Motivation for Change: Implications forSubstance Abuse Treatment

Psychological science has made significant progress exploring the role of motivation in recovery from substance abuse and dependence over the past 20 years. Although recovery is complicated by physiological and psychological dependence, the intentions and motivation of the abuser are a critical part of this process. Motivation for change plays an important part in the process of recognizing the need for change, seeking treatment, and achieving successful sustained change. This article reviews how motivational readiness to change, as conceptualized within the transtheoretical model, contributes to the process of recovery. Important distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, imposed and intentional change, and readiness for change versus readiness for treatment are highlighted.     

Training the Millennial Learner Through Experiential Evolutionary Scaffolding: Implications for Clinical Supervision in Graduate Education Programs

They are the Millennials – Generation Y. Over the next few decades, they will be entering genetic counseling graduate training programs and the workforce. As a group, they are unlike previous youth generations in many ways, including the way they learn. Therefore, genetic counselors who teach and supervise need to understand the Millennials and explore new ways of teaching to ensure that the next cohort of genetic counselors has both skills and knowledge to represent our profession well. This paper will summarize the distinguishing traits of the Millennial generation as well as authentic learning and evolutionary scaffolding theories of learning that can enhance teaching and supervision. We will then use specific aspects of case preparation during clinical rotations to demonstrate how incorporating authentic learning theory into evolutionary scaffolding results in experiential evolutionary scaffolding, a method that potentially offers a more effective approach when teaching Millennials. We conclude with suggestions for future research.     

Experts in Dialogue: An Introduction

Different approaches to expertise and argumentation are discussed. After introducing the problem of expertise and its present day significance in a historical context, various connections with the study of arguments are highlighted. The need for and potential of argumentation analysis to contribute to existing research in social epistemology, science studies, and cognitive science, is discussed, touching on the problems of reasoning and argumentation, embodiment, tacit knowledge, expert context versus public context, expert disagreement, persuasion versus justification, and argument analysis as meta-expertise. As the arguments used by experts constitute a boundary object, we presume that a dialogue format is suitable to address central problems of the special issue “Rethinking Arguments from Experts”.     

The Essentialized Self: Implications for Motivation and Self‐Regulation

Persuasion attempts are more likely to stick and less likely to be counterargued if they fit the ways people naturally make sense of themselves and their world. One way to do that is to yoke persuasion to the social categories people experience as “true” and “natural.” Gelman and Echelbarger's (2019) integrative review of essentialism outlines the emergence of essentialism in children's reasoning. Connecting their discussion with identity‐based motivation theory (D. Oyserman, 2015) and a culture‐as‐situated cognition (D. Oyserman, 2017) perspective, this commentary addresses how an essentialized self can facilitate or impair motivation and self‐regulation and potentiate or undermine persuasive efforts.     

Multilevel Selection Theory and Major Evolutionary Transitions: Implications for Psychological Science

ABSTRACT— The concept of a group as comparable to a single organism has had a long and turbulent history. Currently, methodological individualism dominates in many areas of psychology and evolution, but natural selection is now known to operate at multiple levels of the biological hierarchy. When between-group selection dominates within-group selection, a major evolutionary transition occurs and the group becomes a new, higher-level organism. It is likely that human evolution represents a major transition, and this has wide-ranging implications for the psychological study of group behavior, cognition, and culture.     

Intrinsic And Extrinsic Motivation and Attitudes Toward Professional Continuing Education: Implications for the Counselor

The purpose of this study was to investigate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of individuals enrolled in a continuing education program. The types of couseling strategies and programs to help workers increase their self-confidence are discussed.     

Counseling Implications of Genetic Research: A Dialogue With Thomas Bouchard

Thomas Bouchard is a leading researcher of identical twins reared apart. In this interview he describes the major themes in the Minnesota twin research. Although the genetic influence is central, he also pleads for the impact of environmental factors in optimal human development. Included in the interview are the surprises he has experienced, his current focus, and his plans for the future research.     

The Bhakta and the Sage: An Intertextual Dialogue

Comparing the Bhagavad Gītā and the Buddhist essay “Prajñā is Not-knowing” (Panruo Wuzhi 般若無知) yields interesting insights. The texts have similar dialogical structures and discuss complex philosophical matters. Rhetorically, both texts weave together quotations and allusions from other texts, make liberal use of paradox, and have decidedly spiritual intentions. Their differences, though, remain striking. They emerge from distinct circumstances and their original languages (Sanskrit, Chinese) differ markedly. Stylistically, “Prajñā” is more intellectual and less devotional, espousing a distinctly “this worldly” ideal; by contrast, the Gītā is more dramatic. While espousing “this worldly” ideals, the Gītā is more inclusive and thus more accessible to a broad audience; on the contrary, “Prajñā” has a subtler effect, its “dark” qualities appealing to a more select group. Therefore, while these texts are not “the same,” reading across their convergences and divergences can lead to a deeper understanding of mysticism and cross-cultural spirituality.     

