (2016): - Conducted a large-scale, multi-lab replication study with over 2,000 participants using a standardized depletion task - Found no significant evidence for ego depletion

Answer 169

The tendency to publish only significant results

Answer 170

- Lack of clear definitions: - Self-control is often described vaguely (inhibition, control, modification of behavior), making it hard to measure consistently - Never a clear agreement on what self-control is exactly (how narrow or broad of a concept it is) - Circular task selection & lack of validation: - Many studies justify tasks simply because they’ve been used before, even though they vary widely in cognitive demands - Many self-control tasks haven’t been empirically tested to ensure they actually measure self-control - The same task is sometimes labeled as a depletion/self-control task in one study and a control task in another

Answer 171

- Hand hygiene compliance in hospitals analyzed using data from ~4k healthcare workers across 35 hospitals and ~13 million hand hygiene opportunities - Healthcare workers in hospitals are supposed to sanitize their hands every time they enter a room - When healthcare workers enter a room, they scan their room and there's electronic hand sanitizers so you can objectively measure their hand sanitizing behaviours rather than rely on subjective reports - Compliance rates dropped by an estimated 8.7% points from the start to the end of a typical 12-hour shift - 8.7% doesn't sound like that much but statistically translates to many infections (thousands per year) -> very significant - Higher work intensity led to steeper declines in compliance - Longer breaks between shifts helped restore compliance, especially for workers who had lower compliance before their break - Cumulative work hours mattered - Both the decline in compliance during a shift and the benefits of breaks were stronger for those who worked more total hours in the preceding week - Importance of taking breaks

Answer 172

* Classic study by Mischel and colleagues with preschoolers * One of the most famous psychology studies * Preschoolers are put in a room with a marshmallow in front of them and are told by the experimenter that if they resist the marshmallow while the researcher is gone, they'll get 2 of them * Measuring their self-control * Found that a lot of the kids were able to resist eating the marshmallow * The kids used many strategies to resist temptation: * Cognitive reframing & strategic attentional deployment reduces temptation * They tried to deploy their attention elsewhere * Shifting focus away from an object’s most tempting features makes it easier to delay gratification (ex: kids who imagined the marshmallow as a fluffy white cloud or plain white ball were better at resisting) * So were the kids who were able to distract themselves (ex: with fun toys in the room, the marshmallow becomes much less tempting) * The study didn't become popular right away * The real impact of the study came decades later when Mischel and colleagues followed-up on these children * Correlation between ability to delay gratification at age 4 & desirable outcomes later in life: * Higher SAT scores * Lower rates of substance dependence * Higher income & SES * Better interpersonal functioning (less impulsive, less aggressive)

Answer 173

- Reasons why people thought this classic study wouldn't replicate: original study had significant limitations, ex: children from original study were recruited from a nursery school where a lot of children of Stanford professors go to and these children hence have access to more resources - Subsequent replication with modified (shortened) version of task and larger, more representative sample - Sig correlation b/w performance on modified marshmallow task & subsequent academic achievement (but not behavioural problems) - However, effect much smaller than in original study - Effect further diminished when controlling for background characteristics (ex: family income, maternal education) & earlier tests of cognitive functioning - However, some of the design choices complicate interpretation of the findings

Answer 174

- Maybe self-control isn’t just about willpower, rather it’s influenced by whether children believe their actions will lead to rewards - Maybe it's not about self-control but about how the world is reliable and stable - Researchers designed an experiment where they convinced kids that waiting would be rewarding or would make it worse - Placed crayons in front of children and said if they wait, they'll come back with fancier arts and crafts supplies - Reliable condition: children waited and experimenter came back with fancier supplies - Unreliable condition: children waited and experimenter came back empty-handed claiming they couldn't find the supplies (undermined the children's trust) - Very small study - Children who learned waiting was rewarded (reliable condition) waited much longer for a second marshmallow than those who were taught waiting brought no reward (unreliable condition)

Answer 175

- Individuals adapt their strategies based on environmental stability - In unpredictable environments, people may prioritize immediate rewards (a "fast" strategy -> immediacy over delayed gratification) - In stable environments, people are more likely to invest in long-term goals (a "slow" strategy) - Maybe marshmallow task is tapping into this fast vs slow strategy

