Blogging Benefits in Regards to Motivation

As part of the PNP-3002 course at Bangor University, we were required to write fortnightly blogs on something that we found interesting within the boundaries of emotion and motivation. There were many potential benefits to the concept of blogging about motivation and how it would improve students’ intrinsic motivation for the subject.

One of the most important aspects of the required blogging is that the topic of the blog was allowed to be something of our own choice; the idea behind this comes partly from research by Kemeny (2003) which showed that having some control over a situation created a lot less stress than if no control is available. The other reason behind the idea of free-topic choice for the blog was that if we chose something we were naturally more interested in, our internal/intrinsic motivation for writing the blog would be higher, which research suggests to lead to a higher performance level and therefore higher grades.  (Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., & Deci, E. L. 2006).

However, personal reflection on the free choice of topic gave me incredible difficulty in trying to find something that I was interested enough in to be able to blog about and so because of such was more extrinsically motivated to merely achieve a grade rather than doing it out of personal interest. This may suggest that in certain situations where a person would find a choice difficult, it would be better to give them something set in stone to work towards so as not to waste time or procrastinate looking for a specific topic.

With procrastination in mind, the blogs were also set fortnightly so that the negative stressors of having procrastinated are less damaging than if it was one large deadline. This is shown to work in the study by Solomon, L. J., & Rothblum, E. D. (1984), which showed that more evenly spaced deadlines caused less anxiety through procrastination.

References:

Kemeny, M. E. (2003). The psychobiology of stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(4), 1249129. doi: 10.1111/146798721.01246

Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., & Deci, E. L. (2006). Intrinsic versus extrinsic goal contents in self-determination theory: Another look at the quality of academic motivation. Educational psychologist, 41(1), 19-31.

Ariely,  D.,  &  Wertenbroch,  K.  (2002). Procrastination, deadlines, and performance:  Self-control  by  precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3),  2199224.  doi:  10.1111/146799280.00441 

Solomon, L. J., & Rothblum, E. D. (1984). Academic procrastination: Frequency and cognitive-behavioral correlates. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31(4), 503.

Trigger Warning: The Emotions and Motivations of Abusive Relationships

The topic of abusive relationships is an important one, but also a sensitive one, so if you would find yourself uncomfortable reading about them, please stop reading now.

An abusive relationship can be defined as one that uses any form of abuse such as emotional physical sexual or financial through threats or actual acts to a person with whom you are currently intimate or have been in the past. (stoprelationshipabuse.org). this is usually done to exert some level of control over the partner and uses regular abusive or coercive methods to achieve such power.

Abusive relationships can happen for any number of reasons, but another pressing question is why anyone would stay in an abusive relationship and the site loveisrespect.org outlines some of the main reasons why people may find themselves incapable of leaving an abusive relationship. Conflicting emotions, pressure, distrust and reliance are the main categories within staying in an abusive relationship. The reasons within the categories include being afraid of what the abuser might do them or themselves if they were to leave, not being able to accept that they are in an abusive relationship in the first place, not believing that they have anyone to turn to help them and being unable to leave because of the pressures of leaving children in the relationship with only one parent.

One of the major parts of relationship abuse is that of emotional abuse, and this can be categorised as being a multifaceted category. A study by Murphy, C.M & Hoover, S.A (1999) gives Restrictive Engulfment, Hostile Withdrawal, Denigration, and Dominance / Intimidation as the four categories of emotional abuse. The denigration and dominance/intimidation categories of emotional abuse are the ones most connected to physical abuse as well.

Although it is a common held belief that all abusive relationships are men abusing women, it is also true that there are abusive relationships in which the woman is the abuser, or for it to be an abusive male on male or female on female relationship and there are studies which look behind the motivations of abusers into why they did. One such study is that of Kernsmith, P. in 2005 which looked into the different reasons for physical abuse in men and women. It was found in this study that the common reasons for abuse were the main reasons behind male abusers, female abusers have other motivations such as that of revenge and retaliation to prior abuse on them. This study was conducted on 125 batterers in an intervention program and suggests that because of the different reasons for abuse, women whose reasons for abuse differ from that of power/control/intimidation would not find the counselling provided in the intervention program useful as the power reasons are the main focus of such treatments.

However, it is not all depressing news as although it may be hard, it is possible to successfully leave an abusive relationship. A study of 185 survivors of an abusive relationship by Horton, A.L., & Johnson, B.L. in 1993 looked into the strategies and behaviours that the survivors used, 158 of the survivors were no longer living with their former abusers and a vast majority of the participants cited relying on friends and families as their most influential resources for leaving the relationship.

If you or anyone you know finds themselves within an abusive relationship there are methods you or they can use to help themselves end the relationship and lead healthier lives. The self-help book “Getting Free: A handbook for women in abusive relationships” (1982) is an example of such.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation and its effects on other aspects of life is something that can be discussed for as long as people will be motivated in the first place. However, before we can really understand why motivation affects us the way it does, we must first understand the basic concept of motivation in the first place. What is motivation, and are there different kinds of motivation?

In response to the question, firstly, motivation is a psychological force that guides us as humans towards acting on desires. Secondly, there are many different variations and theories on motivation, though the one which I will be focusing on during the blog is that of the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

            Intrinsic motivation is the kind of motivation that people would associate with the word, in that it is motivation from within one’s self through either an interest in what you are motivated by or by enjoying doing what you are motivated to do. The benefits of having a higher intrinsic motivation can be seen in education in that as long as information is contextualised, children will have a deeper understanding of material due to their increased intrinsic motivation to learn it. Cordova, D. I., & Lepper, M. R. (1996).

