The role of implicit motivation in hot and cold goal pursuit: Effects on goal progress, goal rumination, and emotional well-being

Two cross-sectional studies examined the role of implicit motivational needs in the association between personal goal pursuits and depressive symptoms and affect. Replicating and extending on findings reported by Brunstein et al. [Brunstein, J. C., Schultheiss, O. C., & Grässmann, R. (1998). Personal goals and emotional well-being: The moderating role of motive dispositions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 494–508], both studies provided evidence that goal progress significantly accounted for variations in depressive symptoms and happiness only in individuals with high levels of implicit motivation, but not in individuals low in implicit motivation. Moreover, in the absence of a strong sense of goal commitment, high levels of implicit motivation were associated with high goal progress in both studies and low levels of goal rumination in Study 2. These findings are interpreted within a dual-systems framework of motivation that distinguishes an implicit, intuitive, and hedonically driven from an explicit, effortful-analytical, and non-hedonic mode of goal pursuit.     

Commonalities and differences in characteristics of persons at risk for narcissism and mania

Clinicians have long noted overlap in some of the key features of narcissism and bipolar disorder, including excessively high goals and impulsivity. In addition, empirical findings consistently document high levels of comorbidity between the two conditions. To better understand the similarities and differences in psychological qualities associated with mania- and narcissism-related vulnerabilities, we administered to 233 undergraduates a broad range of measures pertaining to goals and affects (both their experience and their dysregulation) and impulsivity. As hypothesized, tendencies toward both narcissism and hypomania related to elevations on measures of affective and goal dysregulation. In addition, hypomania tendencies were related to higher impulsivity, but that association did not appear for narcissistic tendencies. Results highlight key commonalities and differences between those at risk for mania versus narcissism. Future research should examine these relationships in clinically diagnosed samples.     

Obligatory and optional personal life investments in old and very old age: Validation and functional relations

Personal life investment (PLI) measures motivational energy invested in central life domains. We distinguished between obligatory PLIs, that is, required investments, and optional PLIs, that is, investments that are possible but not necessary. Data from the Berlin Aging Study (N = 516; 70–103 years) were employed to investigate the validity of this distinction. We further explored how both PLI types relate to aging satisfaction and whether associations with validation variables and satisfaction differed depending on resource limitations (poor health). As expected based on conceptual affinities between the distinctions of obligatory-optional PLI and approach-avoidance tendencies, both PLI types showed positive relations with extraversion (a correlate of approach), but only obligatory PLI was positively related to neuroticism (a correlate of avoidance). Optional PLI (not obligatory PLI) was related to higher aging satisfaction, but only in fairly healthy people. This underscores differential functional relations of optional PLI depending on resource availability.

Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.5-month-old infants

Human infants' tendency to attribute goals to observed actions may help us to understand where people's obsession with goals originates from. While one-year-old infants liberally interpret the behaviour of many kinds of agents as goal-directed, a recent report [Kamewari, K., Kato, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hiraki, K. (2005). Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to human action and to humanoid-robot motion. Cognitive Development, 20, 303-320] suggested that younger infants restrict goal attribution to humans and human-like creatures. The present experiment tested whether 6.5-month-old infants would be willing to attribute a goal to a moving inanimate box if it slightly varied its goal approach within the range of the available efficient actions. The results were positive, demonstrating that featural identification of agents is not a necessary precondition of goal attribution in young infants and that the single most important behavioural cue for identifying a goal-directed agent is variability of behaviour. This result supports the view that the bias to give teleological interpretation to actions is not entirely derived from infants' experience.     

图画口语命名中的语义效应

图画口语命名包括了概念准备、词条选择、音韵编码和发音等加工阶段, 是口语产生研究中经典的实验任务。文章首先简要介绍了两类言语产生的基础理论, 然后介绍了不同研究范式下的语义抑制效应与语义促进效应。在此基础上总结了影响语义效应的各种因素, 并重点介绍了竞争说、动态词汇网络假说、反应一致说、语义选择说以及反应排除说。最后基于已有的研究成果与研究现状指出了下一步的研究方向。     

Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants' attribution of goals

Twelve-month-old infants attribute goals to both familiar, human agents and unfamiliar, non-human agents. They also attribute goal-directedness to both familiar actions and unfamiliar ones. Four conditions examined information 12-month-olds use to determine which actions of an unfamiliar agent are goal-directed. Infants who witnessed the agent interact contingently with a human confederate encoded the agent's actions as goal-directed; infants who saw a human confederate model an intentional stance toward the agent without the agent's participation, did not. Infants who witnessed the agent align itself with one of two potential targets before approaching that target encoded the approach as goal-directed; infants who did not observe the self-alignment did not encode the approach as goal-directed. A possible common underpinning of these two seemingly independent sources of information is discussed.     

Individual differences in the social facilitation effect: A review and meta-analysis

The present study reviews the social facilitation literature and identifies two overarching responses to social presence: negative-apprehensive and positive-self-assured. These responses correspond to two general orientations toward the social environment described in current personality literature: a negative orientation, comprised of neuroticism and low self-esteem; and a positive orientation, comprised of extraversion and high self-esteem. A meta-analysis reveals that social presence is associated with performance impairment for negatively oriented individuals, and with performance improvement for positively oriented individuals. Additional analysis reveals that personality is a more substantial moderator of the effect of social presence than is task complexity. The results of this study open a new avenue in the research on social facilitation, encouraging a closer inspection of the meaning that various individuals attribute to social presence.     

Will any doll do? 12-month-olds' reasoning about goal objects

Infants as young as 5 months of age view familiar actions such as reaching as goal-directed (Woodward, 1998), but how do they construe the goal of an actor's reach? Six experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants represent reaching actions as directed to a particular individual object, to a narrowly defined object category (e.g., an orange dump truck), or to a more broadly defined object category (e.g., any truck, vehicle, artifact, or inanimate object). The experiments provide evidence that infants are predisposed to represent reaching actions as directed to categories of objects at least as broad as the basic level, both when the objects represent artifacts (trucks) and when they represent people (dolls). Infants do not use either narrower category information or spatiotemporal information to specify goal objects. Because spatiotemporal information is central to infants' representations of inanimate object motions and interactions, the findings are discussed in relation to the development of object knowledge and action representations.     

Word acquisition, retention, and transfer: findings from contextual and isolated word training

Successful reading instruction entails not only acquiring new words but also remembering them after training has finished and accessing their word-specific representations when they are encountered in new text. We report two studies demonstrating that acquisition, retention, and transfer of unfamiliar words were affected differentially by isolated word and context training. Materials were individualized to include only those words that average readers in second grade were unable to name in context. Different words were trained in each condition; context training presented words in stories, and isolated word training presented words on flashcards. Together, the studies show that context training promotes word acquisition beyond that experienced from reading words in isolation. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, memory performance for words trained in context and in isolation did not differ; children demonstrated excellent retention over an 8-day interval in both conditions. Finally, transfer was maximized when the congruency between training and testing was high. Therefore, when reading trained words in novel circumstances, the best method of training was mediated by the transfer task employed at test.     

工作－家庭界面研究的新视角：工作家庭促进研究

工作家庭促进关注的是工作－家庭关系中的积极方面,指的是个体由于在某一社会系统（工作或者家庭）中的投入,而对另一系统（如家庭或者工作）的发展产生贡献的程度。文章首先探讨了工作家庭促进的理论源流、概念界定以及三个主要的研究方向;接下来介绍了基于系统论思想的促进发生机制模型;最后指出了今后两个首要的研究方向,即工作家庭促进测量工具的开发及其与相关变量的关系研究