H. Heckhausen’s research while affiliated with Technical University of Munich and other places

People have a fundamental need to understand, predict, and control their environment. Causal attributions are extremely important for this. Without knowing the causes for a behavior or event, it becomes unpredictable whether it will occur again and how it might be influenced. This chapter will first introduce the topic by presenting Weiner’s attribution theory of motivation, emotion, and behavior before describing the process of causal attribution. For this purpose, the chapter will explain when and how intensively people search for causes and how they attribute them to events. Both normative and descriptive models of causal attribution will be discussed. The third part of the chapter will then talk about the effects of causal attribution on motivation, emotion, and behavior. Concretely, the chapter will describe their influence on learning and performance, the development of depressive symptoms, as well as aggressive behavior.

This chapter provides an overview of the various different historical branches of research on motivation. In general, research on motivation can be divided into four conceptually different approaches based on the problems they address: first, volitional approaches which conceptualize volition as externally caused (heterogenetic position) or internally driven (autogenetic position) and examine them phenomenologically or experimentally; second, approaches of instinct theory, which describes the content of motivation with more or less comprehensive lists of instincts and tries to assess motivational processes with concepts of behavioral ethology such as innate causal mechanisms; third, approaches of personality theory, which can be distinguished based on whether their orientation lies in motivational, cognitive, or personality theory; and, lastly, the approaches of association theory which are divided into approaches based on learning or activation.

From its earliest development on human behavior is characterized by a striving for control. As humans develop, this striving becomes more concrete, goal-oriented, and reflective. Children’s daily interaction partners play a crucial role in the development of fundamental motivational preferences and behavioral regulation. The behavioral emotions of pride and shame indicate self-evaluation and thus become positive or negative incentives for future behavior. Children’s gradual cognitive development allows them to gain a more elaborate understanding of task difficulty, abilities, effort, and their complex interactions for the prediction and explanation of behavioral outcomes. In addition to general developmental trends, people develop individual differences in their implicit motives, specific incentives and expectancies, generalized performance goal orientations, as well as strengths and weaknesses in behavioral regulation. These individual differences become increasingly pronounced at crucial developmental transitions.

Human behavior is generally characterized by its striving for efficacy and organized into phases of goal engagement and disengagement. People’s motivation to pursue a particular goal depends on situational incentives and personal preferences as well as interactions between these two factors. Ideally, the motivational and volitional regulations of behavior take turns during different behavioral phases and are separated from each other in a clear way. They both ensure in their own way the functional optimization of goal selection, goal striving, and goal realization. Individuals differ tremendously with regard to their motivational and volitional regulation. Both types of behavioral regulation start developing during early childhood and are closely associated with the behavior of adult socialization agents. During youth and adulthood, individuals' control striving becomes focused on their own development. It thus dynamically completes the dialectic interaction between individual and environment.

Striving to realize affect-laden goals is a central facet of motivation. Incentive theories of motivation assume that behavior is goal-oriented. Behavioral regulation is seen as progressive and not as reactive as it is in the case of instinct models. The value of incentives energizes behavior: no drive that “pushes” is required because the goal is “pulling” the acting individual. The theories also assume that individuals do not learn stimulus-response connections but instead expectations about relationships (contingencies). This leads to a simple cognitive model of motivation: motivation as a function of expectancy and value. According to the expectancy times value model, individuals prefer behavioral options which maximize the product of value realized (incentive) and probability of realization (expectancy). More recent theories of motivation are all built on the fundamental claims of expectancy-value theories. Their simpler iterations, however, lack the inclusion of individual differences such as motives or personal dispositions. Many critics also pointed out that although the multiplication of expectancy and value might be rationalistic, it is not psychological. Modern theories of motivation therefore address these issues.

