Psychology
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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Psychology.
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Browsing Psychology by Author "Fujita, Kentaro"
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Item A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Metamotivational Knowledge of Construal Level in the United States and Japan(American Psychological Association, 2020)Metamotivation refers to the beliefs and mechanisms by which people regulate their motivational states to achieve desired ends. Recent metamotivation research demonstrates that Westerners recognize the benefits of engaging in high-level and low-level construal (i.e., motivational orientations toward abstract, essential vs. concrete, idiosyncratic features) for performance on various tasks. We present the first cross-cultural investigation of this knowledge of how to create such construal level task-motivation fit in Eastern and Western cultures. Two studies reveal that American and Japanese participants similarly understand the benefits of high-level vs. low-level construal. American and Japanese participants also similarly recognize the various strategies with which to induce high-level vs. low-level construal—e.g., thinking about why vs. how (Study 1) and engaging in global vs. local visual processing (Study 2). Study 2 also suggests that this metamotivational knowledge in both cultures may guide people’s preferences for these preparatory strategies when anticipating different performance tasks. Taken together, the current research provides preliminary evidence of cross-cultural consistency in metamotivational knowledge of the benefits of high-level and low-level construal and the functional role of this metamotivational knowledge in goal pursuit.Item Metamotivation: Emerging Research on the regulation of motivational states(Elsevier, 2020)Until recently, research examining the self-regulation of motivation focused primarily on the strategies people use to bolster the amount of motivation they have for pursuing a task goal. In contrast, our metamotivational framework highlights the importance of also examining if people recognize which qualitatively distinct types of motivation (e.g., promotion vs. prevention) are most helpful for achieving their goal, given the demands of the task or situation. At the heart of this framework is the idea that any given motivational state involves performance tradeoffs, such that it may be relatively beneficial for some tasks, but detrimental for others. In this piece, we review research suggesting that, on average, people (a) possess metamotivational knowledge of such tradeoffs (particularly those posited by regulatory focus theory, self-determination theory, and construal level theory), (b) recognize strategies that could be used to induce adaptive motivational states, and (c) implement this knowledge (at times) to increase the likelihood of performance success. We also discuss future directions for metamotivation research, including whether and when individual differences in metamotivational knowledge predict real-world outcomes, how such metamotivational knowledge develops, and whether there is a general metamotivational competency that predicts people’s sensitivity to a broad range of motivationally-relevant performance tradeoffs.