Answer 176

- Extensive evidence that childhood self-control predicts better outcomes in adulthood - Ex: longitudinal study following 1,000 individuals from birth into adulthood - Children rated by parents and teachers as higher in self-control→wealthier, less likely to commit crime, lower rates of substance dependence, better physical health - Effects independent of intelligence, SES, and family background

Answer 177

* If we look at the exercise of self-control in daily life * Bring Ps in the lab and measure their trait self-control and then give them a buzzer and follow-up with them throughout the week and buzzing/asking them throughout the day if they experienced any desires recently, what kind of desires, did they find those desires problematic or hard to overcome * Trying to get at the relationship between state self-control (resisting that urge in the moment) and trait self-control * Logically these should go hand in hand * Experience sampling research shows that trait self-control is related to less state self-control * Individuals higher in trait self-control weren't necessarily engaging in more resistance and they weren't more successful at resisting their temptations * They just had less motivational conflict in the first place (fewer desires that they had to resist) * In a follow-up when the researchers had an objective 3rd party coders rate the desires that the individuals listed in this study, the types of desires that the individuals high in trait self-control were naming, were rated by the coders as less problematic * Doesn't appear to be the case that people high in trait self-control spend more time exercising self-control or that they're better at fighting off temptation * Rather, they experience fewer problematic desires

Answer 178

* Some researchers suggest that individuals high in trait self-control might be avoiding temptations by engaging in proactive control measures * Proactive strategies to design our environment in a certain way where we'll be less likely to encounter temptations or lock in our decisions with the aim of reducing future temptations * Examples: * Not keeping unhealthy snacks at home * Setting up an automatic transfer to savings account (example of precommitment) * Preemptively tying yourself to a ship mast to resist the song of the sirens * Safeguarding your future self from making decisions that you'll regret * There's support for this and that these strategies work * This helps but we can't do this all the time * Will find a way around it

Answer 179

- Ability to treat ourselves with kindness during struggles - Promotes more open, less defensive stance - We tend to be more compassionate with others than we are with ourselves - A common tendency for many is to beat ourselves up over our self-control failures - We have a feeling that self-criticism and being hard on ourselves is what makes us great - Self-compassion interventions have been found to increase self-regulation (helped with restrictive eaters and smoking -> particularly true of people who are more critical of themselves) - Self-control failures are normal - May be particularly important for individuals high in conscientiousness - Although conscientiousness is typically associated with greater well-being, people high in this trait suffer greater hits to well-being following major setbacks which was mediated by negative emotion

Answer 180

- Some measures of trait self-control might be tapping into conscientiousness - Conscientiousness is a multifaceted construct that includes: - Self-control - Industriousness = strong work ethic, enjoyment of effort - Responsibility = following through on commitments and being accountable to others (interpersonal component) - Traditionalism = valuing societal norms and rules - Perhaps conscientious individuals are more likely to internalize “virtuous desires” - More likely to trust these rules and norms because they see the value in them - See them as part of leading a good life - Internalized those norms (doing them intrinsically) - If you think more about these ingredients of conscientiousness, you can start to see how they contribute to greater internalization of virtuous societal norms, more autonomous forms of behaviour and more intrinsic motivation - If we want to be more like individuals high in trait self control or conscientious people, perhaps we should be thinking about our goals, re-evaluating our goals and setting goals that are aligned with ourselves - Trying to pursue more of those intrinsic goals and setting goals that are self-aligned - Struggling with self-control or reaching a goal would be a good signal to evaluate why we're struggling in the first place - Lack of motivation could be a valuable source of info for us, even if it doesn't feel good

Answer 181

- Muscle analogy: - With ego depletion, muscles reach their breaking point where they just can’t anymore - But can also be trained and can become stronger overtime - Guiding hypothesis: practicing self-control in one area can lead to improvements in other areas of life - Mixed research findings: - Some support, but heterogeneity in effect sizes (sometimes you see an effect, sometimes you don't, sometimes it's bigger or smaller -> could be due to different operationalizations that researchers use) - Self-control training seems to be more beneficial for men than women - Possible mechanisms: - Still not very clear - Is it changing people's theories of willpower? And changing how they think about self-control? - Changes in self-perception? - Maybe if you begin to see yourself as someone who exerts self-control, who works hard, who's conscientious, becomes a part of your identity - Learning to love effort? - Some evidence that it decreases effort avoidance - Maybe also learning to love the effort itself, particularly if the effort is rewarded - Some evidence that rewarding effort can lead people to like exerting effort more - We also derive a sense of meaning from effort

