Psy 352 – Motivation

Chapter 6 – Psychological Needs

When an activity satisfies our psychological needs, we find enjoyment. Psychological needs promote a willingness to seek out and engage our environment that we hope will nurture those needs.

• Need structure (figure 6.1) – Physiological needs stem from biological deficits. Psychological needs are inherent within our human nature and healthy development. Social needs are internalized and learned from our history.
• Organismic approach to motivation – autonomy, competence, and relatedness can be referred to as organismic needs.
• Person-Environment Dialectic – The person and the environment constantly change. The environment can challenge us, provide us with feedback and supportive relationships that nurture us and can neglect and frustrate us.
• Organismic psychological needs – Needs that provide the motivation that support initiative and learning. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness provide us with a natural motivation to learn, grow and develop.

Autonomy

• People like choices and flexibility in their decision making.
• Behavior is autonomous when our interests, preferences, and wants guide our decision making process to engage or not to engage in activities.
• 3 experiential qualities define our need for autonomy:
  • Perceived locus of causality – an individual’s understanding of the causal source of one’s motivated actions.
  • Perceived choice – the choice we experience when the environment provides us with flexibility to make a decision.
  • Volition – unpressured willingness to engage in an activity.
• Supporting autonomy – relationships can sometimes support or neglect our need for autonomy.
• Autonomy-supportive environments
• Controlling environments
• In order to create autonomy-supportive environments for others:
  • Nurture their inner motivational resources
  • Rely on informational language
  • Promotes valuing
  • Acknowledges and accepts negative affect
• Moment-to-Moment Autonomy Support – listen carefully, share learning materials, create opportunities for others to talk, communicate rationale, ask others for their opinion, encourage effort, offer praise.
• Benefits of an autonomy-supportive motivating style – you provide the person with a way to satisfy their psychological needs.

Competence

• We have a need for competence.
• Involving Competence – the key environmental conditions that involve our need for competence are optimal challenge and optimal structure. The key environmental condition that satisfies our need for competence is positive feedback.
• Optimal challenge and flow – flow is a state of concentration.
  • When skill is low and challenge is high, people worry that the task is overwhelming.
  • When challenge matches skill level, one’s concentration, involvement and enjoyment rise.
  • When skill is high and challenge is low, people don’t concentrate as much and become bored.
  • When skill and challenge are both low, people don’t care about the task.
  • Given optimal challenge, any activity can be enjoyed.
  • People sometimes view a highly challenged task as an opportunity for growth.
  • People sometimes view low levels of challenge as enjoyable because it provides an opportunity for them to receive feedback that confirms their skill level.
  • Online Activity
  • Interdependency between challenge and feedback – People do not experience challenge until you begin to receive feedback.
  • Failure tolerance – With optimal challenge, one can experience success or failure.
  • Structure – the clear communication of what the environment expects the person to do to achieve desired outcomes.
  • Supporting Competence
  • Positive feedback – feedback comes from 4 sources:
    • The task itself
    • Comparisons of one’s current performance with one’s own past performances
    • Comparisons of one’s current performance with the performance of others
    • Evaluations of others
• Optimal challenge and positive feedback

Relatedness

• The need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with others.
• Involving relatedness: Interaction with others is the primary condition that involves the need for relatedness.
• Satisfying relatedness: Perception of a social bond – The social bond needs to be characterized by the perceptions that the other person cares about our welfare and likes us.
  • Exchange relationships – between acquaintances, or business relationships.
  • Communal relationships – between people who care about the welfare of others
• Internalization – the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed regulation or value into an internally endorsed one. When we feel emotionally connected to another, relatedness is high. When we feel distant or neglected by another, relatedness is low and internalization is low.
• Relationships involved in satisfying psychological need
  • Engagement – the intensity and emotional quality people show when they behave.
• When people are highly engaged in something, they show high levels of:
• Attention
• Effort
• Persistence
• Verbal participation
• Positive emotion
• Autonomy support helps engagement – it satisfies the need for autonomy.
• Structure enhances engagement – it satisfies the need for competence.
• Involvement enhances engagement – it satisfies the need for relatedness