Pursuit Of Long-term Goals Research Articles

Reinforcement sensitivity, sensation seeking, and counter-productive behaviour at secondary schools

Behavioural approach and behavioural inhibition as well as sensation seeking have been postulated important determinants of impulsive and risky decision making, or, the pursuit of long-term goals. Adolescence has been described a particularly sensitive developmental period, as an imbalance of these factors may result in risk-taking and counter-productive behaviour. In the current study, we assessed sensitivity to reward, sensitivity to punishment, and sensation-seeking in a cross-sectional sample of adolescents at secondary schools. The battery also included experimental paradigms to assess different forms delay and probability discounting, risk-taking behaviour and gambling as well as a capacity measure of intelligence. As outcome variables, we assessed counter-productive behaviour, substance consumption, and scholastic achievement. The presentation will focus on an imbalance of motivational approach and avoidance tendencies as predictors of risk-taking behaviour and will end with a brief discussion of the behavioural paradigms.

The achievement flow motive as an element of the autotelic personality: predicting educational attainment in three cultures

Human behavior is directed by an implicit and an explicit motivational system. The intrinsic form of the implicit achievement motive has been demonstrated to predict the experience of flow. Thus, this achievement flow motive can be considered an integral component of the autotelic personality, posited in Flow Theory as dispositional difference in the propensity to experience flow. As implicit motivation predicts long-term behavioral trends and flow predicts quality of performance, the achievement flow motive should be predictive of a long-term goal pursuit such as educational attainment. This hypothesis is tested cross-culturally to shed some light on the universality of flow: Participants from Cameroon, Costa Rica, and Germany were asked about the level of education they attained. To assess their achievement flow motive, the Operant Motive Test was employed. After measurement equivalence was established, analyses revealed that, across all three cultures, the achievement flow motive explained variance in educational attainment independent of achievement values as measured by a scale of the Schwartz Value Survey. Consequently, as would be expected of an element of the autotelic personality, the achievement flow motive predicts long-term academic success.

Indulgence or Self-Control: A Dual Process Model of the Effect of Incidental Pride on Indulgent Choice

This research examines the largely unexamined effect of incidental pride on consumer self-control. The results demonstrate that incidental pride influences long-term goal pursuit through dual processes that result in conflicting outcomes for consumer decisions: indulgent choices when promoting a sense of achievement and virtuous choices when promoting self-awareness. A series of four experiments in the money and health domains shows that the relative weight of each process at the time of a decision determines whether incidental pride leads to more or less indulgence. We provide outcome and process support for our theory, linking pride to self-control behavior in the consumption domain, and rule out alternative explanations for our findings. Thus, the findings demonstrate that the influence of incidental pride on self-control is contingent on the cognitive and contextual factors that affect decision making.

In the Trenches of Real-World Self-Control

Successful goal pursuit involves repeatedly engaging self-control against temptations or distractions that arise along the way. Laboratory studies have identified the brain systems recruited during isolated instances of self-control, and ecological studies have linked self-control capacity to goal outcomes. However, no study has identified the neural systems of everyday self-control during long-term goal pursuit. The present study integrated neuroimaging and experience-sampling methods to investigate the brain systems of successful self-control among smokers attempting to quit. A sample of 27 cigarette smokers completed a go/no-go task during functional magnetic resonance imaging before they attempted to quit smoking and then reported everyday self-control using experience sampling eight times daily for 3 weeks while they attempted to quit. Increased activation in right inferior frontal gyrus, pre-supplementary motor area, and basal ganglia regions of interest during response inhibition at baseline was associated with an attenuated association between cravings and subsequent smoking. These findings support the ecological validity of neurocognitive tasks as indices of everyday response inhibition.

Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs.

Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness showed greater intentions to persist in the face of poor performance on a midterm examination. In Study 2, low SES participants who believed more strongly in fairness reported more willingness to invest time and effort to achieve desirable career outcomes. In Study 3, ethnic minority participants exposed to a manipulation suggesting that fairness conditions in their country were improving reported more willingness to invest resources in pursuit of long-term goals, relative to ethnic minority participants in a control condition. Study 4 replicated Study 3 using an implicit priming procedure, demonstrating that perceptions of the personal relevance of societal fairness mediate these effects. Across these 4 studies, no link between fairness beliefs and self-regulation emerged for members of advantaged (high SES, ethnic majority) groups. Study 5 contributed evidence from the World Values Survey and a representative sample (Inglehart, Basañez, Diez-Medrano, Halman, & Luijkx, 2004). Respondents reported more motivation to work hard to the extent that they believed that rewards were distributed fairly; this effect emerged more strongly for members of lower SES groups than for members of higher SES groups, as indicated by both self-identified social class and ethnicity.