Answer 182

- Flow researchers will often use this - Intensive longitudinal data collection method (more intensive than the daily diary study where they only provide data once a day at a specific time) - Ps are followed for a period of several days/weeks and provide data at multiple times throughout the day - Ps provided with an electronic pager (back in the day) or smart phone app (modern day) - Signaled at random intervals throughout the day - Once signaled, need to fill out questionnaire - Flow researchers might ask how Ps are feeling, what they're doing, who they're with - Try to understand when Ps attain this flow state - Advantages: - Avoid retrospective memory bias; a ”snapshot” of life as it is lived - Captures variability and change over time

Answer 183

- Perceived balance between challenges and skills particularly when they're high - This is very rewarding so we have the desire to experience optimal challenge which largely explains why flow improves performance over time - Clear, proximal (here and now), & achievable (balance between challenge and skill) goals - Immediate and unambiguous feedback (tells us whether we're on track or not and then can make adjustments) - Ex: dancing lends itself to a flow state because it has a lot of clear and proximate goals and you get immediate feedback

Answer 184

- Optimal challenge is key to experiencing flow - Ex: students experience more enjoyment and flow in work than mindless activities like watching unchallenging TV programs; adults similarly spend more time in flow when at work vs. at leisure - This suggests that given the right conditions and the key ingredients needed for reaching a flow state, any activity can become a flow activity - Some activities are more conducive to experiencing flow: - Require the learning of skills, set up goals that you have to reach, provide feedback, make control possible - Csikszentmihalyi argues that many different activities can be transformed into flow activities - “A person can make himself happy or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside’, just by changing the contents of consciousness” - Argues this is why some people manage to find flow even in mundane or very horrific circumstances (ex: labour camps) - Up to us to find the challenge in everyday situations and step up to it - Some of us may be better at this than others (the “autotelic personality”) - Thought people who tend to be a bit more self-focused might have trouble attaining a flow state (ex: if you're very self-conscious or self-centered)

Answer 185

People who tend to be more curious, more capable of deep focus, more intrinsically motivated, more interested in seeking out challenges, and more resilient and adaptable (persist even when facing difficulty or obstacles)

Answer 186

- Trying to turn more mundane tasks/activities into flow activities - Challenge-skill balance: - Level of difficulty adjusted to slightly exceed your proficiency - You have to stretch your skills but you're not being overwhelmed - If you make a lot of mistakes, the algorithm is going to lower the difficulty of the questions for a bit and if you're doing very well, they're going to increase the challenge in their questions - Clear, achievable goals - Immediate feedback: - You instantly know whether or not you got a question right - They make it very salient with an animation and noise - Can compare your pronunciation with the recording - Too much reliance on rewards and threats? - Ex: points and trophies for completing a lesson or maintaining a streak or the use threats and try to make you feel bad about yourself if you're not practicing - Or counterbalanced by autonomy-, competence-, and relatedness-supporting elements? - Ex: make it so you can work on your goals with your friends

Answer 187

- Competition can be rich source of both challenge & competence feedback - Type of situation that has a lot of the key ingredients needed for a flow state - Constant stream of challenges (moment-by-moment) and an overarching challenge of beating your opponent - Challenge combined with the meaningful feedback you're getting can be competence boosting and can therefore promote intrinsic motivation and even help us enter a flow state - However, can also involve high levels of pressure (behaviour might feel more controlled), incompetence feedback, social evaluation, stress, & anxiety - Big research area in motivation is the effect that competition is going to have on motivation, performance and wellbeing more broadly

