Schultheiss O (2021)
Publication Type: Authored book
Publication year: 2021
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 9780128139950
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-813995-0.00012-1
This chapter focuses on the roles of motives, personal goals, and their interplay in the dynamic regulation of behavior. Motives represent nonconsciously operating networks of learned cues and behaviors, built around specific, interindividually varying capacities to respond with strong affect to incentives and disincentives. Personal goals are the specific age-graded aims that people consciously construe, report on, and pursue throughout their lives and that provide meaning and a sense of purpose. Motives and goals are statistically, functionally, and neurobiologically separate regulators of behavior that can interact with each other. In the case of motive-goal congruence, high rates of goal progress are associated with enhanced emotional well-being and low rates of goal progress with impaired emotional well-being. In the case of incongruence, variations in goal progress do not impinge on well-being, although they can have an indirect effect via draining resources from the pursuit of congruent goals. Congruence can be facilitated via goal imagery, mindfulness meditation, and strategic elaboration and enhancement of a goal’s motive-congruent aspects and subgoals. Dispositional factors contributing to high congruence include referential competence, action orientation, and a strong sense of self-determination.
APA:
Schultheiss, O. (2021). Motives and goals, or: The joys and meanings of life. Elsevier.
MLA:
Schultheiss, Oliver. Motives and goals, or: The joys and meanings of life. Elsevier, 2021.
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