Stability of and Changes in Implicit Motives. A Narrative Review of Empirical Studies

The relationship between implicit motives and physical activity: a scoping review

BACKGROUND

Interventions that leverage implicit motives - affect-based, non-conscious motivational dispositions - may increase physical activity by making physical activity more pleasurable. However, there is no evidence synthesis of the empirical data linking the major implicit motives (achievement, affiliation, and power motives) and physical activity. We aimed to close this research gap.

METHODS

Following a systematic literature search in the PsycInfo, PubMed, and Web of Science databases until August 2024, we performed a scoping review. We included German- or English-language publications in peer-reviewed journals or books that followed an observational or intervention study design. Studies had to link ≥ 1 major implicit motive measured via a well-established method to physical activity behavior. We critically appraised the methodological quality of the included studies using an adaptation of the JBI critical appraisal checklist for analytical cross-sectional studies and synthesized the evidence qualitatively.

RESULTS

Out of 1047 potentially relevant records, five publications (seven studies, N = 550) were included. All eligible studies were observational (six cross-sectional, one prospective longitudinal). The achievement motive was researched the most. The data indicated a relatively consistent positive association between physical activity and the achievement motive, particularly in athletes and in sports-specific settings. The associations with the affiliation and power motives were more mixed. Most studies were conducted in sports-specific settings. All studies elicited methodological concerns, to varying degrees.

CONCLUSIONS

The available data indicate a positive association between achievement motive strength and physical activity. However, important limitations, especially the lack of intervention studies and the use of non-gold standard assessment methods, limit the confidence in the findings. More, methodologically sound research is needed to better understand the link between implicit motives and physical activity, especially in the general population.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION

PROSPERO CRD42023392198.

Exploring motivational patterns in high-performing pianists: evidence from Cliburn competitors' biographies

This research examines the motivational patterns of high-performing classical pianists, characterized by a combination of implicit motives (i.e., non-conscious preferences for specific incentives). Utilizing the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, I analyzed textual data from biographies of 107 pianists (i.e., Juniors aged 13-17: n = 38; Professionals aged 18-30: n = 30; Amateurs aged 35 and older: n = 39) participating in the prestigious 2022-2023 Van Cliburn Competitions. My results showed distinct profiles of implicit motives among pianists compared to non-pianists, with significantly higher need for achievement and need for power. While professional pianists exhibited the lowest level of need for power, junior pianists demonstrated the highest level of need for affiliation. Gender and age predicted part of pianists' implicit motives. Male pianists demonstrated higher need for achievement than females. Finally, age negatively predicted need for affiliation. These findings highlight the motivational patterns within the classical piano community, offering theoretical implications for understanding implicit motives and practical applications for pianist education. Study limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Psychological Implicit Motives Construct as an Emergent Fractal Attractor from Intermittent Neurophysiological Responses: Simulation and Entropy-like Characterization

Implicit Motives are non-conscious needs that drive human behavior towards the achievement of incentives that are affectively incited. Repeated affective experiences providing satisfying rewards have been held responsible for the building of Implicit Motives. Responses to rewarding experiences have a biological basis via close connections with neurophysiological systems controlling neurohormone release. We propose an iteration random function system acting in a metric space to model experience-reward interactions. This model is based on key facts of Implicit Motive theory reported in a broad number of studies. The model shows how (random) responses produced by intermittent random experiences create a well-defined probability distribution on an attractor, thus providing an insight into the underlying mechanism leading to the emergence of Implicit Motives as psychological structures. Implicit Motives' robustness and resilience properties appear theoretically explained by the model. The model also provides uncertainty entropy-like parameters to characterize Implicit Motives which hopefully might be useful, beyond the mere theoretical frame, when used in combination with neurophysiological methods.

Motive-Specific Affective Contingencies and Their Relevance for Personality and Motivated Behavior

Individuals differ in the tendency to derive pleasure out of motive-specific incentives, such as being socially included or attaining power. Multiple theoretical approaches have proposed that such motive-specific positive affective contingencies (PACs) are central building blocks of motive dispositions and personality more broadly. In the current research, we put this claim to test and investigated individual differences with regard to motive-specific PACs in the affiliation and power domains. We measured PACs via spontaneous emotional reactions to motive-specific cues, as assessed by affect ratings and electromyographic (EMG) recordings of smile responses. Both of these PAC operationalizations were highly internally consistent and moderately to highly stable across time. Furthermore, motive-specific PACs were linked in a manner consistent with theory to measures of motive dispositions and to personality traits with motivational underpinnings (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, and narcissism). Finally, in the affiliation domain, motive-specific PACs were linked to objectively assessed, key motivational outcomes (i.e., attentional orientation, behavior in daily life, and in the laboratory). Taken together, the findings underscore the relevance of affective contingencies for the understanding of personality and motivated behavior.

Dynamics of personality: The Zurich model of motivation revived, extended, and applied to personality

Personality researchers are increasingly interested in the dynamics of personality, that is, the proximal causal mechanisms underlying personality and behavior. Here, we review the Zurich Model of Social Motivation concerning its potential to explain central aspects of personality. It is a cybernetic model that provides a nomothetic structure of the causal relationships among needs for security, arousal, and power, and uses them to explain an individual's approach-avoidance or "proximity-distance" behavior. We review core features of the model and extend them by adding features based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence. We close by discussing the model considering contemporary issues in personality science such as the dynamics of personality, five-factor personality traits and states, and personality growth.

