Chapter 6
Read chapter 6. Summarize the chapter. What was the most surprising thing you learned? If you had to rate yourself as high, medium, low, on the various psychological needs, what would those ratings be? How do those various levels manifest themselves in your life? Choose one psychological need and discuss how it motivates some of your specific behaviors.
If you had to make a guess, what's the deal with the fish picture? How does it relate to this chapter?
Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter.
Chapter 6 goes in depth of what it takes to satisfy one’s psychological needs, such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is our need to experience self-direction, volition, and perceived choice. Competence is our need to be effective in interactions with the environment and the desire to exercise one’s skills. Relatedness is our need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. In each need, different aspects must be met in order to satisfy these needs. For instance, to satisfy one’s need for autonomy, one must be surrounded by an environment that identifies, nurtures, and develops another’s inner motivational resources, as well as using flexible language instead of criticism. To satisfy one’s need for competence, one must have an environment that offers informational feedback and has somewhat of a balance between skills and challenge. To satisfy one’s need for relatedness, one must have a communal relationship, which persons care about the welfare of the other. The chapter then explains how all of these interact and engage each other to produce positive emotions.
The most surprising thing I learned from this chapter is the fact that if our psychological needs are met throughout the day, we feel great and realize it’s a good day. On the other hand, if we neglect these needs throughout the day then we feel negative and realize it’s a not so good day. It’s surprising to me that these unconscious needs have such a massive effect on our day-to-day emotions. Before knowing what psychological needs were, I always thought the outcome of my day depending extensively on the events that happened and how I cope/handle/perceive them. For example, if I perceived I had to go workout in order to get in shape for the summer months, it’s no wonder why I have no motivation to get myself out of the chair to go exercise. Now I know that it’s because I perceive working out as something I have to do, instead of letting myself decide on my own.
If I had to rate myself on the psychological needs or autonomy, competence, and relatedness, I’d give myself a low, medium, and a high, respectively. I consider myself to be extremely indecisive; therefore I leave my mundane, daily decisions up to someone else, such as what to do, where to eat, and what to watch. Even my important life decisions, like what school to go to and what career to have, I look to my parents, professors, and others to influence my decision. As for competence, I gave myself a medium because I do enjoy a challenge and to develop my skills. After reading about the flow theory, I noticed there have been several occasions when I got in the flow with my work or performance, such as with an assignment or running a race. At work, school, and when I was in a sport, I always received some type of performance feedback on how I was doing. However, before taking this class, I always dreaded failure and never realized how it can actually produce success. I rated myself a high for relatedness because the statement “quality vs. quantity” of friendships really hit home. I don’t have a large number of friends, but the ones I do have know me extremely well and I consider them a communal relationship.
The psychological need of competence motivates my behavior to exercise, compete in half-marathons and the like. Although I do enjoy a good competition, I mainly enjoy pushing myself to the limit. When training for a race, I can easily track my performance progress from the start of training to then end. Knowing I’m progressing gives me more motivation to race because I have positive feedback from my past performance to my current performance. As with the flow theory, I find when I run I get into the zone, or flow, because I had enough training to have skills in running and marathons give me that optimal challenge to use my skills. I’m also the type of person that if something like a marathon is overchallenging for others, then it motivates me more to train and gain personal development, but that’s only for tasks that I initially enjoy doing, in this case its running.
Eh, I’m going to take a shot in the dark here and guess that the fish picture is suppose to represent an organismic approach to motivation; that organisms initiate interactions with the environment and how organisms adapt, change, and grow. The fish is jumping out of the water because it made its own choice to do so, autonomy, that it wants the challenge of surviving in the environment, competence, and to meet other fish since it was all alone in that fish bowl, relatedness. The fish is only trying to satisfy his psychological needs.
TERMS: Psychological needs, Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Volition, Positive Feedback, Flow theory, Optimal challenge, Organismic approach to motivation
Chapter six overviews psychological needs, which concentrate more on growth needs for development, as opposed to the deficit needs associated with physiological needs. An organismic approach (in which there is two-way interaction between us and the environment) is used to describe how we satisfy three specific types of psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy is self-direction from our interests and preferences, which can be defined by three qualities: perceived locus of control, volition, and perceived choice. Perceived locus of control is where the individual thinks their motivation comes from, which maybe internal (labeling them an origin) or external (labeling them a pawn). Volition is the willingness to engage without pressure. Individuals with high volition participate freely (I run, because I feel like it), while those with low volition are coerced (I run, because my coach makes me). Perceived choice describes the flexibility of choices given, in which individuals with less restriction tend to feel more autonomous. Autonomy supporting behaviors demonstrate nurturing of inner resources (stimulating their interests), reliance of informational (flexible) language to better show them the problem, provision of explanatory rationales (explanation), and acceptance of negative affect (resistant behavior). For example, a teacher using popular movies to relate to class material, asking questions to let students work through their motivational problems, giving open-ended options for a book report, and accepting disinterest as inevitable for tedious chapters would be demonstrating all of the mentioned behaviors.
Competence is one’s effectiveness in interactions with the environment, based on optimal challenge and flow, structure, and failure tolerance. Optimal challenge and flow describes deep involvement to overcome a challenge in which the skill and challenge are at the same level. Structure describes the amount and clarity of information to achieve a goal. Failure tolerance describes the level of dread associated with failure, indicating the future level of challenge. Competence is satisfied by positive feedback, which may use evaluations based on the task, one’s past performances, other’s performance, or evaluation of others.
Relatedness is one’s attachment to others, which is satisfied through social bonds (mutual liking and caring). Communal relatedness satisfies this need (such as a loving couple), whereas exchange relatedness does not satisfy this need (such as a brief acquaintance). If a relationship is communal, one person may experience internalization (integration of the other person’s values). For instance, my dad did not go to church until he met my mom, and now he is an avid church-goer. Finally, the engagement model links these needs to relate them to social contexts, to explain how satisfaction of these needs provides psychological nutrients for our everyday wellbeing.
What surprised me the most was how important our sense of freedom is to our motivation, behavior, and compliance. Even more so, how many little things can increase or decrease out autonomy. For instance, I wouldn’t likely have realized the difference in my behavior and motivation if a teacher had told me to pick a topic from a set list as opposed to picking whatever topic I wanted. However, I’ll probably be more aware of this in the future, so I can give others more of a true choice.
I would rate myself as medium on autonomy (because I have time and opportunities to do what I like, but I also spend a lot of time doing stuff for class and work) and relatedness (because I have some friends around that I spend time with, but most of my better friends are not at UNI), and high on competence (because I tend to improve at tasks if I put time and effort into them, such as rock climbing or working out). Competence is specifically important to me, because it’s all about adapting to changing circumstances. For instance, I’m motivated to try new things in different environments and retry things until I get a feel for them (extensive studying habits to get used to a class). In short, competence influences my persistence, determinism, and resiliency which expand into a lot of everyday behaviors (getting stuff done, meeting new people, etc.)
The lonely fish is jumping out of his bowl. My guess is he is motivated to get out into his own space (autonomy), seek out companions (relatedness), and prove his worth to the world (competence). Also, I think this is demonstrating that physiological needs are not the only driving force for us to do what we do, because he is leaving his protective environment. Unfortunately, the fish will probably die.
Terms: psychological needs, physiological needs, growth needs, deficit needs, organismic approach, autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived locus of control, volition, perceived choice, origin, pawn, optimal challenge, flow, structure, failure tolerance, positive feedback, communal relatedness, exchange relatedness, internalization, engagement model, psychological nutrients
This chapter focused on psychological needs such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These needs are how organisms initiate interaction with the environment and adapt, change, and grow with the environment. This can also be referred to as an organismic theory. A person acts on the environment just as much as the environment acts on the person. The relationship supports both side's needs. To go into a little more detail - autonomy is the need to experience self directions and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of a person's behavior. The person wants to obtain those inner resources and feel like they are in control of their own choices. The supportive motivating style nurtures the inner motivational resources, promotes value, and relies on informational language. When people are autonomous they tend to have more positive outcomes and gain motivation, engagement, learning, and optimal well-being. Competence is another psychological need that can be described as the need to interact effectively with the environment with the desire to seek out challenges. When a person seeks out challenges their motivation to improve and develop personal skills and talents increases. The principle environmental events involve an optimal challenge, high failure for tolerance, and high structural need. When a challenge and environmental skill are high it promotes flow. Flow is a psychological state of enjoyment, concentration, and full absorption of the task. This may occur when someone receives positive feedback or believes they are progressing during a challenge. The last psychological need is relatedness. This is the need to establish a close emotional bond and attachment with other people (warm and caring). To fully satisfy this need one must confirm the social bond with others - this would be considered a communal relationship because both parties are looking to gain the same thing. A communal relationship supports internalization which is when a person accepts their own as another person's belief, value, or way of behaving. The last topic discussed in this chapter was the engagement model of motivation. This just shows how relationships and social contexts are involved in satisfying the 3 psychological needs. Autonomy enhances engagement because it satisfies autonomy, structure enhances engagement because it satisfies competence, and involvement enhances engagement because it satisfies relatedness.
The most surprising thing I learned is how these needs affect our day-to-day activities and well being. I believe it has been mentioned before by a previous blogger, but if we have a good day it is because we satisfied autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When we don't do this completely, our day wasn't as great. I thought the research done with college students and their daily moods was a good example of this. The students had the best days on the weekend or days when they had high levels of competence and autonomy. They felt effective and had an internal perceived locus of causality.
I would rate myself as medium on autonomy, medium on competence, and high on relatedness. I am a person who likes to make my own decisions but from time to time I do like getting some outside opinions and help from others. I believe that I am a very independent person and like to think that I have perceived locus of control. For example, I am aspiring to experience graduate school out-of-state. I am pushing myself to do the best I can to get into the schools I want while listening to my peers and advisor's thoughts. I rated myself medium on competence as well because I like a challenge and when I do work to accomplish it I feel great! For example, I have been working all year long on infecting and cloning viruses into plants and I finally got my virus vector to work. Even though I am not finished with the experiment yet, I have accomplished this much. I know my skills and talents working in the lab have improved because of this. Lastly, I rated myself as high on relatedness because I value my friends and family a lot. I have a decent group of close friends but within that group there are a select few that I have a communal relationship with.
Competence motivates specific behaviors of mine. For example, I really like decorative projects and crafts. Most of the time I don't have the right materials or even know how to do it. When I learn a new technique I am motivated to keep refining it and improving. Each time I improved it serves as positive feedback. The challenge becomes something I successfully accomplished. I can also use the flow theory to demonstrate how I get into the project and can't stop until I am done. I am in the zone and loving every minute of it!
The fish in the picture is motivated to leave his nice, safe, bowl because he is probably lonely. His psychological need for relatedness is not being satisfied at all. The fish probably has a high levels of autonomy and competence though. He is motivated enough to leave the bowl (autonomy) due to his inner motivators and values. Jumping out of the bowl could be considered the challenge (competence) and he will receive positive feedback once he makes it out of the bowl. It will encourage him to take more leaps of faith...although his fate outside the bowl is not looking to good.