The situational approach addresses the situation as the sole determinant of behavior. For example, behaviorism completely renounced personality dispositions including motive dispositions. Behaviorism is not interested in individual differences but only in determinants of behavior that are specific to the situation (stimulus–response associations). In the further development of this approach, however, the necessity of including a drive or energetic component was realized. Thus, the concept of a general, activating drive was introduced. Subsequently, primary stimulus–response associations were augmented with mediating cognitive and affective processes. Neo-associationism supplements the association of stimulus and response by an intervening basic organismic evaluation reaction. Therefore, affects and emotions are acknowledged as central evaluative mediators in the generation of motivation and the activation of behavior. This conceptualization is pivotal in the transactional stress model which is the major model of stress research to date. Concerning potential motive components, the motivational approaches focusing on cognitive evaluations of the situation remain by and large undeveloped and untested. These approaches can therefore be characterized as motivation research without motives. Nevertheless, all the approaches on behavioral effects of cognitive evaluations of the situation presented in this chapter contribute a great deal to an understanding of motivational problems and provided vital impulses to modern interactionist motivation research.

This chapter discusses the influential theory of achievement motivation by Atkinson (Psychol Rev 64: 359–372, 1957) including the preceding work by McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, and Lowell (The achievement motive, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1953) and its development into the self-evaluation model by Heckhausen (Fear of failure as a self-reinforcing motive system. In: Sarason IG, Spielberger C (Hrsg.) Stress and anxiety, Vol. II, pp 117–128. Hemisphere, Washington, DC, 1975b). After an introduction to the ontogenetic foundation of achievement-motivated behavior, which focuses on the discussion of standards of validity, the chapter will take a look at the development of picture-story tests which can be used to measure individual differences in achievement motivation and its two facets “hope for success” and “fear of failure.” The chapter will introduce studies of their validity and central findings on Atkinson’s model of risk behavior as well as its extension for the prediction of complex behavior. Another section is dedicated to Heckhausen’s model of self-evaluation and its application in academic contexts. Finally, the chapter will address some unanswered questions in this research area.

Motivation is the result of an interaction between situational incentives and individual dispositions. Dispositional influences can explain why some people act in a motivated way across different situations while others do not. In part, motivation is, thus, not only attributed to the causal impact of situational incentives but also to stable traits which are part of an individual’s personality. These traits differ from other people across situations and are relatively stable over time. This chapter will begin with a basic explanation and gradually introduce more complex perspectives on the role of dispositional factors in motivation. Both nomothetic and idiographic perspectives will be introduced.

Motivation entsteht aus einer Interaktion von situativen Anreizen und dispositionellen Eigenschaften. Mit dispositionellen Faktoren der Motivation soll erklärt werden, warum manche Menschen über verschiedene Situationen hinweg ein bestimmtes motiviertes Verhalten zeigen, andere jedoch nicht. Motivation wird somit (neben auslösenden Anreizen) auch auf stabile, in der Persönlichkeit des Individuums verankerte Eigenschaften zurückgeführt, die sie von anderen Menschen transsituativ und mit einer gewissen zeitlichen Stabilität unterscheiden. Das Kapitel beginnt mit einer einfachen Sicht und nähert sich schrittweise einer komplexen Betrachtungsweise der Rolle von dispositionellen Faktoren in der Motivation, so dass ein weiter Bogen von nomothetischen bis hin zu idiografischen Betrachtungsweisen gespannt wird.

Im situativen Ansatz wird die Situation als alleinige Determinante des Verhaltens thematisiert. Der Behaviorismus verzichtet vollständig auf Persönlichkeitseigenschaften und damit auch auf Motive. Er fragt nicht nach individuellen Unterschieden, sondern nach der Situationsspezifität des Handelns (Reiz-Reaktions-Verknüpfungen). Im Verlauf der Entwicklung dieser Ansätze wurde jedoch die Notwendigkeit einer Antriebs- oder Energetisierungskomponente erkannt. Es wurde das Konzept eines allgemeinen, aktivierenden Triebs („drive“) eingeführt. Im Weiteren wurden dann die primären Reiz-Reaktions-Verknüpfungen um vermittelnde kognitive und affektive Prozesse ergänzt. Im Neo-Assoziationismus wird bei der Assoziation von Reiz und Reaktion eine basale organismische Bewertungsreaktion zwischengeschaltet. Damit wird auch hier Affekten oder Emotionen als zwischengeschaltete Bewertungsinstanz eine zentrale Rolle bei der Entstehung von Motivation und der Aktivierung von Verhalten zugestanden.