Implicit Motives, Laterality, Sports Participation and Competition in Gymnasts

Measuring Achievement, Affiliation, and Power Motives in Mobility Situations: Development of the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility

The current study introduces the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility (MMG-M) in an age-stratified sample (N = 206) that aims to disentangle six motive components - hope of success, hope of affiliation, hope of power, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of power - in mobility-related and mobility-unrelated scenarios. Similar to the classical Multi-Motive Grid (MMG), we selected 14 picture scenarios representing seven mobility and seven non-mobility situations. The scenarios were combined with 12 statements from the MMG. Both the MMG-M and MMG were assessed to allow comparability between psychometric criteria. The results of confirmatory factor analyses yielded a good model fit for a six-factor solution with an additional mobility factor for the MMG-M. Internal consistency of the items was similar to the MMG. Lastly, we investigated associations between the motive components and mobility-related variables. We found that risk awareness was positively related to all fear components in both mobility and non-mobility scenarios. Most importantly, physical constraint was positively associated with fear of rejection and fear of power in mobility situations underlining the importance to create support systems to reduce these concerns in people's everyday lives.

Motives and Laterality: Exploring the Links

Objectives

We explored associations between the needs for power, achievement, and affiliation and functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs), guided by three established hypotheses about the nature of these associations.

Methods

One-hundred-and-seven participants completed picture-story measures of dispositional motives and activity inhibition (AI), a frequent moderator of motive-behavior associations, tasks measuring FCAs (line bisection, chimeric emotional face judgments, turning bias, perceptual and response asymmetries on the Poffenberger task), self-reported laterality preferences (handedness, footedness, ear and eye preference), and interhemispheric interaction (crossed-uncrossed difference). They also completed an experiment manipulating hand contractions (left, right, both, neither) while they worked on a second picture-story motive measure.

Results

Dispositional power motivation was associated with stronger rightward asymmetry and less interhemispheric transfer in high-AI and stronger leftward asymmetry and more interhemispheric transfer in low-AI individuals. For the affiliation motive, findings were fewer and in the opposite direction of those for the power motive. These findings emerged for men, but not for women. Left- or right-hand contractions led to increases in power and achievement motivation, but not affiliation motivation. Only left-hand contractions led to decreased AI.

Conclusions

We discuss these findings in the context of sex-dimorphic organizing and activating effects of steroids on motives and laterality.