TERMS: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, organismic theory, supporting motivation style, perceived choice, perceived control, challenge, flow, structure, failure tolerance, communal relatedness, internalization, engagement model, positive feedback
Chapter 6 discusses different social contexts that support or inhibit our psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness of our intrinsic motivations. Autonomy is the need to experience self-direction and one’s own say in their behavior. There are three factors that help define the experience of autonomy being a perceived locus of causality, volition, and perceived choice. Perceived locus of causality means how much the individual understands the causing source of why his/her behavior occurs. Volition is a want to engage in an activity without being or feeling pressured. Perceived choice involves allowing different opportunities to choose from and keeping the situation open for decision-making flexibility. Having a “conundrum” of choice can go both ways on an individual having autonomy by either helping by offering a flexible and unrestricted choice while relating to the individuals interest or hindering autonomy by having a choice that forces and controls the individuals behavior. Controlling environments, relationships, social contexts, and cultures neglect, frustrate, and interfere with people’s need for autonomy. Supportive environments, relationships, social contexts, and cultures satisfy the need for autonomy. Interpersonal behaviors that initiate autonomy support are namely, nurturing inner motivational resources, relying on flexible language, providing explanatory rationales, and acknowledging and accepting the other’s expressions of negative effects. Autonomy-supportive people help others to learn flexibly by relating sources to their interests, providing answers to listlessness, poor performance, and inappropriate behavior by providing the value, worth, meaning, utility, or importance of engaging in uninteresting task. By doing all this, autonomy-supportive people help enhance engagement, development, learning, performance, and psychological well-being. Competence is the need to be involved and interacting with the environment by reflecting the desire to exercise one’s skills by seeking out and mastering optimal challenges. Positive feedback and the perception of progress help satisfy the need for competence. Flow is the balance of skills and a challenge allowing competence to appear within the experience. Structure of a challenge must offer clear goals and guidance as well as providing information about the pathways to desired outcomes and support and guidance for pursuing these pathways. Praise and feedback are needed to assure competence within a challenge because positive feedback can boost competence, whereas criticism and negative feedback does not. Relatedness is the need to have close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. Communal relationships involve the caring of welfare for one another while exchange relationships are between acquaintances or ‘business people’. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to relatedness because communal relationships are the only relationships that satisfy the relatedness need. Relatedness between two people can then turn towards internalization of one individual’s beliefs and influences on another. Relatedness is necessary for internalization to happen, but it doesn’t mean it always will. Overall, autonomy support enhances engagement by involving and satisfying the need for it, structure enhances engagement by involving and satisfying the need for competence, and involvement enhances engagement by involving and satisfying the needs of relatedness. To feel vital, one must have reached a satisfied level of autonomy, competence, and relatedness displaying that these psychological needs are growth needs, not deficit.
The most surprising thing I learned was that we learn more from failure than we do success because it allows us to find a cause of the failure, to try and find new strategies to fix this failure, seek advice and instruction on how to overcome this failure, which eventually leads us to doing more research and engaging more in the activity in order to reach the right answer and gain better competence of the situation. Through error tolerance, failure to tolerance, and risk taking we make sure to avoid these next time and improve our engagement of our knowledge over a certain area. This mostly surprised me because I had never really thought of it before, but after contemplating past failures versus successes, failures seemed to stick out more for I engaged more in those to find a reason and solution to fix the problem.
To rate myself, I would say that my autonomy right now is at a medium due to pressures of school and flexible, creative tasks I am involved in outside of those school pressures . I constantly feel pressured to do well in school and to think quickly within a time limit over different subjects, but outside of school I take my free time to paint, listen to records, and catch up on my reading which overall balances my autonomy. My competence level would be at a high because I feel as though I am constantly challenging myself, but never to the point where I can’t handle it or feel stressed about it. I have recently broken up with my boyfriend and have been confident in engaging in new relationships while also focusing on school subjects that interest me yet challenge me at the same time. My relatedness level is also at a high because I find myself to have a quantity of relationships and a few good quality relationships. Although I have just broken up with my boyfriend, we are still remaining good friends and talk consistently. Even when I have an exchange relationship with someone I always try and make it communal by asking them how everything is going within their lives outside of business. I feel as though I have many friends, but only have a few very close relationships with my friends and family, which I am very thankful for.
Competence is one psychological need that constantly needs to be filled within my life. I always want to be challenged and to seek out new opportunities. By being a Psychology major I am engaging myself in challenging classes but am also aware of my skills within this field causing me to be consistently interested in my schoolwork. I strive for good grades and know it is possible to fail sometimes because I have done so before, but commit myself to learn from those mistakes and move on. I work hard to receive good feedback to help motivate myself to keep going. I always make sure I understand the structure of different challenges before attempting to try them find great pleasure in myself when I have succeeded by receiving praise for my work.
The fish picture is symbolizing an individual stepping outside of his/her normal environment due to psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, locus of causality, volition, perceived choice, conundrum of choice, autonomy supportive, positive feedback, praise, exchange relationships, communal relationships, internalization, engagement, growth needs, deficit needs
Chapter 6 is explaining psychological needs, and what we need to gratify those needs. The chapter goes into depth about autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is pretty much like wanting to making your own decisions and having some type of control. An example of this may be we want to choose our own school/work schedule, or decide what we are going to do over the weekend, without other people making that decision for you. Competence is wanting to know how to interact with our surrounding, and every part of our environment. Competence relates to flow, another topic that was discussed in the chapter. This is when a person experiences a deep level of involvement in an activity, and this is usually very pleasurable experience for a person. The last major topic that was included in this chapter would be relatedness. This is the need for us to establish close relationships with others, such as friends, family, and other social interactions. For example this could be someone wanting to be involved in some type of club or organization to meet and socialize with others. The last section of the chapter focused on putting all three of these concepts together, and how they connect with each other. This explains how all three of these satisfy our psychological needs. This explains that if someone can achieve all of these needs, they are shown to have a good well being.
I thought the most surprising part of this chapter was definitely the end of the chapter that had to do with people experiencing a “good day.” I thought it was interesting that if an individual experiences all three of these psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) than we will have a good day, and good well being. Satisfying all of these needs causes us to have positive emotions; yet if we do not achieve all of these than we will have more negative emotions, which is not good for our well being. The book explains that there can of course be day to day feelings, and one minute we may not be achieving any of these needs, while the next we could be feeling all 3 of them. It is something that can be off and on, and not permanent, yet if you can achieve all of them at the same time, that is by far the best, and most pleasurable.
I would give myself between a medium and high (even though that wasn’t really an option) on autonomy. I am a very independent person, and have been since high school; yet I do like having some help when it comes to certain things. When it comes to everyday things such as what to do, how to do it, and such I prefer me to make the decisions, unlike some of my friends who literally can’t make a decision on their own (which is fine!). I like to be in control of what is possible (unfortunately not everything). Even though I do like to make my own decisions and be independent, I do like some feedback on things as well, such as when it comes to school, work, and athletics. There are some things that cannot be controlled, and I have to let other people do it, which is okay at times. For example, I am choosing which graduate school to apply to, because I want to go where is right for me, but unfortunately I probably will not be able to choose exactly where I go (unless I for some odd reason I get into everywhere I apply).
I would give myself a medium on competence. I always like a challenge here or there, especially if I know I can definitely achieve it. If I work out, I challenge myself to do better. If I run, I challenge myself to run faster, and farther. Yet, there are some days where I just don’t want to be challenged, and would rather just breeze on through.
Lastly, I would give myself a high on relatedness. Family and friends are something that I value a lot! I am extremely close with my family, and friends, and rely on them a good amount. I have a good group of friends that know me well, and I feel like I can always go to someone if I need something. I have a large group of friends, but I also have a select few that I am the closet with, and am very thankful for that! I think that all three of these needs things that are involved in my life every day, even if they are low or high levels.
Competence is something that definitely is used in my life every day. It comes into play with school, working out, work and relationships. In school I am usually always being challenged. For example, I am not the best at math. Taking psychological statistics was somewhat challenging for me, and it was something that I had to work at every day to make sure that I got good enough of a grade. Another example would be exercising. I do this for myself and even though I usually do not enter in actual races, I race myself, and challenge myself. If I run 3 miles at 6.5MPH, the next time I run I’ll bump it to 4 miles, and the next time maybe I’ll go 7MPH. It is something that is challenging, but feels good after achieving it.
I’m going to take a wild guess when it comes to this fish. I would say that the fish is pretty lonely just swimming in that boring fish bowl by himself. He is probably not achieving his psychological need, and maybe wants to get out so he can do that (like Nemo). He is probably not accomplishing autonomy because he is stuck in a bowl, and that’s pretty his only option. I think he is trying to achieve competence because he is attempting to get out of the bowl, which is probably very challenging. When it comes to relatedness, I am sure he does not have a lot of social interactions. He probably wants to get out of the bowl so he can find social/communal relationships.
TERMS: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Flow, Pleasurable, Psychological Needs, Feedback, Communal Relationships, Social Relationships
Chapter 6 is all about psychological needs. It talks about how we satisfy these needs and what they are. The three psychological needs that the book talks about are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. It first started talking about autonomy and it is defined ast the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior. Pretty much what it means is that we have the choice of what we want to do and when we want to do it. People are more willing to engage in activities they like when their autonomy is supported. The chapter also talked about competence. Competence refers to the need of how effective in interactions with the environment and reflects the desire to exercise one's capabilities and skills and trying to master optimal skills. What this means is how hard and how easy of challenges that we seek and how willing we are to seek out touch challenges. On the same level of competence, flow was discussed. Flow is how involved you are in an activity and how concentrated you are. If you are really in flow you really enjoy the activity or whatever you are doing. Something being too easy is bad for you and is boring and something that is too hard can be frustrating to someone. Relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. Everyone wants friends and everyone is trying to establish warm relationships with people. Developing relationships is very important. There are two different types of relationships. Communal relationships refer to relations between people that care about each other. Exchange relationships are considered as business relationships. These aren't as developed as communal. To tie it all together, it finishes talking about engagement.
The thing that I found most surprising was when it was talking about optimal challenges. It discussed that people usually take on activities that are challenging and engaging. I kind of feel that people usually take the easy way out and do easy things. I have found that by completing any challenge people feel better about themself. If they do an activity that is challenging, the person will be frustrated and be stressed. This is why I feel that most people take the easy way out.
If I had to rate myself on these three psychological needs, I think that they would differ in some ways. I feel like my autonomy is at a medium. This is because I feel like I have some choice in what I want to do daily but I don't have a full range of things to do. If I had full autonomy I would probably play basketball all day or watch sports but I usually do more than that. I do stuff for school that I probably wouldn't do if I didn't have to. I would probably say my competence is at a medium too. I seek difficult challenges but only for certain things. I probably don't put myself out there for schoolwork as much as I should but I do put a pretty good effort when it comes to homework. For relatedness I would say I am at a high. I have close relationships with a lot of people and feel like I have good social interactions everyday.
Autonomy plays a big role in all of our lives. I use it everyday. For example, I choose what I want to eat, when I want to eat, and where to eat. I choose when I want to do homework or even if I want to do homework. If I want to go workout that day I will do it and nobody is forcing me to do any of things. Everybody has some level of autonomy in their lives daily. Some people may not feel autonomous but everybody has some level of it.