Answer 188

- The more an event is perceived as controlling, the more it'll frustrate autonomy and weaken intrinsic motivation and shift us towards external regulation - Doing something just to meet expectations, impress others, avoid punishment - Whereas when events are autonomy supportive, they help maintain intrinsic motivation by allowing people to feel a sense of choice and volition in what they're doing - The way that competition is framed can have a big impact on motivation - Research shows that simply introducing a competitive goal like "beat the other person" tends to create a moderate level of control which orients people towards winning as an outcome rather than enjoying the activity itself - The shift in focus can undermine intrinsic motivation - ”Win-focused” instructions tend to be experienced as moderately controlling, thereby decreasing intrinsic motivation - Orient the individual toward trying to obtain outcome/reward of winning rather than enjoying engagement in the task - Degree of pressure matters - Emphasis on winning at all costs lowers intrinsic motivation more than comparative competition condition without exclusive emphasis on winning, as well as a no competition condition - Even for participants who won - This reduction in intrinsic motivation is mediated by reduced sense of autonomy

Answer 189

- They used particularly controlling instructions for a puzzle task and in these controlling instructions conditions they were told that it doesn't matter if they figure out how the puzzle works, the only thing that matters is which one of them wins the competition (emphasis on winning at all costs) -This type of instruction significantly lowered intrinsic motivation compared to other competition conditions that were not as controlling so Ps still managed to have a sense of engagement in the task - Emphasis on winning at all costs tends to undermine intrinsic motivation for everybody even for those who won

Answer 190

- Reorientation into a competitive mindset is often made salient by the intro of competitively contingent rewards (prizes that are only given to the winner) - Ex: tangible rewards like money and career opportunities or symbolic ones (ex: trophies, medals, status) - Competitively contingent rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation, even for those who win - Competitive situations are complex -> will depend on how rewards and feedback are delivered - Competition is more motivating when success is based on personal achievement rather than beating others or winning a prize - Losers who met a performance standard and received positive feedback felt just as competent, interested, and engaged as winners - But those who lost but received external rewards for meeting the standard were less likely to continue engaging freely - Extrinsic rewards can increase effort, but only temporarily - Ex: professional athletes performed better during their contract year (when playing for a salary increase) but showed a decline in performance afterward once the contract was secured - Shows how external rewards can undermine motivation overtime

Answer 191

- Double-sword nature of feedback - Feedback carries both informational value and can be used as a source of control as well - The more informational that an event and a piece of feedback is going to be, meaning the more it can help people understand their performance and areas for improvement, the more it's going to satisfy their need for competence and therefore enhance their intrinsic motivation - If we get feedback that signals ineffectiveness or failure, that frustrates our need for competence and can lead to amotivation - Winning enhances intrinsic motivation by affirming competence, while losing can undermine motivation by making people feel ineffective - Expectations matter: - Competitors form pre-competition expectations based on past experiences or their opponents - If they expect to do well, their motivation, engagement, and competence stays high; if they expect to struggle, their motivation and perceived competence drops which makes them less interested in the activity - Perceptions of competence are key: - If people feel competent because they improved or met a personal standard they can stay motivated and their sense of competence is going to remain high even if they lose - Best way to structure competition to promote intrinsic motivation: competitive environments should focus on personal growth, mastery, and constructive feedback, rather than just winning and losing

Answer 192

- Challenge perception emerges with feedback - Competitors don’t necessarily feel challenged just by being in a competitive setting; the sense of challenge arises after receiving performance feedback - Importance of optimal challenge: - Excessive negative feedback & over-challenge tends to lead to withdrawal of effort and amotivation over time - Positive & constructive feedback is more likely when competitors are evenly matched - Impact of individual appraisals: - How we interpret a competitive situation is going to matter - Viewing a competitive situation as a challenge (rather than a threat) leads to better focus, improved performance, and more adaptive emotional & physiological responses - But when viewing it as a threat, they tend to fixate on the possibility of failure rather than their actual performance and as a result end up performing worse and experiencing more stress

