Understanding the motivational effects of procedural and informational justice in feedback processes

Building upon traditional feedback models, this study examined the role of fair treatment in feedback contexts. Structural equation modelling using data from 236 undergraduate students highlighted perceived accuracy as a mediator in the credibility‐motivation relationship as well as a relationship between accuracy and perceptions of procedural and informational justice. In addition, the results showed that the motivating effects of feedback accuracy partially occurred through procedural justice perceptions. Tests of an alternative model also demonstrated the interactive effects of credibility and accuracy on justice perceptions. Overall, this study provides insight into the role of fairness in appraisal processes, as well as how fairness might enhance recipients' reactions to appraisal and, subsequently, the effectiveness of appraisal systems.     

Retrieval processes in distance cognition

Two studies were performed to evaluate the role of information retrieval in the cognition of traversed distance. In Study 1, subjects walked a pathway containing intersections that were labeled with either high-frequency or low-frequency proper names. The pathway with high-frequency names was estimated as longer than the pathway with low-frequency names. Subsequent tests of memory for names indicated that high- and low-frequency names were recognized equally well, but that the former were recalled more easily. Prompting subjects with intersection names eliminated the difference in distance estimation between highand low-frequency name conditions. A second study demonstrated that category prompts that increased information recall also increased estimated distance. Results were interpreted as suggesting a significant role of information retrieval in distance cognition.     

Some social features of cognition

This paper describes and assesses a number of dispositions which are instrumental in allowing us to take on the opinions of others unselfconsciously. It is argued that these dispositions are in fact reliable in the environments in which they tend to come into play. In addition, it is argued that agents are, by their own lights, justified in the beliefs they arrive at as a result of these processes. Finally, these processes are argued to provide a basis for rejecting the claim that fixation of belief is radically holistic.     

Personality,motivational, and social cognition predictors of leisure-time physical activity

ObjectiveThe purpose of the present study was to investigate associations between personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism, autonomous motivation, and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) constructs and leisure-time physical activity. The study examined whether autonomous motivation and the TPB constructs mediate the association between personality traits and physical activity, and whether personality traits moderate the relationship of autonomous motivation and the TPB constructs with physical activity.MethodsMiddle-aged women (N = 441) completed self-report measures of personality traits, autonomous motivation, attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control (PBC) and intention. Moderate-to-vigorous leisure-time physical activity (MVPA) was measured using accelerometers approximately seven weeks later. Participants’ past accelerometer-based MVPA was available from four years earlier.ResultsOnly autonomous motivation and past MVPA directly predicted MVPA. Neuroticism and past MVPA were indirectly related with MVPA through autonomous motivation. No support for a moderator role of personality traits was found.ConclusionsCurrent data suggest that autonomous motivation and past experience are prominent determinants of accelerometer-based leisure-time MVPA, but not beliefs and intentions.     

Research note: A motivational perspective on change processes and outcomes

A reengineering process in a chemical plant with technostructural and human-process-oriented interventions was analysed in order to develop and test a generalized expectancy?–?valence-theory model for participation in the change process and effective change. It was assumed that both supervisory support and favourable colleagues' change attitudes enhance one's change motivation, and participation in the change process, by increasing participation opportunities, and positive attitudes toward change. In turn, employee participation should have a positive impact on outcomes of the change process. After 2 years of restructuring, 104 employees participated in the evaluation of the change process. Path analyses revealed results that supported our model by and large. Employee participation in the change process predicts positive organizational effects. Favourable change attitudes as well as perceived participation opportunities, and supervisory support, which were integrated into one scale, predict the degree of employee participation. The latter also showed a direct path to organizational effects.     

Pavlovian processes in the motivational control of instrumental performance

Hungry rats were rewarded for pressing a lever on a multiple schedule. During one component the reward was a sucrose solution, whereas food pellets acted as the reward during another component. Lever pressing was never rewarded during the third component. When the drive state was switched from hunger to thirst and the animals tested in extinction, they pressed more in the presence of the component stimulus that had been associated with the sucrose reward during training. A similar effect was observed during the extinction test of a second study in which the component stimuli had signalled non-contingent presentations of either the sucrose or pellet rewards in the absence of the lever. This suggests that the instrumental irrelevant incentive effect observed in the first experiment was due, at least in part, to the Pavlovian relationship between the component stimuli and the reinforcers during training. In fact, when the size of the effects controlled by purely Pavlovian and supposedly instrumental contingencies was compared directly in the final study, no difference could be detected.     