I feel like the fish jumping out of the bowl means a couple of things. The fish may stand for being competent enough to get out of the bowl and sees this as an optimal challenge. For autonomy, the fish decides to jump out because it wants too. It is the fish's initiation to jump out when it wants too. Also I could kind of see relatedness in it too. The fish may be lonely and it needs social interaction in order to feel good about itself. Being in a bowl by itself may make the fish lonely and feel out of place. This is why it is jumping out of the bowl.
Terms: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Communal Relationship, Exchange Relationship, Flow, Engagement, Optimal Challenge
Chapter six dealt with Psychological Needs. It included things like autonomy, competence and relatedness. Finally there was a section about how engagement and vitality. The chapter says that psychological needs are important addition to our motivated behavior. These promote a willingness to seek out and engage in an environment. Help us explore and challenge seek. On page 144 there is also an diagram that explain the person-environment dialect.
Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self direction and personal endorsement in initiation and regulation of your own personal behavior. Three experimental qualities: Perceived Locus of Causality, Volition, and Perceived Choice.
Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment and reflects desire to exercise your own skills and seek out challenges.
Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and reflects desire to be emotionally connected. This includes interactions with other, social bonds and internalization.
Nothing was really that surprising to me. Most of this i had a good idea what is was about and what we need to have a good day and so forth. I was excited to be given a more in depth analysis of these three topics though.
I would say I am medium on Autonomy and Competence but low on Relatedness because i am very introverted and I spend a lot of time alone, mostly doing school work, and i find it hard to make friends quickly. I am medium on the other two because i have some choice in what i do everyday and some not. As for competence I seek out challenges sometimes but not as often as i could. Like last semester i would have to say i looked for almost no challenges preferring to be lazy.
Autonomy always motivated my behavior. Truthfully I don't have to go to class or do homework, no one is holding a gun to my head and making me go. Everyday i choose to get up and go to school and work and i choose to not watch TV and do my homework every night. I feel like we are almost autonomus because we have a choice what we want to do and we choose to go to school or work instead of relaxing at home.
I saw the fish as a sort of "Fish out of water" thing. I think that without these three psychological needs that we would be like fish out of water, gasping for breath and we would essential die without them. Like the water is the psychological need we all need to keep on going.
terms: Autonomy, psychological, need, competence, relatedness, engagement, vitality, person-enviornment dialect, erceived Locus of Causality, Volition, and Perceived Choice
Chapter six goes more into psychological needs. The three main ones are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is a person’s need to make their own decisions and feel independent. Competence when people shape their behaviors to fit in with those around them. We don’t want to be the under-dog. Relatedness is the idea that people want to belong or have friends. To truly feel good about ourselves we need to have all three of these needs met. An ideal scenario of these three needs would be: a person has a lot of friends with some of them being good close friends. Their actions and behaviors fit in with those around them and they don’t feel foolish or embarrassed when with their friends. But the person still feels they can make their own decisions and their friends can’t determine their actions.
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was the motivational model of engagement. This is they model of how relationships and social contexts successfully involve and satisfy. It seemed so simple that by have those three needs met I could be completely happy. I would think I would need so much more in my life to make me feel wonderful. But it just shows how basic human beings are. We can survive on the bare minimums if needed and it doesn’t take a whole lot to fulfill our psychological needs.
If I had to rate myself on autonomy I would say I’m high. I like have the feeling of being independent. I need to be able to make my own decisions, I hate it when others think they can influence my choices. I am my own person and I will decide what is best for my life. I would say I rate medium on my competence, I defiantly like to be my own individual but I hate having everyone staring at me. So I like to blend in go about my tasks. I highly dislike people knowing everything about my life, so if I fit in people don’t tend to focus their attention on me. As for relatedness I believe I rate medium again. I love having friends, they do make me happy. But I don’t like having a huge group of friends. I like to have a smaller set of friends so we all can be really close and be able to share what we are really thinking and feeling, rather than being surface level friends. So I do need friends but I don’t need a ton of them to make me happy, I’m content with my handful.
Autonomy plays a large role in my life, being in college I am in charge of my life. I have to pay for things on my own and plan my own future. Competence is daily in play with my life because every day I come to school and try to work on my competence so I’m not the dumb girl in class and I can better myself. Going to class helps me fit in with others around me because most of them are striving for the same goal as me. Which brings me to relatedness, everyone wants to have friends, especially in college. I need friends to hang out with, study with, and vent to.
Autonomy motivates my behaviors because I know that this is my life and I can do what I want with it. I am making steps to decide what I am going to do after school. I go to school and work to pay for my expenses. Sometimes it makes my roommates mad because I don’t think of them first, but it’s just my need to make my own decisions for myself.
The fish bowl picture, I would have to guess that he is reaching for some competence and relatedness. He wants competence because he knows he is better than that bowl and wants to get out and explore his possibilities. He is reaching for relatedness because he was all alone in that bowl. He wants to find some friends a bowl next to him because he gets bored and lonely by himself.
Terms: Psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, motivational model of engagement
In chapter six Reeves expands on the already mentioned ideas of the psychological needs autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These needs are not like our physiological needs like thirst, hunger, and sex in the sense that they are not simply deficits that need replaced over and over. These psychological needs are more for development and growth of self. They help us build the person we become as we interact with our environment.
The idea of autonomy or self-governed choice represents a key psychological need we have as humans. When breaking down autonomy we find three important concepts that accompany it. They are Perceived Locus of Control, Volition, and Perceived Choice. PLOC is the term used simply for defining where the location of our motivation comes from. This location is of a Bi-Polar nature stemming from the internal or external continuum. When we have internal PLOC it is said to have an origin within us. When we have external PLOC it is said our motivation comes from a pawn as if we are being controlled like a pawn in chess. The second concept of Autonomy is Volition which simply refers to the individual's willingness to engage in activity without force. Somebody with high volition will study for a big test because they want to be well prepared. A person with low volition will study for a test because if they don't they will be kicked out of school. The underlying factor to study does not come within the self, but rather for fear of punishment. The final concept within autonomy is perceived choice. Put in laments terms, when choice is not restricted individuals feel more autonomous. However, the freedom of choice is not always helpful to autonomy. For true autonomy the choices have to nurture inner resources and interests, be explained in a concise way, explained why the choice needs to be made, and acknowledgment of the after effects. For example one way to destroy almost all or these parts that need nurtured would be to give an ultimatum. This is a list of choices that kills the autonomy evolved from perceived choice.
Competence is the feeling of being in the know and have the skills to accomplish tasks presented by the environment one interacts with. To see further under the hood of competence Reeves discusses 3 components of competence in the environment and this interaction stems from an optimal challenge and flow, structure, and failure tolerance. In order to gain part of competence one has to find tasks in the environment that challenge one in a threshold between too difficult and too boring. After finding a steady challenge the individual gets so good at it that they find themselves in a state of flow that is so surreal they wish to experience is many times over because it often results in a peak performance. Nobody likes to work in an unstructured chaotic environment and that is why structure is such an important part of competence and speaks for its own description. Failure tolerance is another self explanatory component of competence. It simply describes the scale at which people handle failure of a task. the scale ranges from giving up after one attempt to not giving up until success is constant. Optimally speaking a challenge should be about 50/50 with success and failure to ensure competence is enjoyable. Overall the idea of competence is typically reviewed through many parts of self-efficacy. Comparisons are drawn to past performances, vicarious performances, and the evaluation of others.
Relatedness is simply stated as the need for bonds shared by the individual and others. Different bonds help to satisfy an ever-present need for relatedness. Bonds are sought after, formed, and are reciprocated in another and the failure and success of these bonds builds or destroys our relatedness. One of the msot important kinds of relationship is the communal relatedness. This is the bond shared by those who care deeply or love each other say a man and wife or mother and daughter. These are the relationships that impact and satisfy our needs the most. So much impact that at times internalization may occur. This is when one person influences the other so much in way of action, values, or emotions that the other half of the relationship adopts these traits. One person could like sports and influence the other to try sports and now they both like them. Another relatedness that does not satisfy our need is an exchange relationship which means two people exchange things that they need and nothing more. The cashier at a fast food place, a mailman, or a co-worker you don't necessarily work with. All these people interact with you to exchange goods, services, or pleasantries. You don't really share your life with them, just a sliver of it. Int he latter portion of relatedness Reeves talks abut Engagement Theory. This theory basically describes the ways in which we encounter people and share relatedness with them and how when we are successful at sharing we provide ourselves with much needed relief from the desires of our psyche.
When reading about autonomy and more importantly the subsections of autonomy. I was surprised when I realized how much I actually run into autonomical situations everyday. There are certain things I like to have a choice in like what to eat, music I listen to, etc. I experience low volition when it comes to picking out research topics because I have a tough time picking out a good topic as opposed to a teacher who gives us a list of set topics because I trust that whose topics have proven to be successful.
When I evaluated all of the levels of psychological needs I came to a rather easy answer as I have evaluated myself before in these topics however I did not know their names. In autonomy as a late I am very low on the scale simply because of my last 4 years in the military. I have trained myself to be disciplined and as my supervisor puts it "voluntold" to do tasks. This does not bother me because it is my duty and I am paid to do so. When it comes to competence I am in the middle. I am able to push myself to learn things that are vital to my growth, but I can accept defeat when the skill or knowledge does not hold my growth in the balance like say calculus. Relatedness is very high for me as I find myself constantly trying to be more than just acquaintances to someone. I try to have a deeper friendship and be there for them.
I believe the fish jumping out of the bowl represents its psychological needs of what our chapter discussed. He is self-governing his decision to leave the bowl for a more interactive environment. There it hopes to find challenges to be competent at and also Relatedness with other fish perhaps. Even though his does not know what lies beyond the water and that he may die when taking the jump his psychological need has exceeded his care for well-being.
Terms Used: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, PLOC, Volition, Perceived Choice, challenge & flow, structure, failure tolerance, internalization, Engagement Theory.
Chapter 6 discussed the psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When an activity involves our psychological needs, we feel interest, and when it satisfies our psychological needs, we feel happiness. Organismic Theories suggest that the survival of any living thing depends on its environment, which provides its resources, like food, water, and social support. Organismic Theories stress the importance of the person-environment dialect. The person-environment dialect means that both the environment and the individual act on each other. They are also constantly adapting. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness provide motivation for learning, growing, and developing. Autonomy is our desire to decide our own actions. The Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) is a person’s understanding of the source of their motivated acts. The PLOC is a continuum ranging from internal to external. Volition is a feeling of freeness to choose one’s own behaviors. Choices help us enhance our sense of autonomy, however, either-or choices are an exception. When environments involve and satisfy peoples’ need for autonomy, they are considered autonomy supportive. We can foster autonomy supportive environments by taking others’ views and values into account during an activity. Competence is the need to use our skills to be effective in our environmental interactions. Flow is a state of focus where the person is highly involved mentally in an activity. When a person uses their skills to overcome an obstacle, they usually experience flow. Given optimal challenge, any activity can be enjoyed. Structure in the environment nurtures the need for competence if it offers assistance, feedback, and goals. The best way to promote competence is to be tolerant of failure. Relatedness is the psychological need to create strong emotional connections with others. People tend to not break their social connections. Relationships that are not reciprocal or do not involve liking do not satisfy our need for relatedness. Internalization is when we accept an external regulation as our own value. When we are in a communal relationship, internalization is high because we believe the other person has our best interest at heart. Engagement is the intensity and emotional quality people demonstrate when they are involved in an activity. When our psychological needs are involved and satisfied, we have more positive emotion and psychological well-being. Vitality is a way that we have “good days”. Vitality is a clear signs that our psychological needs are being met.