Answer 193

- Golf competition among novice golfers - Challenge condition: - Ps were encouraged to think of the task as a challenge and of themselves as capable of meeting that challenge - Focus on the task & performing effectively - Threat condition: - Focus on possible mistakes and being evaluated negatively - Social evaluation component was made very salient to them - The researchers looked at 2 different types of anxiety in this study: cognitive anxiety (worries, negative thoughts) and somatic anxiety (physical symptoms of anxiety) - Both groups experienced similar levels of somatic anxiety but the group that received the challenge instructions reported less of the cognitive anxiety compared to the threat group and they also interpreted the cognitive anxiety differently - To the extent that they felt it, they saw it as a positive force that would help them focus and perform and also saw their somatic anxiety as being less harmful - Challenge vs. threat appraisal: - When the novice golfers viewed the task as a challenge, they were better able to focus on the task, better performance, more adaptive emotional and physiological states - Framing a competition as a challenge rather than as a threat not only reduces the amount of worry that you're going to experience but it also encourages a more positive interpretation of any anxiety that arises - This should enable you to better focus on the task at hand and perform better

Answer 194

- Like external events (ex: competition) and interpersonal context (ex: a controlling coach), intrapersonal events (things that are happening within ourselves - ex: self-talk, self-criticism, self-praise) can be needs-supportive or needs-frustrating - Intrapersonal events can undermine or support intrinsic motivation just like external rewards and pressures can

Answer 195

- Ego-involvement occurs when one’s self-esteem (evaluation of one’s self-worth) becomes tied to competitive success - Occurs as external pressures are internalized - When people tie their self-worth to winning, they put internal pressure on themselves, making failure feel personal and demotivating - Beating others becomes the only way that we can feel good about ourselves - Focus shifts from learning, improving, & enjoying the process to proving one’s worth by outperforming others - Leads to psychological need frustration, lower intrinsic motivation & well-being - Threatens our sense of autonomy and sense of competence - Losing in an ego-involving condition (when our ego is wrapped up in our performance) is particularly distressing

Answer 196

* Inner dialogue we have with ourselves * Can build us up or tear us down * Can include anything from positive self-encouragement to harsh self-criticism * Going to impact motivation and performance * Limitation for research: this research tends to be correlational (possible that the relationship goes the other way)

Answer 197

- Researchers asked undergraduate students to keep track of their self-talk during a challenging lecture (stats/research methods class) - Then they had Ps rate those self-talk statements that they had as being either informational positive or controlling - Generally, informational statements were more constructive and supportive - Found that, among students attending stats lecture: - Positive self-talk associated with positive affect - Controlling self-talk associated with anxiety & stress, especially when paired with more negative experience in the class - How self-talk feels matters more than the content or how another person might rate our self-talk: if it feels supportive/positive/informational, it helps and will be linked to positive outcomes like higher positive affect; if it feels like pressure/controlling, it hurts and is going to lead to higher levels of anxiety and stress (particularly if students are having harder time in class) - Takeaway: the way that we talk to ourselves matters - Informational positive statements tend to be more helpful than controlling statements - But interpretation of self-talk is what's most important - What's helpful to you might not be helpful to someone else

Answer 198

- Looked at volleyball and basketball players and found that players that used informational/positive self-talk during competitions: - Experienced higher autonomy & competence need satisfaction, as well as better concentration during the competitive events - Able to focus on what they had to do rather than worrying about how they're being evaluated or how they have to reach a certain outcome - Suggests positive self-talk doesn't just make us feel better but can also improve concentration and performance

Answer 199

- Competition can have both positive and negative effects on competitors’ motivation and well-being - This depends the extent to which we perceive the competitive situation as either supporting or frustrating our needs for autonomy & competence - Well-structured competitions should: - Emphasize growth & learning - Provide clear, constructive feedback to build competence - Maximize autonomy - Minimize autonomy undermining pressures like unnecessary pressure & ego-drive stakes

Answer 200

- Fundamental human need to form close, emotionally satisfying bonds with others and to feel emotionally connected to others - Research suggesting that this is a fundamental need rather than something that's just nice to have or something we might want - This need is universal and pervasive - We see this cross-culturally - People around the world: - Gravitate towards small primary groups - People generally don't tend to live in isolation - Form bonds easily (often doesn't take much more than just putting people in close proximity to each other) - Experience profound distress when their relationships are threatened or lost (highlighting it's a need and not just a want) - Are reluctant to break off relationships - Hallmarks of relatedness need satisfaction: feelings of warmth, closeness, & benevolence (the sense that we're positively contributing to another's wellbeing -> we derive all sorts of emotional and physical benefits from helping others)