            Extrinsic motivation is the kind of motivation that comes from an outside source, such as that of money or awards. This is based not on enjoyment of a task but rather to perform a task to receive something that one deems important. One flaw of extrinsic motivation is that it is less effective than intrinsic motivation when it comes to actually performing a task. This can be seen in the Curry, S., Wagner, E. H., & Grothaus, L. C. (1990) study on methods used to quit smoking in which intrinsic methods such as concerns about one’s own health and amount of self-control were more effective in assisting smoking abstinence than the extrinsic motivators of immediate reinforcement and social influence. This flaw can be seen as an important one that needs addressing due to the fact that in education there is a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation in students between grades 3 and 9 (ages 8-9 to 14-15) shown by the S.Harter study in 1981.

            One interesting aspect of these two types of motivation is how they can affect each other. Intrinsic motivation would be able to affect how effective an extrinsic motivator would be in that if one does not enjoy something or doesn’t deem it important, then that something would not be able to be used as an extrinsic motivator. The effects of extrinsic motivation on intrinsic motivation are more interesting however. In that in one study, the promise of a reward for playing with a toy (drawing materials) in young children actually caused play time with that toy to be reduced. (Malone, T. W., & Lepper, M. R. 1987) This may be because when children expect to be rewarded for something, they aren’t as intrinsically interested in it, in that they only want to play with it because they’ll get something they actually want from it later, so if they do it at all they’ll get the reward, so they won’t do it as much.

So it can be seen through a simple analysis of what motivation is and what some of the different kinds of motivation are that there are many different ways in which being motivated by something can affect a person.

References:

Cordova, D. I., & Lepper, M. R. (1996). Intrinsic motivation and the process of learning: Beneficial effects of contextualization, personalization, and choice.Journal of educational psychology, 88(4), 715.

Curry, S., Wagner, E. H., & Grothaus, L. C. (1990). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for smoking cessation. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 58(3), 310.

Harter, S. (1981). A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation in the classroom: Motivational and informational components. Developmental psychology, 17(3), 300.

Malone, T. W., & Lepper, M. R. (1987). Making learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivations for learning. Aptitude, learning, and instruction, 3, 223-253.

Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation

“Emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.” (Gross 1998)

Mindfulness is the self-regulation of one’s own awareness so that attention is centred on current emotions, feelings and events. This area in psychology was based on the Buddhist applications of awareness.

            Emotion regulation is the idea of being able to change how one expresses emotions both internally and externally by changing their own reaction to initial feelings of the emotion intending to be regulated. This can be done through many methods, such as avoidance, intensification of either the initial emotion of others to counter-act it. Emotional regulation is something that is done by everybody, and problems with emotional regulation such as under or over regulation are theorised to be the causes of certain disorders such as anxiety, under regulation, obsessive compulsive disorder, and over regulation. (Gross, 2007. Campbell-Sills, L., & Barlow, D. H. 2007)

The practical use of mindfulness in psychology is usually centred on the treatments of emotion based psychological problems such as anxiety and stress disorders. (Khoury et al 2013.) Mindfulness based therapies employ the use of regulating ones emotions through the use of changing someone’s relationship with a specific emotion rather than the earlier methods of changing the thoughts themselves. This is to promote a higher acceptance level of one’s emotions rather than to deny them and rely on the use of avoidance strategies.

There are two main mindfulness based therapies which are MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) and MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy). MBSR is a group based therapy using techniques such as meditation to acquire positive mindful awareness designed to help participants of the program to cope better with stressors in the their life. Research suggests that MBSR is capable of helping patients with overall mental health and to be a combatant against stress, depression and anxiety. (Fjorback, L. O., Arendt, M., Ørnbøl, E., Fink, P., & Walach, H. 2011). However one drawback that was mentioned in the meta-analysis by Fjorback et al was that the effectiveness of MBSR is directly correlated with how many years of training in the therapy technique the therapist had, which means that those with a lower amount of training would have difficulty replicating positive results in patients undergoing MBSR. MBCT is a therapeutic technique heavily influenced by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that includes aspect of mindfulness that is used mainly to help patients with depression from relapsing, most usually patients that suffer from severe forms of depression such as MDD (Major Depressive Disorder.) The main objective of MBCT is to alter the mind-set of a depressive patient so that when their depression is triggered, instead of relying upon automatic responses which would lead them into a depressive episode, they are able to recognise what is triggering them and become aware of the emotions that are being caused by such and to accept them and for it to become more of a reflective process than that of a reactive one. Research by Ma, and Teasdale (2004) has shown that in such cases, the relapse rate can be reduced by up to 50%.

Mindfulness and it’s ideology of accepting and reflecting can then be seen as an effective method of better regulating emotions rather than using coping mechanisms which result in negative drawbacks due to not dealing with the issues that have caused the emotions.

References:

Campbell-Sills, L., & Barlow, D. H. (2007). Incorporating emotion regulation into conceptualizations and treatments of anxiety and mood disorders.

Corcoran, K. M., Farb, N., Anderson, A., & Segal, Z. V. (2009). Mindfulness and emotion regulation. Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment, 339-355.

Fjorback, L. O., Arendt, M., Ørnbøl, E., Fink, P., & Walach, H. (2011). Mindfulness‐Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness‐Based Cognitive Therapy–a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 124(2), 102-119.

Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of general psychology, 2(3), 271.

Khoury, B., Lecomte, T., Fortin, G., Masse, M., Therien, P., Bouchard, V., … & Hofmann, S. G. (2013). Mindfulness-Based Therapy: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis. Clinical Psychology Review.

Ma, S. H., & Teasdale, J. D. (2004). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: replication and exploration of differential relapse prevention effects.Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 72(1), 31.