I was surprised when I read that only certain kinds of choices promote autonomy. Either-or choices do not promote autonomy. Only open-ended choices help meet this psychological need. I would rate myself high in all the psychological need categories. I say this because I feel autonomous in that I can choose whether or not I want to go to class. My good grades make me feel competent, and my close friendships and familial relationships make me feel a sense of relatedness. My need for competence motivates me to go to class, do my homework, and make good decisions. Initially I was going to say the fish was jumping out of the bowl because he was so ecstatic that all of his psychological needs were met and he felt like didn’t have any limitations, but then I realized that he was alone in the bowl, and probably his relatedness need was not being satisfied and he was ending his life from loneliness.
Terms: Psychological Needs, Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Organismic Theories, Person-Environment Dialect, Perceived Locus of Causality, Volition, Autonomy Supportive, Flow, Positive Feedback, Internalization, Vitality.
Chapter 6 is titled “Psychological Needs”. The main idea of the chapter is that when an activity involves our psychological needs, we feel interest. When an activity satisfies our need, we feel enjoyment. People are aware of their needs and what motivates them to engage in the environment around them in order to satisfy their psychological needs. The organismic approach to motivation recognizes that environments constantly change and therefore they need to be flexible. The opposite of this approach is known as a mechanistic approach. This involves the environment acting on a person and the person reacts. For example, when the environment is cold, it causes people to shiver. Person-Environment Dialectic theory involves a reciprocal relationship between the environment and the person. Organismic Psychological Needs provide motivation that supports learning. The psychological need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness provide people with natural motivation for learning, growing, and developing. The environment plays a big factor in determining whether or not people actually gain knowledge from their experiences. Autonomy support, structure and involvement are important factors in social settings. When people experience a need for satisfaction, they experience their psychological needs necessary for active engagement and subjective experiences of vitality and well-being.
One of the most surprising and fascinating things that I learned was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s study of optimal flow and challenge. This was a surprising thing for me to learn about because I did not know that competence could be so complex. He studied hundreds of people that had straight forward hobbies and knew what they enjoyed to do. Later, he studied people that were not quite as exciting and had less hobbies. He found that the essence of enjoyment could be traced back to the “flow experience”. Flow is a state of concentration that involves holistic absorption and deep involvement in an activity. When a person find themselves in a “flow” it is often very pleasurable and they seek out to do it again. It often occurs when a person uses his or her skills to overcome a challenge. When challenge matches skill, the person is still concentrated and enjoying themselves. When skill outweighs challenge, concentration is often lost. When the challenge outweighs skill level, the individual often fears that they will not be able to complete the task. This was interesting to me because recently I have started to rock climb and at first I was somewhat overwhelmed. I had rock climbed before, but I didn’t take it as seriously, nor did I plan on making it a hobby. After awhile I began to get better and got in a “flow”. I loved the way I felt afterwards, like I had worked out in a way that I never had before. It is still challenging to me, but the more I work at it, the more competent I feel to accomplish tougher routes.
When rating my psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, I would give myself a medium to a medium-high. When it comes to autonomy, I would rate myself as medium-high. I would definitely not give myself this rating a few years back, but with time I have learned to embrace who I am and enjoy my free spirit. I have a hectic schedule with work, class, working out, and studying so that makes it difficult to have a lot of free time to meet with friends during the day. This, in a way, forces me to be independent. I have to make decisions for myself because no one is going to make them for me.
For competence I give myself a medium. Mainly I am referring to my job as a barista. I am able to perform my job properly and behave accordingly as work. However, I do not always follow the rules. I text as work, I eat food without paying for it, sometimes I give stuff away for free and I make drinks the way I think they should be made. Opps. I am able to communicate with customers effectively and problem solve when a problem arises.
For relatedness I would give myself a medium. I have a lot of acquaintances at UNI, but I feel closer with my friends from High School. That is probably because I don’t spend a lot of time in Cedar Falls on the weekends so I don’t have the chance to open up more to friends here.
Competence motivates me in many ways. At my job I have gained the competence to perform daily tasks such as making drinks, taking orders, running a cash register, making and filling a stock list, communicating with customers and so on. However, there are constantly new people being hired and I am often training them. With every training session there is a new challenge depending on the new employees work experience. Some people can adapt to the job very quickly because they are familiar with coffee drinks in the first place. However, it is not as easy to train people that don’t like coffee and aren’t familiar with the process at all. The new challenge is definitely something that challenges my competence. Going to college has also tested my competence. Through various classes with different levels of excitement I have learned how to ask for help, study, not procrastinate, etc. There are many more challenges ahead, especially with a new job.
My guess for the fish picture is that it is symbolizing going out of your comfort zone. This chapter is about Psychological Needs and sometimes that requires doing things that you may not feel competent enough to complete. Through this experience, you are able to grow and develop.
TERMS: psychological needs, interest, enjoyment, motivates, satisfy, engage, organismic approach, environment, mechanistic approach, autonomy, growing, developing, competence, relatedness, optimal flow, challenge, holistic, symbolizing
As inherently active individuals we are motivated to achieve our psychological needs. It is thought that involvement and interaction with an individual and the environment is fluid. Through person environment dialectic we affect our environment and our environment affects us. Our psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are affected by our motivation to achieve growth, development, and self-satisfaction. Autonomy allows for personal choice and self-interest to be involved in our decisions. With personal choice it affects what we involve ourselves in and how we are personally motivated and supported in these interactions. Competence, due to autonomy is also affected by our own ability when interacting in certain activities and behaviors. We push and strive to achieve success but when our skills are repeatedly questioned or not enough to complete a task our competence is questioned. Development of relationships allows for the growth of relatedness. We develop relationships based on our interpretations of others and their liking and caring for us.
I found if very interesting to think that through achieving autonomy, competence, and relatedness we internally motivate ourselves. Through our success in achieving psychological needs we are able to interact and motivate our behavior in a more positive manner. While this makes a vast amount of sense, it is crazy to believe how much this affects our behavior and motivation.
Autonomy in my life is important to some extent. Personal choice is valued because I am very independent and I want the ability to choose what I would like to participate in. Now I am in college and my major requires me to take some courses but then I am able to choose the other classes to make the rest of my major credits. I am therefore still able to have some choice with the classes I would like to take but then still required to take certain courses. When I attempt certain activities my autonomy may be higher but as of now I would rate this as low.
As for competence I would rate myself as high. I get very offended at times when people question my ability in skills I feel I have mastered. When learning new activities my level of competence is very low because I am unaware of the specifics of the new skills being taught. I think this why I often get really nervous when starting a new job. Waitressing is my current occupation and things that question my competence which irritate me are when I enter an order wrong and co-workers question my work. The structure of my occupation is based on serving customers but I am able to still have autonomy with certain decisions.
Relatedness is a high psychological need for me. I constantly strive to have positive relationships with coworkers, fellow students, managers, and professors. Interaction is a necessity for me. I feel that I experience more communal relationships in my life now due to my parse limited college and work environment. But then I also feel that within my communal relationships I experience a vast amount of exchange relationships. For example, my friend was selling Girl Scout cookies for his niece and I bought some. I would qualify this as an exchange relatinoship but he is an important and prominent person in my life.
Achieving relatedness motivates me to be a very personable person in both my occupation and person life. My desire to have positive relationships with others allows me to be happy with myself. At work I feel that some co-workers and I have more of an exchange relationship. Then there are many other employees which I have communal relationships outside of work and exchange relationships during our shifts together.
The presentation and purpose of the fish picture presented with Chapter Six is there because it shows that we strive to push ourselves for even what seems impossible. We question our abilities and when we achieve something difficult our competence and personal achievement strive. We have the choice (autonomy) to attempt the impossible. Our surroundings and relationships help us succeed.
Terms: inherently active, psychological needs, person environment dialectic, motivation, growth, development, self-satisfaction, internally motivated, autonomy, competence, structure, relatedness, communal and exchange relationships
Chapter 6 talks about one's psychological needs and the enjoyment we feel from partaking in an activity that satisfies our psychological needs. The psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The psychological needs are also known as the organismic psychological needs. Organismic theories derives from organism, something that is alive and is active in its environment. The organism need to learn to adapt to the changes in its environment, because things will always change. The Organismic theories like the person-environment dialectic. The person acts in the environment out of interest, curiosity, intrinsic motivation to create changes in it. The environment offers opportunities for the person like feedback and relationships. The person and the environment are constantly changing.
Autonomy is one's experience to have self-direction and choice in the initiation and regulation of their behavior. Autonomy is having a choice of interests, things we like and dislike, and the flexibility to make our own decisions. Perceived locus of causality is a person's understanding of the cause of their motivated action. The source of their motivated actions could either be from an internal perceived locus of causality or an external perceived locus of causality. Internal would be an interest to do something and external would be a paycheck. Volition is the willingness to engage in an activity without pressures. The freedom to do what they want without something like peer pressure making them do an activity. Perceived choice is flexibility in our decision making and having many options to choose from. This reminds me of a commercial where a guy has a huge wardrobe but everything is the same and does not have any choices. These three things make up the experience of autonomy.
Competence is the need to be effective in interactions in the environment and to test their skills with challenges they seek out. The environmental conditions that are used to reach competence are: optimal challenge, clear and helpful structure, high failure tolerance from others, and positive feedback and perception of progress. In optimal challenge and flow, if one's challenge and skills are even, then the person experiences flow. Flow is a state of concentration which someone is fully and deeply involved in an action. Flow is such an enjoyable experience that the person engages in an activity time after time, in hopes of experiencing flow again. Structure is how clear the information is and the guidance given to reach the goal. With optimal challenge, a person is likely to experience failure. By failing, one learns what not to do, new ideas and ways to succeed, and experience a greater feeling of competence. This is failure tolerance. Positive feedback come from the task itself, comparisons of one's current performance with one's own past performances, comparisons of one's current performance with the performance of others, and evaluations of others.
Relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with others. We tend to become close to people we trust and stay away from people who are a damage to our well-being. People look for in relationships where they can relate honestly and be caring and emotional meaningful. Relatedness forms social bonds that are easily formed. Interactions with others usually come with warmth, care, and mutual concern. This is needed for friendships, relationships, falling in love, becoming colleges.
What surprised me the most was how complicated competence is. I did not realize that there was so many steps in reaching competence. I have never heard of flow used in the terminology as it is used for competence. Flow is a state of concentration which someone is fully and deeply involved in an action. Flow is such an enjoyable experience that the person engages in an activity time after time, in hopes of experiencing flow again.
I think I am pretty low on autonomy because even when I have a closet full of clothes to choose from, I have no idea what to where most days. It usually takes me like ten minutes to pick out an outfit. I have told my roommate that I should just have a stylist choose my outfits. Also when choosing an activity to do with my friends I never want to be the person to decide. I like making sure it is an activity everyone likes and agrees on, not just me. I think that is why I have such a hard time choosing places or activities.