How chocolate keeps you slim. The effect of food temptations on weight watching goal importance, intentions, and eating behavior

In the Western rich food environment, people are constantly confronted with palatable but unhealthy food products. For those who would like to watch their weight, the appeal of immediate satisfaction is in conflict with their long-term weight watching goal, constituting a classic self-control dilemma. The current studies were designed to test the effect of food temptations on self-regulation mechanisms. Hypotheses were based on counteractive control theory stating that temptations trigger goal-directed behavior, thereby forming an adaptive self-regulation mechanism. Two experimental studies showed that exposure to food temptations, compared to a control condition, yielded enhanced goal importance (Study 1), goal intentions, and goal-directed behavior (i.e., healthy eating; Study 2). It is concluded that confrontation with temptations is not always undermining self-control and may even be beneficial for long-term goal pursuit.

Pursuing goals for us: Relationally autonomous reasons in long-term goal pursuit.

People pursue goals for a variety of reasons, including reasons that take into account close relationships (termed relationally autonomous reasons, or RARs). Two longitudinal studies examined the degree to which relational self-construal, RARs, and personally autonomous reasons (PARs) predicted goal attainment. In Study 1, 166 participants rated 7 goals on several goal outcomes at 2 sessions. Results revealed that self-construal was positively associated with RARs and that RARs predicted goal attainment, controlling for PARs. Study 2 (N = 177) added a 3rd follow-up to the Study 1 design, and results showed perceived progress toward one's goals predicted enhanced RARs but not enhanced PARs. Both studies showed that RARs are an effective motivational component in goal pursuit and attainment.

Voluntary control of unavoidable action

Goal-oriented behavior is usually portrayed to be directly related to incentive values. Underlying mechanisms are thought to include reward-oriented response bias and perceptual sensitivity. A recent electrophysiological study by Minamimoto et al. challenges this view, and reports neural activity in the thalamus that appears to counteract response bias. This type of activity might be crucial for our ability to engage voluntarily in actions that give little or no immediate return, but are necessary in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Morality in an Age of Contingency

Let me begin this essay with a note of caution or perhaps an 'all clear' sign: it will not be a jeremiad. I will not lament a process of ongoing fragmentation, of the loss of all values in our time, of the disappearance of community or trust or commitment or the social significance of character formation. Such jeremiads are so common in current debates about values and morality that they constitute a rhetorical genre of their own both in the social sciences and in cultural criticism. They can be found in conservative as well as in progressive versions. The mere fact of their being a genre of their own can already sensitize us to the schematizations and narrative restrictions imposed by this genre. When the American historian Thomas Bender searched American historiography to locate the exact date of the triumph of individualism and materialism over the ideals of Puritan community life, he discovered that such a claim has been made for practically all points in time since 1650. Desperately he asked: 'How many times can community collapse in America?' (1978: 46). Similarly, we should ask ourselves when the time before the alleged contemporary fragmentation of society is said to have been and whether we really do justice to contemporary changes if we constantly force them into the framework of loss and decline. In the first part of this essay I exemplify the problem I have with these pessimistic diagnoses by analysing one of the most influential sociological contributions to this genre in the past few years. In the second part, I sketch an alternative to this type of interpretation before developing a few thoughts in the concluding section about the problem areas for successful value-transmission today. The 'influential diagnosis' I have in mind is Richard Sennett's book The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998. Its title is a clear sign that it belongs to the genre of diagnoses of decline. The author intends to describe a process of corrosion, namely of decay, decomposition, disintegration. What is it that according to Sennett is undergoing such a decomposition today? It is the human character of human beings a phenomenon he defines in terms of the permanent structure of a personality in its emotional and other dimensions. Human character, he writes, 'is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratifications for the sake of a future end' (1998: 10). The formation of characters is said to be fundamentally threatened today by an epochal change in capitalism, for which Sennett uses the term 'flexibilization' (1998: 10):

Dimensions of personality organization as predictors of teenage pregnancy risk.

Personality development as measured by Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test, The Friedman Developmental Level Scoring System for the Rorschach, The Urist Mutuality of Autonomy Scale, The Thematic Apperception Test, and indexes from a structured interview were able to discriminate between teenagers at high- and low-risk for pregnancy. In addition, these measures correlated significantly with each other and enabled a description and comparison of the personality characteristics of adolescents who are at risk for pregnancy and those who are not.