On the nature of implicit motives

David McClelland’s research on the different kinds of (implicit) motives and how to measure them has had a substantial influence on contemporary psychology of motivation. He did not, however, reflect on the nature of implicit motives in much detail. In this article, I fill this gap. I argue that implicit motives should not be understood as mental states the agent has no introspective access to. Instead, I propose that the implicit motives that McClelland and others in the field distinguish—the power, achievement, and affiliation motive—are generic descriptions of specific ends an agent may act for. These motives are implicit, because they are not explicitly expressed but merely implied in what the agent does, thinks, and feels. Establishing whether an agent acts for or has a certain implicit motive, then, is a matter of interpreting the agent’s expressions. This proposal is in line with and explains the empirical findings.

Perceived Intrinsic Motivation Mediates the Effect of Motive Incongruence on Job Burnout and Job Satisfaction

Job burnout is a profound concern in modern society producing enormous financial and emotional costs for companies, health insurances, and the individual employee. In this study, we aimed at contributing to the literature on determinants of job burnout by investigating the indirect effects of implicit and explicit motive discrepancies (IED) through intrinsic motivation, with the aim of replicating previous findings from the literature. In addition, we extended this research by adding job satisfaction as an outcome variable in the mediation model, as well as volition as a moderator in these relationships. We preregistered our study and collected data from 136 participants (82 females; M_age = 29.33 years, SD_age = 6.30) using indirect measures (for implicit motives) and self-report measures (for explicit motives, job burnout, job satisfaction and volition). IED was shown to have an indirect effect on both job burnout and job satisfaction through intrinsic motivation. Additionally, these indirect effects were mitigated by high levels volition. We discuss implications of our findings for research and practice.Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2021.1980758.

Applying Attention-Based Models for Detecting Cognitive Processes and Mental Health Conditions

According to the psychological literature, implicit motives allow for the characterization of behavior, subsequent success, and long-term development. Contrary to personality traits, implicit motives are often deemed to be rather stable personality characteristics. Normally, implicit motives are obtained by Operant Motives, unconscious intrinsic desires measured by the Operant Motive Test (OMT). The OMT test requires participants to write freely descriptions associated with a set of provided images and questions. In this work, we explore different recent machine learning techniques and various text representation techniques for facing the problem of the OMT classification task. We focused on advanced language representations (e.g, BERT, XLM, and DistilBERT) and deep Supervised Autoencoders for solving the OMT task. We performed an exhaustive analysis and compared their performance against fully connected neural networks and traditional support vector classifiers. Our comparative study highlights the importance of BERT which outperforms the traditional machine learning techniques by a relative improvement of 7.9%. In addition, we performed an analysis of how the BERT attention mechanism is being modified. Our findings indicate that the writing style features acquire higher importance at the moment of accurately identifying the different OMT categories. This is the first time that a study to determine the performance of different transformer-based architectures in the OMT task is performed. Similarly, our work propose, for the first time, using deep supervised autoencoders in the OMT classification task. Our experiments demonstrate that transformer-based methods exhibit the best empirical results, obtaining a relative improvement of 7.9% over the competitive baseline suggested as part of the GermEval 2020 challenge. Additionally, we show that features associated with the writing style are more important than content-based words. Some of these findings show strong connections to previously reported behavioral research on the implicit psychometrics theory.

Motivated behavior in intimate relationships: Comparing the predictive value of motivational variables

Motivational variables are considered fundamental factors influencing the occurrence of behavior. The current study compared different types of motivational variables (implicit and explicit motive dispositions, motivation as states and as aggregated person-level variables) in their ability to predict communal and agentic behavior reports in intimate relationships. 510 individuals completed measures of dispositional communion and agency motives and participated in a dyadic experience sampling study with five assessments per day across four weeks. They reported on their momentary communal and agentic motivation, as well as on their own and their partner’s behaviors. All examined types of motivational variables predicted certain behavior reports on the between-person or within-person level and had incremental effects beyond the other motivational variables in at least one motive domain. Directly replicating and conceptually extending prior research, the effects of motivational states and their aggregates were consistently found across behavioral outcomes, across self- and partner-reports and across the motive domains of communion and agency. Using the example of motivational states, the general value of assessing within-person variables for psychological phenomena in ESM-designs is discussed.

Authoritative Maternal Parenting Associates With the Explicit Need for Autonomy

Abstract. Previous research suggests that parenting style influences the development of the needs for achievement, power, and affiliation. The present study investigated the relationship between parenting style and another important motive disposition – the need for autonomy – in a sample of Singapore university students ( N = 97, 69% female), using a cross-sectional and retrospective design. It was predicted that an authoritative perceived parenting style would relate positively to the implicit need for autonomy ( nAut), the explicit need for autonomy ( sanAut), and the congruence between these two motive dispositions. Authoritative maternal parenting was found to positively associate with sanAut, while maternal parenting was not found to associate with nAut, or with nAut/ sanAut congruence. Paternal parenting was not associated with any of the dependent variables.