I am medium on competence. I dislike failing with a passion. If I do not do something right, I feel like I have failed everyone around me and myself. Even if the project I am working on is difficult and frustrating, I usually will not quit. I will keep at it until I have figured out the problem and fix it or finish a project and do it correctly. For school, if I really do not want to study or write a paper, I will anyway because getting a bad grade is not acceptable to me. I remember when I was in tumbling, I messed up in a competition because I was so nervous. My coach made me do the routine again to prove to the judges that I could do it. I redid the routine without messing up, but since I messed up before I got scratched. I got last place, and I hated it. So I worked harder so that would never happen again, and it didn't. Knowing that accomplished something difficult makes me feel good about myself and my abilities.
I would rate myself as pretty high on relatedness because I like interacting with people. I normally like having someone around that I can talk to or hang around with. I thought about having a single room, but I would miss having someone there that I could almost always talk to. I like making friends and I have a number of friends that I talk to everyday. My best friend and I have a great relationship. We've been friends since elementary school and we have been through a lot of things. She is one of the first people I talk to if I have exciting news or if I'm sad or need help with something. The same goes for her, she knows I'll always be there for her.
George is a lonely goldfish and is jumping out of its bowl to make friends. George the goldfish wanted a companion to talk and play with to satisfy his psychological need of relatedness. George the goldfish was bored with just a fishbowl with nothing in it and wanted other options of fishbowls and items in it. Or George the goldfish enjoys jumping and chooses to jump because he can and find it interesting (autonomy). Jumping could also show its competence. George the goldfish wants to show that dolphins and whales are not the only fish that can jump. Also George the goldfish wants to prove that it can jump out of its bowl or see how high it can jump.
TERMS: psychological needs, organismic theories, organism, person-environment dialectic, autonomy, perceived locus of causality, internal perceived locus of causality, external perceived locus of causality, volition, perceived choice, competence, optimal challenge, flow, structure, failure tolerance, relatedness
Chapter six is a discussion on our psychological needs; namely the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Psychological needs are an innate source of motivation that creates the desire to interact with one’s environment in a manner that promotes personal growth. The person interacts with the environment and the environment in turn influences the person in ways such as offering feedback and challenges. This is the person-environment dialectic. Human beings are organisms with a mind that has needs that must be met in order to offer development, learning, and growth to the individual.
Autonomy is the need to experience choice in stimulating and regulating one’s behavior. We want to be in control or at least feel like we are in control of most things in our lives. This gives us a sense of sovereignty. There are three elements that give us the feeling of autonomy: perceived choice, volition, and perceived locus of causality. An autonomy-supportive environment preserves independence when it provides opportunities for one to guide their own course of action and direction. In this environment people are allowed to work at their own pace, solve problems their own way, and focus on things that align with their own values and sense of importance.
There are several ways one can support others sense of autonomy. You can listen carefully to what others are saying allow them to express themselves. Providing positive feedback and acknowledging their unique perspective are also supportive to other’s sense of autonomy. There are benefits to using this autonomy-supportive motivation style. It promotes developmental and engagement gains and increases motivation in others. You will also see better performance and improved learning.
Competence is the psychological need that gives us the motivation to put worth sufficient effort in order to gain a sense of mastery in a subject or task. When one is so immersed in the activity at hand that they experience such joy and temporal displacement, a flow experience has occurred. But when one is overly challenged they will feel overwhelmed. If one feels the task is tedious or too easy they will become bored. We want to experience optimal challenge, where we are not overwhelmed or bored with a task.
Relatedness is the psychological need to establish intimate bonds and attachments with others. This gives us a feeling of emotional connectedness with others and our environment. We want to be around people we feel this relatedness with and in environments that support this feeling. When the needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are properly supported, we get the feeling of engagement with others and our environment. This gives us an overall sense of well-being.
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter is just how many and diverse the range of benefits you receive from being in autonomy-supportive relationships and environments. You will feel happier, perform better, learn more, and be more creative.
I feel that I am probably in the middle of the road for all three of the components: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I feel need to be autonomous but structured environments and inflexible people do not get to me like they may for people with a higher need of autonomy. I am able to adapt to those types of situations enough to function without much frustration. I feel the need to be competent in most things I do but I rarely get hung up on needing to feel like I mastered every single idea or activity. I have the need to experience relatedness with my wife and immediate family but beyond that I do not have that high of a need with others. I can be causally friendly with most people without having the urge to feel like I need to have a strong emotional connection with them.
Having a medium psychological need to feel relatedness affects and motivates behaviors in a variety of ways. I have a good connection with my family but live far away from them. I see them only a handful of times a year and I am comfortable with that. My relationship with my wife is good enough to satisfy my daily need of relatedness. I have moved around a lot and beyond a small group of friends I had throughout high school most of my relationships with others can be described as casual. I do not have a string need to connect with everyone I meet throughout my travels in life. The small group of friends I have stayed in contact with over the years is enough to satisfy my need of relatedness in regards to friendship. We text, occasionally talk on the phone, and hang out a few times a year at sporting events or weekend trips. All of this is enough for me without feeling I have no sense of belong or not enough social interaction.
The fish is jumping out of the fishbowl. This demonstrates it has enough competence and sense of autonomy to motivate it to leave the bowl. Its motivation to leave the bowl might be its need to be with others to feel the sense of relatedness.
Terms: Psychological Needs, Person-Environment Dialectic, Autonomy, Autonomy-Supportive Environment Competence, Flow, Optimal Challenge, Relatedness, Engagement
Chapter 6 focuses on the motivational significance of three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These needs generate a proactive energy that promotes a willingness to seek out and engage in an environment. When the environment supports and nurtures these needs then people experience positive emotions, optimal experience, and healthy development. These three needs are referred to as organismic psychological needs due to how an organism can interact with and how it adapts, changes, and grows as the environment changes. The organismic theory circles the idea of a person-environment dialectic that is reciprocal (two-way). If a person acts on the environment either through curiosity or interest the environment responds with opportunities such as imposed structures or by making demands, which will fulfill or frustrate the individual. This is on the assumption that the organism is naturally active and motivated by the three needs for learning, growing, and developing.
Autonomy the psychological need to experience self-directed and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior, such as the what, when, and how aspects of our lives. There are three qualities that work together to define autonomy (self-determining). Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) refers to an individual’s understanding of the causal source of his or her motivated actions. Such as if the person is behaving on a personal (internal PLOC) or environmental (external PLOC) source to say, why read a book? Do you do it because its fun and you enjoy it or is your professor making you read for class? Other terms that get thrown around to describe external and internal are pawns and origins. Volition is an unpressured willingness to engage in an activity and fill free doing so. The opposite of feeling free is being coerced and pressured into action, where an individual forces themselves into action, “I have to do this”. Perceived choice is the sense of choice we experience when we find ourselves in environments that provide us with decision-making flexibility to choose from.
Competence the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills. This is due to competences need to generate the willingness to seek out optimal challenges. A few key environmental conditions that allow for competence are: optimal challenge, clear structure, and failure tolerance, along with the most important positive feedback and the perception of progress. Optimal challenge refers to a person using his or her skills to overcome different pairings of challenges and skills if they be over challenging causing worrying and anxiety, under challenging that can cause emotional boredom, or were the challenge is just right (flow experience) and the individuals concentration, involvement, and enjoyment rise. Structure is the amount and clarity of information about the environment that people with the autonomy to support others expects the person to do to achieve desired outcomes. In simpler terms they are offering clear goals and guidance. Failure tolerance is knowing that there is just a good enough chance of failing a task as there is to succeed. That if it’s error tolerance, failure tolerance, or risk taking we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. Positive feedback is the information individuals need to formulate a cognitive evaluation of their perceived level of competence, if it’s task-generated, self-generated, social comparisons, or other-generated.
Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. It shows the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. It’s a need that creates a social bond between one self and a reciprocal other that wants the same sort of relationship and eventually internalizes external regulations or values into internal endorsed ones. This is only when the value, meaning, and utility of prescriptions (do’s) and proscriptions (don’ts) of the other are seen with clear meaning.
The most surprising thing that I learned would have to be the difference between challenge and feedback. That lifting weights, tests, or car problems are not a psychological experience; they are just the situations that set the stage for a challenge. It’s not until the person starts to perform and receive that first part of feedback that it becomes a psychological experience of being challenged. When it comes to rating myself on the three psychological needs id have to high for autonomy and medium for competence and relatedness, I say this for competence due to the work load and hassles of school and for relatedness might be a low when it comes to a close, intimate relationship. The one psychological need I think that motivates me the most would be competence. When it comes to lifting I am always or running to prove that I can do better than last time and be stronger for when I need to be, but I never really get hat feedback to give myself the psychological challenge on if I should keep going or improve even more. For the fish I’m going to say he or she is taking an organismic approach of challenging the environment to adapt, learn, and grow. The fish made an autonomic choice to jump out of the water to challenge his competence and maybe find relatedness rather than be alone.
Terms: autonomy, competence, relatedness, organismic psychological needs, reciprocal, Perceived locus of causality, autonomy, personal, coerced, Volition, origins, pawns, environmental, Perceived choice, optimal challenge, clear structure, failure tolerance, positive feedback, flow experience, task-generated, self-generated, social comparisons, error tolerance, failure tolerance, risk taking, proscriptions, internalize prescriptions
This chapter focuses on psychological needs, specifically autonomy, competence and relatedness. These are also referred to as organismic needs. We find enjoyment out of things that use our psychological needs. The energy that we gather from our psychological needs is proactive. We want to be involved in a space that requires our psychological need. We need it to grow, develop and learn in our ever-changing environments. Mechanistic theories are based off of more of a cause and effect basis. Our body’s reactions to the environment are machine like and a reaction that is common among others.
Autonomy is having the authority over ourselves to decide as Reeve puts it “what to do, when to do it, how to do it, when to stop doing it, and whether or not to do it at all”. Having the freedom and power over our own choices and actions, more specifically, self-directions and personal endorsement, gives us autonomy. There are three main concepts that work together to create autonomy—perceived locus of control, which is understanding why someone is motivated to do the things they do. The second is volition is the willingness to participate in an activity. Lastly, perceived choice can be explained by what we feel when we have free reign over our decisions. Individuals also do not feel autonomy if they are given an either- or decision. When they have to choose between two things, it is not completely giving them a choice and can create a pressure to have to choose. That is called the conundrum of choice.
This chapter also focuses on the psychological need of competence. Competence is the desire to interact effectively in one’s environment. This can be in school, work and in relationships. An important concept in competence is flow. Flow is the feeling of when one is so involved in a task that the concept of time is no longer important or one is oblivious to it. The final psychological need discussed in the chapter is relatedness. Relatedness is the desire for social interaction. People want intimate and loving relationships that they can gather comfort from.
The most surprising thing I learned was the concept of autonomy and the knowledge that we have of it. I think it is surprising that we know supportive autonomy is the most productive for learning and creativity, but we do not use it in the school system. Much of our lives the controlling aspect of autonomy is used. We had learned to be accustomed to live in somewhat of a controlled life every day.