Recoding processes in recognition: Some effects of presentation rate

Character classification time was studied in a situation in which Ss sometimes had to decide whether a probe item was a translation of a remembered item according to a previously learned translation scheme. When translation between probe and remembered items was necessary, the rate at which the to-be-remembered items had been presented affected the form of the memory-scanning functions. This result seemed to contradict Cruse and Clifton’s (1973) hypothesis that Ss translated all remembered items into the form of the probe after the probe was presented. An alternative model claimed that, when time permits, Ss translate to-be-remembered items into their alternate form at the time of presentation and scan the resulting translated items at a relatively slow rate if the probe matches them in form. If Ss are unable to translate the to-be-remembered items when they are presented, they resort to the strategy of translating the probe item into the form in which the remembered items had been presented.     

Behavioral and motivational effects of immune-system activation

Immune-system activity induces changes in animal behavior such as decreased food intake, decreased exploratory behavior, increased sleep, and impaired cognitive functioning. These changes are mediated by proinflammatory cytokines, and the administration of cytokines produces the same profile of behavior change as do infection and inflammation. Results demonstrating differential effects of immune-system activation depending on environmental contingencies and physiological states support the hypothesis that the behavioral effects of immune activity may be mediated by motivation. In this article, the author outlines the behavioral changes induced by immune-system activation and discusses evidence for a motivational analysis of immune-induced behavior change and the potential involvement of motivation in human sickness behavior.     

Some motivational properties of sensory stimulation in psychotic children

The purpose of this experiment was to assess the reinforcing properties of sensory stimulation for autistic children. Three different types of sensory stimulation were used: music, visual flickering stimulation (e.g., strobe light), and visual movement (e.g., windshield wiper). In a given session, one of the three kinds of sensory stimulation was presented for 5 sec contingent upon the children's bar pressing (FR5). In Phase I, which was designed to assess the differential reinforcement value of these events, four children participated in sessions with each of the sensory events. In Phase II, designed to assess variables influencing the maintenance of responding for the sensory events, two children continued to participate in sessions with their preferred sensory event until satiation occurred. The results showed the following: (1) Sensory events could be used as reinforcing stimuli to produce a high rate of responding which was relatively durable over time: (2) the reinforcement function of the sensory events was idiosyncratic across children. with one child preferring one kind of sensory event, and another child preferring a different kind; (3) there was substantial variability in daily response rates: and (4) when a child satiated on a particular sensory event, a relatively small change in the sensory event was sufficient to recover a high rate of responding. The results of this study suggest that sensory reinforcers can profitably be used in behavior therapy with autistic children.     

Automatic effects of deviancy cues on creative cognition

Three experiments test the existence of an automatic deviancy‐creativity link. Using a lexical decision task, in Experiment 1 we found a semantic link between deviancy and creativity words in that decision times for creativity‐related words were enhanced after subliminal deviancy priming. In Experiment 2, participants were led to think about either a punk or an engineer and afterwards were administered creative insight and analytical reasoning problems. According to a pretest, punks and engineers were judged as differing in uniqueness but not in creativity. Participants given ‘punk’ priming solved more creative insight problems and fewer analytical reasoning problems than those given ‘engineer’ priming. In Experiment 3, participants were incidentally exposed to abstract artworks symbolically expressing either the concept of conformity or deviancy and were subsequently asked to solve a creative generation task. Exposure to the artwork representing deviancy led to generation of more creative solutions than exposure to that representing conformity. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reconnecting cognition in the lab and cognition in real life: The role of compensatory social and motivational factors in explaining how cognition ages in the wild

The papers in this Special Issue compellingly show that older adults' everyday cognitive life is governed not by the decline in elementary cognitive processes as measured in the lab, but by a multitude of compensatory mechanisms, most of which are of the social/motivational variety. Much of this compensatory behavior can be elicited with no or only little experimental prodding, underscoring the self-organizing or self-initiated nature of this type of behavior, even in advanced old age. We suggest that the study of compensation and the orchestration of cognitive, social, and motivational compensatory mechanisms in effective and healthy aging provides a meaningful challenge to traditional ways of examining developmental changes in cognitive performance.     

