Understanding Motivation and Emotion, Seventh Edition

Book Preface

Now is an ideal time to take a course in motivation and emotion. This is becausemotivation and emotion scientists have just completed a highly productive decade in understanding how human motives operate. The field is now in a “golden age.” Each year, new discoveries are made, new insights are gained, and new theories emerge and are validated. As a whole, the field can now provide clear and deeply satisfying answers to core questions, such as the following: What do people want?; Why did she do that?; From where do motivation and emotion come?; Why do motivation and emotion change?; and What good are they—what do motivation and emotion predict and explain? The book’s title is Understanding Motivation and Emotion, and many pages of the book are devoted to this purpose. A deep understanding is great, but it is even better to take the next step and actually apply that knowledge to improve people’s lives. As a field, we now understand the nature of motivation and emotion, their causes, the conditions that affect them, and how motivational and emotional processes lead to productive outcomes such as learning, performance, and well-being.

The field’s understanding is so deep that researchers can now confidently offer practical recommendations. The book includes several state of-the-art intervention programs designed explicitly to enhance people’s motivation and emotion so to improve their lives in some important way. Because this is so, it may now be time to re-title the book as, Understanding and Applying Motivation and Emotion.

By the time you turn the book’s last page, I hope you will gain two important achievements. First, I hope you gain a deep and sophisticated understanding of motivation and emotion. Second, I hope you will gain the practical know-how to apply that knowledge in a concrete and personally meaningful way.Motivational and emotional principles and findings can be applied in many domains, but the most obvious include the home, school, workplace, clinical setting, counseling center, gym, athletic field, all aspects of health care, and interpersonal relationships in general.

I assumed some background knowledge on the part of the reader, such as an introductory course in psychology. The intended audience is upper-level undergraduates enrolled in courses in the department of psychology. I also write for students in other disciplines, largely because motivation and emotion research reaches into so many diverse areas of study and application, including education, health, counseling, clinical, sports, industrial/organizational, and business. The book concentrates on human, rather than on nonhuman, motivation.

WHAT’S NEW IN THE SEVENTH EDITION

It has been three years since the last edition of the book was published. In that time, two important trends unfolded. First, motivation and emotion scientists were able to reach a greater sense of consensus as to what constructs, ideas, theories, and findings are most important and meaningful. For someone who has spent a lifetime in the field, it was good to see this greater sense of agreement, consensus, and clarity of purpose. This achievement just makes the story of motivation and emotion study an easier story to tell. What this means for the reader is that the seventh edition of the book is 50 pages shorter than the sixth edition. I think students might appreciate this greater clarity and organization. That said, all of the following motivational and emotional phenomena are new to the seventh edition: Expectancy × Value theories, with a special emphasis on value-promoting interventions; mindfulness, terrormanagement theory; intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals; psychological need frustration; internalization and integration of extrinsic motivations; leadership motivation profile, coping with failure, two views of the self, including self-as-object and self-as-agent, and the question of whether or not people have a “true self.”

Each chapter features a chapter box that addresses a specific concern. For instance, the box in Chapter 3 uses the information on the motivated and emotional brain to understand how antidepressant drugs work. The box in Chapter 8 uses the information on goals to lay out a step-by-step goal-setting and goal-striving program that can be applied to many different objectives. At the end of each chapter, a set of 10 recommended readings appears. These recommended journal articles represent suggestions for further individual study. I selected these particular readings using four criteria: (1) each reading’s represents what is central to the chapter, (2) its topic appeals to a wide audience, (3) its length is short, and (4) its methodology and data analysis are reader-friendly.

INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL/TEST BANK

The seventh edition includes an expanded Instructor’s Manual/Test Bank. This supplement includes classroom discussion questions, recommended activities, brief demonstrations of motivational principles, and other tools to help instructors teach their students. Interested instructors should contact their Wiley representative for more information.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many voices speak within the pages of the book. Much of what I write emerged from conversations with colleagues and through my reading of their work. I have benefited from so many colleagues that I now find it impossible to acknowledge them all. Still, I want to try. My first expression of gratitude goes to all those colleagues who, formally or casually, intentionally or inadvertently, knowingly or unknowingly, shared their ideas in conversation: Nathalie Aelterman, Avi Assor, Roy Baumeister, Daniel Berlyne, Virginia Blankenship, Mimi Bong, Jerry Burger, Sung Hyeon Cheon, Valery Chirkov, Steven G. Cole, Bud Craig, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Richard deCharms, Edward L. Deci, Andrew Elliot, Marylene Gagne, Nicolas Gillet, Peter Gollwitzer, Wendy Grolnick, Leen Haerens, Martin Hagger, Marc Halusic, Pat Hardre, E. Tory Higgins, Holley Hodgins, Alice M. Isen, Carroll Izard, Hye-Ryen Jang, Hyungshim Jang, Mireille Joussemet, Haya Kaplan, TimKasser, Eun-JooKim, Sung-il Kim, RichardKoestner,Andraes Krapp, Jennifer LaGuardia, Randy Larsen,Woogul Lee, Lisa Legault, George Loewenstein, Chris Lonsdale, Wayne Ludvigson, David McClelland, Lennia Matos, Marina Milyavskaya, Kou Murayama, Henry Newell, Glen Nix, Nikos Ntoumanis, Brad Olson, Erika Patall, Dawn Robinson, Tom Rocklin, Carl Rogers, Guy Roth, Richard Ryan, Oliver Schultheiss, Kennon Sheldon, Paul Silvia, Ellen Skinner, Bart Soenens, Richard Solomon, Martyn Standage, Yulan Su, Silvan Tomkins, Robert Vallerand, Maarten Vansteenkiste, Feliciano Veiga, John Chee Keng Wang, Karin Weber-Gaparoni, Netta Weinstein, Dan Wegner, Geoffrey Williams, and Rex Wright. I consider each of these contributors to be my colleague and kindred spirit in the fun and struggle to understand human strivings. My second expression of gratitude goes to those who explicitly donated their time and energy to reviewing the early drafts of the book, including Debora R. Baldwin, Sandor B. Brent,Gustavo Carlo, Herbert L. Colston, Richard Dienstbier, Robert Emmons, Valeri Farmer-Dougan, Todd M. Freeberg, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Wayne Harrison, Carol A. Hayes, Teresa M. Heckert, John Hinson, August Hoffman, Mark S. Hoyert, Wesley J. Kasprow, Norman E. Kinney, John Kounios, Robert Madigan, Randall Martin, Michael McCall, Jim McMartin, James J. Ryan, Kraig L. Schell, Peter Senkowski, Henry V. Soper, Michael Sylvester, Ronald R. Ulm, Wesley White, and A. Bond Woodruff.

I sincerely thank all the students I have had the pleasure to work with over the years. It was back at Ithaca College that I first became convinced that my students wanted and needed such a book. In a very real sense, I wrote the first edition for them. The students who occupy my thoughts today are those with me at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. For readers familiar with the earlier editions, this seventh edition presents a tone that is decidedly more practical and applied.

This balance comes in part from my daily conversations with students. Ithaca, New York, is doubly important to me, because it was in this beautiful town in upstate New York that I met Deborah Van Patten ofWiley (then Harcourt College Publishers). Deborah was every bit as responsible for getting this book off the ground as I was. Although 22 years have now passed, I still want to express my heartfelt gratitude to you, Deborah. The professionals at Wiley have been wonderful. Everyone atWiley has been both a valuable resource and a source of pleasure, especially LisaWojcik, Nichole Urban, Nicole Repasky, Judy Howarth, Ethan Lispon, Indirakumari S, and Mike Cullen.

I am especially grateful for the advice, patience, assistance, and direction provided by my psychology editor Veronica Visentin. Thanks.
—Johnmarshall Reeve