I would rate myself medium in autonomy. As we discussed in class today, in the classroom setting, I do enjoy having some structure and knowledge of what I should expect from the course. On the other hand, I do get frustrated if I constantly am being forced to do things that I may not want to do, or would rather be spending my time doing something else. In competence I would rate myself high. I feel as thought I strive when I am competent in the activities that I am involved in. During high school I did not feel as though I was highly competent in many of my class. After coming to college and being able to focus on psychology, I feel better about my overall competence in school. The final need, relatedness, is the iffiest for me. There is much of my time that I would rather spend alone than with a lot of other people. Even though that is true, I would also be very depressed and unproductive with my life if I didn’t have people to spend time with.
Relatedness would be the best example to show how I am motivated in certain areas of my life. I am motivated every semester to take more classes that meet on campus rather than online classes because I would rather feel apart of a group than sit by myself. The motivation to be around people also comes up in my personal life. I can tell if I have been by myself for too long a certain day because I have a drive and desire to be about people. This happens a lot because I only have one other roommate and our schedules are conflicting.
I think the picture of the fish symbolizes its lack of autonomy and relatedness. This fish is in a small bowl by itself. It doesn’t have a choice of what to do with its time because his only real option is to swim around the bowl. This fish is also the only fish in the picture; hypothetically, it may be searching to be around other fish.
Terms: organismic theory, mechanistic theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived locus of control, volition, perceived choice, conundrum of choice, flow
Chapter 6
This chapter discussed psychological needs that people experience on a daily basis. The three basic needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior and reflects the desire to have inner resources rather than having environmental events determine your actions. A self-determined person makes a choice when it comes to their actions. Whether or not a person satisfies the need for autonomy depends on how supportive or controlling their relationships and environment are. People with autonomous behavior verses controlling show positive outcomes including gaining motivation, engagement, development, learning, performance, and well-being. Competence is the need to interact effectively with the environment. It reflects the desire to exercise skills and to seek out and master challenges. This need generates the motivation to want to develop, improve, and refine personal skills and talents. Flow is a psychological state characterized by maximum enjoyment, intense concentration, and full absorption in a task and is experienced when a person’s challenge and their environment are both relatively high. Positive feedback and the perception of progress are environmental events that that satisfy the need for competence. Lastly, relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. It reflects the desire to be emotionally connected and interpersonally involved with others in a warm, caring relationship. A person needs to confirm that their special bonds involve both caring and liking in order to satisfy relatedness. Relatedness is important because it provides the social context that supports being able to accepts another’s views or behavior as their own. Motivation is the approach that these three needs are based off and rely on two assumptions: people are inherently active and people use these inherent psychological needs to engage in the environment that sometimes supports or neglects inner resources. We as humans possess a natural motivation to learn, grow, and develop in a way that is healthy and mature. We do these things when our environment involves and supports our psychological needs. In conclusion, the support, structure, and involvement of autonomy are all important aspects of the social context because they provide the means through which environments support people’s psychological needs. When satisfaction is experienced through psychological needs, a person also experiences needs necessary for active engagement and subjective experiences of vitality and well-being.
One surprising thing that I learned while reading the chapter was the terms for relatedness. It was interesting to read that a bond needs to involve caring and liking in order for it to be relatedness. This makes sense, but at the same time I feel like I can relate to some people that I do not necessarily care for or like. I assumed that humans share similar characteristics and can relate to one another with or with caring.
I think that my autonomy level is high, my competence level is low, and my level of relatedness is medium. I feel like I am a very self-directed person and strive to make myself a better person internally. This is why I believe my competence level is low because I try not to let the environment control how I think or behave. I do like pursuing challenges in life, but more so for my own satisfaction, not to satisfy my environment. I placed my relatedness level at medium because although I don’t like to compare myself to other, I do find myself relating to them. Sharing a bond with someone else is a positive thing for me and I enjoy caring for someone and relating to their values as well as having someone care about me and connect to my views. Autonomy motivates specific behaviors in my life especially when it comes to school. Beyond the fact that society portray education as a necessity to succeed, I more so enjoy school for the personal achievement. I enjoy learning new things and self-directing myself to engage as such a level that improves my well-being.
I view the picture of the fish as a symbol for autonomy. I think of the fish bowl perspective when everyone is watching your every move and critiquing you behaviors and actions. The fish jumping out of the bowl makes me think that it is ‘escaping’ the attention from its environment and wanting to become more self-directed and not have to worry about any judgments made from an outside source.
Terms: autonomy, competence, relatedness, psychological needs, self-direction, environmental events, motivation, engagement, learning, development, well-being
This chapter focused on another type of need, the psychological kind. We learn immediately from the chapter that physiological needs, as discussed in the previous chapter, were reactive, meaning they would come into play when the body demonstrated a deficit. Psychological needs, however, are proactive, meaning they are always in play, constantly ready. These needs are also known as the growth needs, referring to our well-being and psychological self. The three needs discussed in this chapter are called organismic, or that they rely on the environment in order to grow, gain skills, and to change. The three needs are: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
The relationship between person and environment is two-way, and constantly in flux. The textbook tells us that the proactive person actively seeks out and engages himself in the challenges the environment produces. We do this as an expression of our self and with the desire to effectively interact with our outside world. With these interactions, we strive to gain autonomy, relatedness, and competence to some degree. A great example of how these three needs work into our daily lives is given in the textbook; children want to do activities of their own choosing and on their terms (gaining autonomy), and be able to do that activity better than they did before (achieving competence), depending on which skills and activities are important with regard to their own values, attitudes, and emotional climate offered to them by the important people in their lives (relatedness).
Autonomy, determined by the self, involves deciding when, how, where, what, and with whom to do something. Autonomy is about choices, whether perceived, true or restricted. Three qualities also work together to define autonomy as a subjective experience; perceived locus of causality (PLOC), volition, and perceived choice. When we have a supported autonomy, we experience higher motivation, stronger engagement, enhanced development, more learning, increased performance, and overall better psychological well-being. Ways to do this are: listening, providing rationale, encourage effort, respond to questions, ask others’ opinions and wants, and praise. The important thing to remember is that these things must be done in a non-controlling way. When a person is controlled, he feels pressure to comply with a prescribed way of behavior, or way of thinking/feeling.
Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. Flow is defined as a state of concentration that involves a holistic absorption and deep involvement in any activity. In other words, when you become engrossed in an activity and lose track of time, you have been experiencing flow. Competence is also referred to as having structure.
We need to realize that experiences involve failure, so we should prepare with failure tolerance. On the other hand, when we do a good job, we desire positive feedback from others, the task itself, the present performance compared to a past one, or this performance compared to others’. Moderate challenges seem to give the most pleasure.
The third and final psychological need this chapter discusses is relatedness. This is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachment with other people. Relatedness also reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships.
Also discussed in chapter 6 are the topics of exchange and communal relationships. Exchange relationships are those between acquaintances or people who simply do business together. Communal relationships are more personal, and involve persons who care for each other and about the welfare and needs of the others in their life.
Internalization refers to the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed regulation or value into an internally endorsed one voluntarily. This could be a child adopting a parent’s values or a student adopting a professor’s. In order to internalize successfully, one must have relatedness need satisfaction and have been offered clear and convincing rationale.
Lastly, engagement is the quality of intensity and emotion people show when initiating and carrying out activities. Satisfaction of these three psychological needs provide the psychological nutriments necessary for positive well-being, or our “good days”.
I was actually surprised that some of the controlling conditions discussed are things I am guilty of doing occasionally with my own children. I don’t think I’m harsh, but there are times that I did not provide rationale.
As far as rating myself, as far as autonomy- I am about medium. I like a little instruction at times. I suppose I am about the same for competence and relatedness, right in the middle. In my own life, for example, I feel more comfortable sometimes with instructors giving little wiggle room. This makes me have fewer decisions in my life, and is sometimes just easier. As far as competence, I do enjoy getting things accomplished, even at home. I like the close relationships I have with friends and family, but again, it’s a need that rates in the middle on a high/low scale for importance.
As I mentioned before, autonomy is a relatively high need, yet not too high in importance. At times, I like to decide things for myself, usually events and activities with my children and at home. Other times, I would rather not have to think as much about any task and just know what I am supposed to do, like in many school assignments.
As far as the fish picture, I just think the fish is expressing its autonomy and not putting up with others telling it that it has to stay in the bowl.
TERMS: autonomy, relatedness, competence, psychological needs, engagement, internalization, failure tolerance, positive feedback, flow, structure, perceived choice, PLOC, volition, organismic theory, person-environment dialectic, communal, exchange relationships
Chapter 6 discusses a person’s psychological needs, and what we do in order to satisfy our needs. This chapter focuses on three main psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. Psychological needs are not to be confused with physiological needs which were discussed in chapter 4. Physiological needs are more dependent on the satisfaction of biological factors such as water, food, and sex. Psychological needs stem from ones need to develop relationships and grow as an individual in our environment.
When we decide what we want to do or what we don’t want to do we are engaging in autonomy. We have a need for autonomy; we all want the freedom to make our own choices. There are three factors involved in the process of autonomy. Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) is the term that describes where our motivation stems from. PLOC is measured on a bipolar sequence that ranges from internal to external. PLOC is reflective of a person’s behavior, to show if their behavior is initiated by personal or environmental factors. Volition is involved in autonomy; this is when a person does something because they genuinely want to. Perceived choices are the types of choices we make when we are presented with a multitude of options to choose from. People tend to respond better to autonomy-supportive motivating style rather than the controlled motivation style. Autonomy-supportive motivating style is more effective because the person’s interest is taken into perspective allowing room for personal growth, while controlling motivation style allows little room for growth and the person feels like their input is less valuable.
Another psychological need that is important is competence; this allows one to interact successfully in an environment. Competence motivates one to exercise their skills to effectively master challenges. The optimal challenge and flow is when a person level of skill matches the level of the challenge. When a person feels over challenged this threatens their competence. Structure is the amount of clarity of information about what the environment expects the person to do. Failure tolerance describes when people take on highly skilled task and experience dread or frustration. Supporting competence is when feedback is offered on progress. When an individual receives Positive feedback then they feel that they are competent.
Relatedness is another psychological need that motivates us to go out of our way to form relationships with people. We want to form close bonds with people and be a part of something. We all want to feel needed and loved. Examples of Involving relatedness would be starting a new relationship, making a new friend or giving birth to a child. People tend to seek out relationship with people that will be emotionally rewarding to fulfill their need for relatedness. Supporting relatedness is when the relationship is mutual, the people involved both care about the other person’s well-being.
When rating myself on psychological needs such as autonomy, competence and autonomy I would have to say that it would be low, high and .
When it comes to autonomy I love being able to make my own decisions but I am pretty nonchalant about things. I am often indecisive about where I want to eat or what I want to do; I can just go with the flow and be perfectly content most of the time. My competence level would have to be high, I think that I am able to adapt to new environments very easily. I left Texas to come to school in Iowa and I’ve adjusted rather quickly. I like trying new things in new environment’s just to broaden my horizons. I would rate my relatedness medium, I like meeting new people and forming relationships but I choose quality over quantity. I have many friends and associates but only a handful of really close friends. I like being around people but I’m also perfectly happy being alone. I don’t require a constant need for people to be around.