Morality: An Evolutionary Account

ABSTRACT— Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic "social instincts," or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is.     

Empirical Support for an Evolutionary Model of Self‐Destructive Motivation

We tested predictions generated from an evolutionary account of self‐destructive motivation in two survey studies of 18–24‐year‐old university students. As hypothesized, hierarchical regressions showed that the positive relationship between perceived burden to family and suicide ideation was amplified for participants with low measured health and romantic relationship satisfaction, and for participants with relatively young mothers. The moderating effect of maternal age was also observed in logistic regressions of suicide attempts. These effects occurred independently of depression, hopelessness, and other relevant extraneous variables. Results have implications for understanding self‐destructive motivation, assessing suicide risk, and preventing suicidal thinking and behavior.     

Evolving Development: An Evolutionary Perspective on Development for an Interconnected World

The notion of development has been permeated by concepts and methods from positivistic science. As a result, many development initiatives are reductionistic, myopic, and with little or impact on the improvement of the quality of life and the sustainability of communities and societies. This article marks the beginning of a transdisciplinary inquiry among the authors, motivated by direct interest in the issue of development, per se, and in particular, Mexico's development. Our inquiry departs from and weaves together our various areas of expertise and experience, including: systems theory, general evolution theory, economic development, technology transfer, social innovation, sustainable development, environmental behavior, social systems design, and education. The article reviews the concept of development from an evolutionary and systemic perspective. It outlines the foundations of evolutionary development in terms of theory, philosophy, and methodology and provides a conceptual framework for future research aimed at the articulation of a practical model for evolutionary development.     

Evolutionary biology and personality psychology: Implications of genetic variability

Biological considerations raise an important set of issues for psychology: what behavioral attributes of the species are genetically based, what are the mechanisms by which genetic influences affect behavior, what are the evolutionary antecedents of genetically-based attributes, and what are their consequences? This article examines a subset of these issues by exploring some potential consequences of extant genetic variability for personality functioning, social interaction and the current genetic evolution of our species. Behavior genetics provides a methodology for discovering genetically-influenced behavioral variation. Five disparate areas (socialization, personality development, personality assessment, interactionism and assortative mating) are examined in which findings from behavior genetics can guide research and theory in personality psychology. Relationships between organismic and social parameters are emphasized. The final section combines these five areas by placing them within the broader context of theory-building in psychology.     

An Integrated Model for the Study of Teacher Motivation

Des recherches récentes ont montré que les enseignants souffraient plus que d’autres groupes professionnels d’un manque de motivation au travail. Une compréhension globale de la motivation des enseignants exige un modèle adéquat. L’objectif principal de cette recherche était de proposer et de mettre à l’épreuve un modèle de la motivation des enseignants qui intégre des concepts de plusieurs théories cognitivo‐motivationelles. Le modèle intégré s’appuie sur la schéma expectation‐valence et celui de l’incapacité acquise, mais surmonte quelques‐unes de leurs imperfections. L’échantillon était composé de 272 enseignants des écoles élémentaires et secondaires du Portugal. Ils ont répondu à une série d’inventaires destinés à mesurer leurs expectations de contrôle, de succès et d’efficacité, leurs attributions, leur motivation intrinsèque, la valence de leurs buts perçus et comment tout ceci interagit pout agir sur l’engagement professionnel (la variable exogène du modèle). Les analyses des coefficients de pistes et de la variance des variables endogènes valident le modèle intégré proposé ici et suggèrent des stratégies de formation pour accroître la motivation des enseignants. Recent studies show that teachers suffer more than other professional groups from the occupational lack of motivation. A global understanding of teacher motivation requires an adequate framework for its study. The main goal of the current research was to propose and test a model of teacher motivation that integrates constructs from several cognitive‐motivational theories. This integrative model starts from the perspectives of Expectancy‐Value and Learned Helplessness but overcomes some of the limitations of each. The participants were 272 elementary and secondary teachers in Portugal. They responded to a series of inventories designed to measure their expectancies of control, success and efficacy, attributions, intrinsic motivation and perceived goal value levels, and how these interact to influence professional engagement (the model's exogenous variable). Analyses of path coefficients and the variance of endogenous variables support the proposed integrated model and suggest strategies for teacher education that may increase teacher motivation.     

Cultural Values and Happiness: An East-West Dialogue

Abstract

Happiness as a state of mind may be universal, but its meaning is complex and ambiguous. The authors directly examined the relationships between cultural values and experiences of happiness in 2 samples, by using a measurement of values derived from Chinese culture and a measurement of subjective well-being balanced for sources of happiness salient in both the East and the West. The participants were university students–439 from an Eastern culture (Taiwan) and 344 from a Western culture (the United Kingdom). Although general patterns were similar in the 2 samples, the relationships between values and happiness were stronger in the Taiwanese sample than in the British sample. The values social integration and human-heartedness had culture-dependent effects on happiness, whereas the value Confucian work dynamism had a culture-general effect on happiness.