People base their decisions not only on their own self-interest but also on the interests of close others. Generally, the personal self has primacy in the motivational hierarchy in the Western culture. A recent study found that friends have the same motivational hierarchy as the personal self in the Eastern collectivist culture. Remaining unknown is whether the motivational hierarchy of the per...

What is the primary motivational basis of self-definition? The authors meta-analytically assessed 3 hypotheses: (a) The individual self is motivationally primary, (b) the collective self is motivationally primary, and (c) neither self is inherently primary; instead, motivational primacy depends on which self becomes accessible through contextual features. Results identified the individual self ...

The present study probed 409 Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) learners' motivation and attitude toward English as an International Language (EIL) by investigating the causal relationships of their facets via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). To do so, the Persian version of the ‘attitudes toward EIL’ scale was designed and validated. It measures five constructs of: cultural realism, ...

The primary purpose of the present study was to identify motivational profiles of adolescent athletes using cluster analysis in non-Western culture. A second purpose was to examine relationships between physical self-perception differences of adolescent athletes and motivational profiles. One hundred and thirty six male (Mage = 17.46, SD = 1.25 years) and 80 female adolescent athletes (Mage = 1...

Research suggests that different motivational dynamics underlie right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). These differences may be framed in the theory of basic human values. RWA may trace back to conservation versus openness-to-change values, and SDO to self-enhancement versus self-transcendence values. Based on a large-scale German survey, associations of RWA a...

Using motivational intensity theory as a framework, three experiments examined how implicit self-focus (manipulated with masked first-name priming) and explicit self-focus (manipulated with a large mirror) influence effort-related cardiovascular activity, particularly systolic blood pressure reactivity. Theories of self-focused attention suggest that both implicit and explicit self-focus bring ...

Past research provides initial evidence that errors pertaining to undesired (vs. desired) self-standards are of greater motivational significance, but little is known about how quickly people recognize and respond to such errors. To examine immediate responses to errors pertaining to desired and undesired self-standards, we assessed event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants judged self...

BACKGROUND Self-efficacy is an important predictor of health behaviour change. Within the health action process approach (HAPA; Schwarzer, 2008), motivational and volitional self-efficacy can be distinguished. Motivational self-efficacy is assumed to serve as predictor of intention formation whereas volitional self-efficacy should be relevant for behaviour change. This study examined these assu...