Achieving relatedness motivates me to be more outgoing and friendly. Naturally I am very quiet and shy which can come off as standoffish. I feel that I have to work a little harder to just talk to people sometimes. I need to make sure that I appear friendlier and ask questions. I do think that developing relationships is very important to achieve a successful and healthy life. But once I come out of my shell I really enjoy being around people and making new friends.
The fish jumping out of the bowl is in correlation to chapter 6 because the fish is doing something that it wants to do even though it is difficult. The fish is jumping out of its bowl into a new environment and pushing itself to go beyond its normal setting (competence). The fish also has a desire to satisfy its need for relatedness and jump out of the bowl to look for friends; it’s probably tired of being alone in the bowl.
Key terms: psychological needs, physiological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, PLOC, environmental factors, volition, perceived choices autonomy supportive motivating style, controlling motivation style, positive feedback, involving relatedness, supporting relatedness, interact, relationships, bonding,
Chapter 6 discusses a person’s psychological needs, and what we do in order to satisfy our needs. This chapter focuses on three main psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. Psychological needs are not to be confused with physiological needs which were discussed in chapter 4. Physiological needs are more dependent on the satisfaction of biological factors such as water, food, and sex. Psychological needs stem from ones need to develop relationships and grow as an individual in our environment.
When we decide what we want to do or what we don’t want to do we are engaging in autonomy. We have a need for autonomy; we all want the freedom to make our own choices. There are three factors involved in the process of autonomy. Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) is the term that describes where our motivation stems from. PLOC is measured on a bipolar sequence that ranges from internal to external. PLOC is reflective of a person’s behavior, to show if their behavior is initiated by personal or environmental factors. Volition is involved in autonomy; this is when a person does something because they genuinely want to. Perceived choices are the types of choices we make when we are presented with a multitude of options to choose from. People tend to respond better to autonomy-supportive motivating style rather than the controlled motivation style. Autonomy-supportive motivating style is more effective because the person’s interest is taken into perspective allowing room for personal growth, while controlling motivation style allows little room for growth and the person feels like their input is less valuable.
Another psychological need that is important is competence; this allows one to interact successfully in an environment. Competence motivates one to exercise their skills to effectively master challenges. The optimal challenge and flow is when a person level of skill matches the level of the challenge. When a person feels over challenged this threatens their competence. Structure is the amount of clarity of information about what the environment expects the person to do. Failure tolerance describes when people take on highly skilled task and experience dread or frustration. Supporting competence is when feedback is offered on progress. When an individual receives Positive feedback then they feel that they are competent.
Relatedness is another psychological need that motivates us to go out of our way to form relationships with people. We want to form close bonds with people and be a part of something. We all want to feel needed and loved. Examples of Involving relatedness would be starting a new relationship, making a new friend or giving birth to a child. People tend to seek out relationship with people that will be emotionally rewarding to fulfill their need for relatedness. Supporting relatedness is when the relationship is mutual, the people involved both care about the other person’s well-being.
When rating myself on psychological needs such as autonomy, competence and autonomy I would have to say that it would be low, high and .
When it comes to autonomy I love being able to make my own decisions but I am pretty nonchalant about things. I am often indecisive about where I want to eat or what I want to do; I can just go with the flow and be perfectly content most of the time. My competence level would have to be high, I think that I am able to adapt to new environments very easily. I left Texas to come to school in Iowa and I’ve adjusted rather quickly. I like trying new things in new environment’s just to broaden my horizons. I would rate my relatedness medium, I like meeting new people and forming relationships but I choose quality over quantity. I have many friends and associates but only a handful of really close friends. I like being around people but I’m also perfectly happy being alone. I don’t require a constant need for people to be around.
Achieving relatedness motivates me to be more outgoing and friendly. Naturally I am very quiet and shy which can come off as standoffish. I feel that I have to work a little harder to just talk to people sometimes. I need to make sure that I appear friendlier and ask questions. I do think that developing relationships is very important to achieve a successful and healthy life. But once I come out of my shell I really enjoy being around people and making new friends.
The fish jumping out of the bowl is in correlation to chapter 6 because the fish is doing something that it wants to do even though it is difficult. The fish is jumping out of its bowl into a new environment and pushing itself to go beyond its normal setting (competence). The fish also has a desire to satisfy its need for relatedness and jump out of the bowl to look for friends; it’s probably tired of being alone in the bowl.
Key terms: psychological needs, physiological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, PLOC, environmental factors, volition, perceived choices autonomy supportive motivating style, controlling motivation style, positive feedback, involving relatedness, supporting relatedness, interact, relationships, bonding,
Chapter 6 discusses a person’s psychological needs, and what we do in order to satisfy our needs. This chapter focuses on three main psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. Psychological needs are not to be confused with physiological needs which were discussed in chapter 4. Physiological needs are more dependent on the satisfaction of biological factors such as water, food, and sex. Psychological needs stem from ones need to develop relationships and grow as an individual in our environment.
When we decide what we want to do or what we don’t want to do we are engaging in autonomy. We have a need for autonomy; we all want the freedom to make our own choices. There are three factors involved in the process of autonomy. Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) is the term that describes where our motivation stems from. PLOC is measured on a bipolar sequence that ranges from internal to external. PLOC is reflective of a person’s behavior, to show if their behavior is initiated by personal or environmental factors. Volition is involved in autonomy; this is when a person does something because they genuinely want to. Perceived choices are the types of choices we make when we are presented with a multitude of options to choose from. People tend to respond better to autonomy-supportive motivating style rather than the controlled motivation style. Autonomy-supportive motivating style is more effective because the person’s interest is taken into perspective allowing room for personal growth, while controlling motivation style allows little room for growth and the person feels like their input is less valuable.
Another psychological need that is important is competence; this allows one to interact successfully in an environment. Competence motivates one to exercise their skills to effectively master challenges. The optimal challenge and flow is when a person level of skill matches the level of the challenge. When a person feels over challenged this threatens their competence. Structure is the amount of clarity of information about what the environment expects the person to do. Failure tolerance describes when people take on highly skilled task and experience dread or frustration. Supporting competence is when feedback is offered on progress. When an individual receives Positive feedback then they feel that they are competent.
Relatedness is another psychological need that motivates us to go out of our way to form relationships with people. We want to form close bonds with people and be a part of something. We all want to feel needed and loved. Examples of Involving relatedness would be starting a new relationship, making a new friend or giving birth to a child. People tend to seek out relationship with people that will be emotionally rewarding to fulfill their need for relatedness. Supporting relatedness is when the relationship is mutual, the people involved both care about the other person’s well-being.
When rating myself on psychological needs such as autonomy, competence and autonomy I would have to say that it would be low, high and .
When it comes to autonomy I love being able to make my own decisions but I am pretty nonchalant about things. I am often indecisive about where I want to eat or what I want to do; I can just go with the flow and be perfectly content most of the time. My competence level would have to be high, I think that I am able to adapt to new environments very easily. I left Texas to come to school in Iowa and I’ve adjusted rather quickly. I like trying new things in new environment’s just to broaden my horizons. I would rate my relatedness medium, I like meeting new people and forming relationships but I choose quality over quantity. I have many friends and associates but only a handful of really close friends. I like being around people but I’m also perfectly happy being alone. I don’t require a constant need for people to be around.
Achieving relatedness motivates me to be more outgoing and friendly. Naturally I am very quiet and shy which can come off as standoffish. I feel that I have to work a little harder to just talk to people sometimes. I need to make sure that I appear friendlier and ask questions. I do think that developing relationships is very important to achieve a successful and healthy life. But once I come out of my shell I really enjoy being around people and making new friends.
The fish jumping out of the bowl is in correlation to chapter 6 because the fish is doing something that it wants to do even though it is difficult. The fish is jumping out of its bowl into a new environment and pushing itself to go beyond its normal setting (competence). The fish also has a desire to satisfy its need for relatedness and jump out of the bowl to look for friends; it’s probably tired of being alone in the bowl.
Key terms: psychological needs, physiological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, PLOC, environmental factors, volition, perceived choices autonomy supportive motivating style, controlling motivation style, positive feedback, involving relatedness, supporting relatedness, interact, relationships, bonding,
Chapter 6 talks about psychological needs. Psychological needs promote a willingness to seek out and to engage in an environment that we expect will be able to nurture our psychological needs. Because psychological needs motivate exploration and challenge-seeking, they are understood as growth needs. The three psychological needs discussed in this chapter are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The study of these three psychological needs relies on organismic approach to motivation, an approach to motivation that makes two core assumptions. The first assumption is that people are inherently active. The second assumption is the person-environment dialectic, the person uses inherent psychological needs to engage in the environment and the environment sometimes supports but other times neglects and frustrates these inner resources. Autonomy is the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior, and it reflects the desire to have inner resources, rather than an internal perceived locus of causality. There are three experiential qualities work together to define the subjective experience of autonomy. One quality is the perceived locus of causality (PLOC) refers to an individual's understanding of the causal source of his or her motivated actions. Another quality of autonomy is volition, which is an unpressured willingness to engage in an activity. The third quality of autonomy is perceived choice, which refers to that sense of choice we experience when we find ourselves in environments that provide us with decision-making flexibility that affords us many opportunities from which to choose. Competence is the need to interact effectively with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one's capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. The need for competence generates the motivation to want to develop, improve upon, and refine personal skills and talents. Relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved with others in warm, caring relationships. To satisfy relatedness, a person needs to confirm that the emerging social bonds with other people involve both caring and liking. Autonomy support, structure, and involvement are important aspects of the social context because they provide the means through which environments support people's psychological needs. When people experience psychological need satisfaction, they experience the psychological nutriments necessary for active engagement, having "a good day," and subjective experiences of vitality and well-being.
The thing I found to be most surprising was the organismic approach to motivation. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are sometimes referred to as organismic psychological needs. Organismic theories of motivation acknowledge that environments constantly change and, hence, organisms need flexibility to adjust to and accommodate those changes. To adapt, organisms must learn to substitute a new response for a previously successful but now outdated one, and organisms must grow and develop so that new skills, new interests, and new ways of adjusting emerge. The main focus of the organismic approach to motivation concerns how organisms initiate interactions with the environment and how organisms adapt, change, and grow as a function of those environmental transactions. Organismic theories reject such one-way portrayals and instead emphasize the person-environment dialectic. The person acts on the environment out of curiosity, interest, and an intrinsic motivation to seek out and affect changes in it. The outcome of the person-environment dialectic is an ever-changing synthesis in which the person's needs are fulfilled by the environment, and the environment produces in the person new forms of motivation. The organismic approach to motivation begins with the assumption that the organism is inherently active. This was all surprising to me because I honestly had no idea how much the environment affected us as human beings, and how the environment and environmental factors impact our motivation.