Reinforcement sensitivity theory and major motivational and self-regulatory processes in children

The present research explores the role of sensitivity in the BIS and the BAS as antecedents to cognitive and affective motivational processes in middle-school children. Two studies were initiated to examine the relationship between sensitivity in the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral approach system (BAS) and several important motivational factors. The first study looked at the assumption that the BIS and the BAS are systematically linked to motives and achievement goals. The second study investigated the links between BIS/BAS and individual differences in self-regulatory processes and affect during problem-solving. The findings indicate that the motive to avoid failure, the inability to take action after failure and to initiate intended goal-directed activities, as well as the tendency to focus on avoiding misunderstanding are all grounded in threat responsiveness. Conversely, the motive to approach success, self-efficacy and the tendency to focus on comparison with others in a problem-solving setting are grounded in incentive responsiveness.     

Reinforcement sensitivity theory and major motivational and self-regulatory processes in children

The present research explores the role of sensitivity in the BIS and the BAS as antecedents to cognitive and affective motivational processes in middle-school children. Two studies were initiated to examine the relationship between sensitivity in the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral approach system (BAS) and several important motivational factors. The first study looked at the assumption that the BIS and the BAS are systematically linked to motives and achievement goals. The second study investigated the links between BIS/BAS and individual differences in self-regulatory processes and affect during problem-solving. The findings indicate that the motive to avoid failure, the inability to take action after failure and to initiate intended goal-directed activities, as well as the tendency to focus on avoiding misunderstanding are all grounded in threat responsiveness. Conversely, the motive to approach success, self-efficacy and the tendency to focus on comparison with others in a problem-solving setting are grounded in incentive responsiveness.     

Cognitive and motivational processes underlying coping flexibility: a dual-process model

Discriminative facility was proposed as a cognitive process and need for closure was proposed as a motivational process underlying coping flexibility. The dual-process model posits that need for closure influences discriminative facility, which in turn modifies coping flexibility and psychological adjustment. In Study 1, results of structural equation modeling provided support for the dual-process model. This model was further examined using experimental methods (Study 2) and a prospective design (Study 3). Consistent with the dual-process model, results from all 3 studies showed that participants who were more motivated to seek alternative coping strategies tended to encode stressful situations in a more differentiated way. These individuals used a greater variety of strategies to fit different situational demands and were better adjusted.     

A motivational perspective on risky behaviors: the role of personality and affect regulatory processes

The present study tested a motivational model in which personality influences on risky behaviors were hypothesized to be primarily indirectly mediated, by shaping the nature and quality of emotional experience as well as characteristic styles of coping with these emotions. This model was tested in a representative community sample of 1,666 young adults, aged 18 to 25 years old. Results revealed strong support for the model, indicating that broad traits related to neuroticism and extraversion promote involvement in alcohol use and risky sex via distinct pathways. Neurotic individuals were prone to engage in risky behaviors as a way to cope with aversive mood states, whereas extraverted individuals were more likely to engage in risky behaviors as a way to enhance positive affective experience. In contrast, impulsivity directly predicted some forms of risk taking, and interacted with extraversion and neuroticism to predict motives for risky behaviors. The model provides a highly general though not complete account of risky behaviors.     

Threat of bodily harm has opposing effects on cognition

Several theoretical frameworks have suggested that anxiety/stress impairs cognitive performance. A competing prediction is made by attentional narrowing models that predict that stress decreases the processing of task-irrelevant items, thus benefiting performance when task-irrelevant information interferes with behavior. Critically, previous studies have not evaluated these competing frameworks when potent emotional manipulations are involved. Here, we used threat of bodily harm preceding a color-word Stroop task to test these claims. We found a basic effect of threat consisting of a slowing down of performance during neutral Stroop trials. Furthermore, both facilitation and interference scores were affected by threat of shock in a way that was consistent with a reduced-distractor effect. Taken together, we interpret our findings in terms of two opposing effects of stress on cognitive performance. Although partly consistent with the attentional narrowing hypothesis, both resource models and cognitive breadth models require revision in order to account for the results.     

Selective effects of prior motivational experience on current on-line control of attention

This study examined the influence of prior motivational experience on the efficiency of executive attention control during performance of a task set reconfiguration task (Rogers & Monsell, 1995). Results revealed that motivation manipulations selectively affected attention switching mechanisms, but did not influence either inhibition of crosstalk from competing stimuli, or basic response execution time. This provides additional evidence for distinct attentional systems involved in resolution of response and perceptual competition. Speculations regarding the neural systems that mediate both motivation and attention switching are considered, pointing to a possible involvement of dopaminergic influences on the ventral striatum.