Answer 201

- Key ingredient in building closer relationships - Sharing personal information about the self - Tend to like those who share personal information with us - Also tend to like people better after disclosing personal information to them - Important boundary conditions to this: self-disclosure works best when it's gradual and reciprocal - Researchers wanted to see if they could design a task that could be implemented in the lab to get people to bond very quickly - Lab-based task for creating feelings of closeness: - Reciprocal exchange - They take turns answering these questions - 3 sets x 12 questions gradually escalating in intimacy within & across sets - In one study by Aron et al. (1996) using this task, they found that Ps experienced greater feelings of closeness with partner following disclosure task (relative to small-talk control)

Answer 202

- Self-disclosure - Responsiveness

Answer 203

* How the other person is going to respond to our self-disclosure * After we make ourselves vulnerable, we want our disclosures to be met with a certain degree of caring and understanding * Perceived partner responsiveness is the feeling that someone truly listens, understands, and cares about you * 3 key ingredients of a supportive response/responsiveness: * Understanding: accurately grasping the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences * Validation: communicating acceptance and appreciation for the other person’s perspective and personal qualities (reassurance that your thoughts and feelings matter) * Caring: demonstrating genuine concern for the wellbeing of the other person and showing up when help is needed * High responsiveness leads to: * Stronger trust, emotional closeness, and commitment * Greater satisfaction in relationships, fulfilling the need for relatedness, therefore leading to more positive affect

Answer 204

- Exchange relationships are transactional, based on reciprocity - Kinds of relationships you're most likely to have the casual acquaintances - "It's just business" type of relationships - Not much of an emotional bond - Communal relationships are based on mutual care and concern - Don't expect people in these relationships to give back tit-for-tat - Not expecting an immediate repayment - Key differences: - In exchange relationships, people do not feel obligated to care about the other’s needs beyond fairness - In communal relationships, people monitor and respond to each other’s needs without expecting direct repayment

Answer 205

* Communal relationships best satisfy need for relatedness because they provide emotional support & genuine connection * People in communal relationships: * Check in on each other’s well-being * Offer help without expecting repayment * Avoid keeping score of favours or contributions * Find financial exchanges (ex: paying a friend for a favour) uncomfortable

Answer 206

Sense of feeling alive and energized, which happens when psychological needs are satisfied

Answer 207

- External contingency at stake: incentives, consequences - People are acting a certain way or doing certain things due to there being external rewards or punishments - Ex: “The reason I recycle is to get or avoid a consequence (make 5 cents on each can or avoid a fine)” - Not a great long term-motivator - Relative to other forms of extrinsic motivation, linked to lower engagement & poorer performance

Answer 208

- Slightly autonomous - The taking in, but not truly accepting or personally endorsing, other people’s suggested ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving (partial internalization) - External contingency at stake: avoid guilt - When you do something because you have to but you don't really want to - Tyranny of the "should" or "ought" - Self-imposed pressure - Ex: “The reason I recycle is because I ought to; I feel guilty if I don’t” - Creates inner conflict and tension

Answer 209

- Highly autonomous - Voluntarily accepting as one’s own the merits and utility of other people’s suggested ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving - External contingency at stake: valuing, sense of importance - Ex: “I recycle because it is important for a cleaner environment” - Have internalized importance of activity even if we may not enjoy the activity itself, which makes motivation stronger and more sustainable

Answer 210

- Highest level of extrinsic motivation - Fully autonomous - Result of integration: fully transforming an identified regulation (way of thinking, feeling, or behaving) into the self in a coherent and conflict-free way - Accepted and incorporated the value of something into your self-concept/identity - External contingency at stake: value congruence - Ex: “I recycle because it reflects my values as an environmentalist”

Answer 211

Parental conditional regard

Answer 212

- Standards - Monitoring - Strength (key thing)

Answer 213

- Specific - Measurable - Achievable - Realistic - Time-Bound

Answer 214

1) Select Goals that Won’t Require So Much Self Control - Autonomous goals - Selecting a goal which reflects your developing interests and core values (vs something you feel pressured to do) 2) Make Goal Pursuit Automatic - “Implementation plans” 3) Outsource the demands of goal pursuit to our friends - We rely on others to show interest in and provide support for our goal pursuits - It is useful to outsource the self- control demands

Midterm (final) Flashcards

(238 cards)