Motives and Emotions

Theories of implicit motivation generally assume that motivationally-relevant situations contain affectively-rewarding incentives or affectively-aversive disincentives, and that motivated action elicits anticipatory as well as consummatory affect. Additionally, McClelland (1975) hypothesized that each of the Big Three motives is linked to a specific emotion (e.g., interest) which acts as a natural incentive for that motive (e.g., nachievement). Previous research on McClelland's emotion-specificity hypothesis (e.g., Zurbriggen & Sturman, 2002) used self-report measures of specific emotions and found some support of emotion-specificity for npower and naffiliation, but not for nachievement.  Previous work also did not examine emotion-specificity for approach versus avoidant motives. 
In this project, we seek to improve on previous research by examining affective-specificity for approach as well as avoidant motives, and by focussing on nachievement, which is an obvious knowledge gap in the already sparsely-populated literature on the emotion-specificity hypothesis (c.f., Woike et al., 1999; Zurbriggen & Sturman, 2002).  Finally, our research also examines the link between motive activation and anticipatory versus consummatory affect.

​For more information, or if you are interested in participating in the study and/or collaborating on the project, please contact us at [email protected].