If I were to rank the three psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, then i would have to rank them all as high. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior. I ranked this as "high" because I was raised to always keep looking toward the future in a positive way, and to always have a positive attitude toward anything that i do in my life. I ranked competence as "high" also. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one's capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. I have always believed in giving 110% when doing anything, whether i enjoy it or not. I ranked this as "high" because i feel that competence is very important if you want to be good or great at whatever it is you are doing. Whether it be drawing a picture for fun or completing a task(s) for your job/career. In order to overcome any challenge, i had to rank competence as a "high" priority because we are all faced with challenges everyday, and even though all of the challenges we face are not complicated, some tend to be, and we must be competent in order to effectively overcome those challenges. Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. I also ranked relatedness as a "high" psychological need because we all want to feel like we belong, we all desire social interactions, and we all want friends. We all have close family and friends and if not for this psychological need playing such a large role in the way we feel about these certain people. I, personally, have a great relationship with my family members and close friends, and i am able to talk to them about anything, such as personal problems, school, my job, health problems, and anything else you can think of. Even though i have ranked all three psychological needs as "high," relatedness would have to be ranked as the number one most important psychological need. If it were not for relatedness, then we would not be able to have the relationships that we do with our family and friends. And if we didn't have those relationships we would have more problems than we all think we have now.
I think the picture of the fish jumping out of the bowl is related to all three of the psychological needs discussed in this chapter. The fish probably feels alone and wants to have the feeling of relatedness. By jumping out of the fish bowl, it is seeking out and trying to find something that it can have some sort of relationship with, whether that be another fish or some random animal or even object for that matter.
TERMS: Psychological Needs; Organismic Theory; Person-Environment Dialectic; Autonomy; Competence; Relatedness; Perceived Locus of Control (PLOC); Volition; Perceived Choice
Chapter six provides information on psychological needs. When people are doing something that satisfies their psychological needs they have interest, are engaged, and feel enjoyment. We seek out environments that are going to satisfy our psychological needs and allow these needs to flourish. The person-environment dialect explains that the relationship between the two is give-and-take. The environment acts on the person and the person acts on the environment as they both constantly change. The environment gives a person affordances, or opportunities, to act upon their specific needs. There are three main psychological needs discussed in the chapter which include; autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. There are three main components to autonomy. The first is the perceived locus of causality (PLOC). PLOC is a person’s understand of the source of their own motivation and their actions. Actions can originate from internal or external PLOC. Internal means intrinsically coming from within one’s self and external would be motivation caused by the environment. Next is the concept of volition which is a feeling of freedom. This freedom includes making decisions without pressure from the environment or other individuals. The last quality to explain autonomy is perceived choice. When we are put in a flexible environment with different options we feel more autonomous even if we don’t have total autonomy. Providing choices for people generally make them feel more autonomous if the choices are valuable to that specific individual. The text discusses two different styles of environments that either support or discourage autonomy. The autonomy-supportive motivating style suggests taking on others perspectives in order to increase autonomy and self-growth. When a person tries to pressure others in the decisions it would be considered a controlling motivating style. This lowers autonomy and overall success of an individual. Competence is the second psychological need looked at in the chapter. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment. It allows us to use our skills and to seek out optimal challenges. Flow of competence is when an individual is completely absorbed into an activity; it gives enjoyment and encourages the person to do the activity again and again. A person experiences flow when they overcome a challenge using their skills. People generally seek out activities that are challenging and thus rewarding by completing the challenge. If an activity is underwhelming and too easy a person feels bored and uninterested. On the other hand, if an activity is overwhelming and too difficult frustration sets in and the activity is not enjoyable. In order to feel competence and person needs feedback on the challenge at hand. A person must also be able to accept failure to increase competence. Failures are likely to happen, but taking the loss and learning from it will help develop ones competence. Relatedness is the last psychological need the text describes. Relatedness is the need to establish close bonds and attachments with other people. Interactions with others who provide warmth, care, and mutual concern satisfy our need of relatedness. When an individual is able to be their true self around another person a strong connection had been made. Relatedness promotes vitality and well-being and minimizes loneliness and depression. Daily experiences of meeting our psychological needs promote well-being and a happy life.
I honestly didn’t find this chapter to be very surprising or unexpected. The needs are pretty self-explanatory and the reasoning behind them is clear as well. I did however find the information on the autonomous-supportive and controlling motivating style to be very helpful. I’ll eventually be working in a one-on-one environment with children and a lot of the tips to having a supportive autonomous environment will be useful. I’m especially interested in working with children with Autism, a population that frequently gets upset when things don’t go their way. Understanding the child and what choices they value will help control these situations.
I would give myself the following ratings on psychological needs; autonomy-high, competence-high, relatedness-medium. I’m a very self driven person and like to be in control of everything I do, leading to my high autonomous self description. I like to have the freedom to make my own decisions in school, work, and at home. I have a high desire for competence especially in my field of study. I want to be able to collaborate with others and give important and meaningful input. I rate myself as medium relatedness because I have a few close friends and a lot of acquaintances. I’ve been this way my entire life. From daycare on I’ve always had a few “best friends” and then everyone else is just someone I interact with in group settings.
My need for competence motivates me to work hard in school. I have extrinsic motivators as well like getting into graduate school, but I want to also be able to strive in graduate school which involves having high competence. I study with a group of friends that challenge each other and discuss meaningful topics involved in our major which drives me to learn as much as I can.
The fish jumping out of the bowl is looking to satisfy his needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. He wants to make his own decisions, so to start off he jumps out of the bowl into a world where hopefully he has more choices. He is looking for something more challenging, therefore wanting to satisfy his need for competence. Swimming around in the bowl each day is becoming mundane. While the bowl is becoming boring, it is also lonely. He’s leaving the bowl in search for relatedness by forming relationships with other organisms.
Terms: psychological needs, person-environment dialect, affordances, autonomy, competence, relatedness, internal and external PLOC, perceived choice, autonomy-supportive motivating style, controlling motivating style, flow, feedback, failure
Chapter 6 discusses a person’s psychological needs, and what we do in order to satisfy our needs. This chapter focuses on three main psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. Psychological needs are not to be confused with physiological needs which were discussed in chapter 4. Physiological needs are more dependent on the satisfaction of biological factors such as water, food, and sex. Psychological needs stem from ones need to develop relationships and grow as an individual in our environment.
When we decide what we want to do or what we don’t want to do we are engaging in autonomy. We have a need for autonomy; we all want the freedom to make our own choices. There are three factors involved in the process of autonomy. Perceived locus of causality (PLOC) is the term that describes where our motivation stems from. PLOC is measured on a bipolar sequence that ranges from internal to external. PLOC is reflective of a person’s behavior, to show if their behavior is initiated by personal or environmental factors. Volition is involved in autonomy; this is when a person does something because they genuinely want to. Perceived choices are the types of choices we make when we are presented with a multitude of options to choose from. People tend to respond better to autonomy-supportive motivating style rather than the controlled motivation style. Autonomy-supportive motivating style is more effective because the person’s interest is taken into perspective allowing room for personal growth, while controlling motivation style allows little room for growth and the person feels like their input is less valuable.
Another psychological need that is important is competence; this allows one to interact successfully in an environment. Competence motivates one to exercise their skills to effectively master challenges. The optimal challenge and flow is when a person level of skill matches the level of the challenge. When a person feels over challenged this threatens their competence. Structure is the amount of clarity of information about what the environment expects the person to do. Failure tolerance describes when people take on highly skilled task and experience dread or frustration. Supporting competence is when feedback is offered on progress. When an individual receives Positive feedback then they feel that they are competent.
Relatedness is another psychological need that motivates us to go out of our way to form relationships with people. We want to form close bonds with people and be a part of something. We all want to feel needed and loved. Examples of Involving relatedness would be starting a new relationship, making a new friend or giving birth to a child. People tend to seek out relationship with people that will be emotionally rewarding to fulfill their need for relatedness. Supporting relatedness is when the relationship is mutual, the people involved both care about the other person’s well-being.
When rating myself on psychological needs such as autonomy, competence and autonomy I would have to say that it would be low, high and .
When it comes to autonomy I love being able to make my own decisions but I am pretty nonchalant about things. I am often indecisive about where I want to eat or what I want to do; I can just go with the flow and be perfectly content most of the time. My competence level would have to be high, I think that I am able to adapt to new environments very easily. I left Texas to come to school in Iowa and I’ve adjusted rather quickly. I like trying new things in new environment’s just to broaden my horizons. I would rate my relatedness medium, I like meeting new people and forming relationships but I choose quality over quantity. I have many friends and associates but only a handful of really close friends. I like being around people but I’m also perfectly happy being alone. I don’t require a constant need for people to be around.
Achieving relatedness motivates me to be more outgoing and friendly. Naturally I am very quiet and shy which can come off as standoffish. I feel that I have to work a little harder to just talk to people sometimes. I need to make sure that I appear friendlier and ask questions. I do think that developing relationships is very important to achieve a successful and healthy life. But once I come out of my shell I really enjoy being around people and making new friends.
The fish jumping out of the bowl is in correlation to chapter 6 because the fish is doing something that it wants to do even though it is difficult. The fish is jumping out of its bowl into a new environment and pushing itself to go beyond its normal setting (competence). The fish also has a desire to satisfy its need for relatedness and jump out of the bowl to look for friends; it’s probably tired of being alone in the bowl.
Key terms: psychological needs, physiological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, PLOC, environmental factors, volition, perceived choices autonomy supportive motivating style, controlling motivation style, positive feedback, involving relatedness, supporting relatedness, interact, relationships, bonding,
Chapter 6 was about psychological needs, which provide means necessary for growth and well being beyond physiological needs which strictly respond to insufficiencies. The three psychological needs discussed are autonomy, competence and relatedness. Autonomy is the control, or perceived control a person has over themselves and their environment. Three factors that contribute to autonomy are causality, volition and perceived choice. Competence is feelings of efficacy and adequacy a person experiences in relation to their environment. Flow is a psychological state of deep involvement and enjoyment from an activity. Relatedness involves the establishment of emotional bonds with other people such as family and friends. When all of these psychological needs are met it promotes psychological well-being.
The most surprising information I learned was that we judge days as ‘good’ if the three psychological needs are met. While it seems like common sense, I have never considered the factors that make up my psychological stated from day-to-day. I have consciously experienced lack of autonomy, competence and relatedness, but never thought of my growth and well being as dependent on them.
I would rate myself high on autonomy, high on relatedness and medium on competence. When it comes to control, I have certain areas of my life that I fixate on. Food and exercise are a high area of control for me, along with the ability to create my own schedule. This only pertains to school. I have more frequent and more severe desires for control when it comes to school and schoolwork than any other aspect of my life. I rate my relatedness high because my relationships with others are how I define who I am. I also define myself through others’ opinions of me. I rate my competence as medium, but this varies. Sometimes I want to do everything, and sometimes because I can’t do everything I do nothing.
The fish out of the water symbolizes a need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Although the physiological needs of the fish are met in his bowl, his psychological needs cannot be. He has no control in his environment, he has no relationships, and nothing to feel effective about. The fish jumping out of the bowl is attempting to manipulate his environment to attempt to fulfill his psychological needs.
Chapter 6 talks about our psychological needs. Psychological need an innate human feelings of deprivation related to an individual's mental well-being. The book talks about 3 main ones, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior and it reflects the desire to have inner resources rather than environmental events, determine one’s action. Such as the other day in class when we were given the option that we could do whatever we wanted to do and we wouldn’t be held accountable for what we did or didn’t do, we were given the option to choose what we did and didn’t want to do. Competence is the need to interact effectively with the environment. Relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved with other is warm, caring relationships.
For me the most surprising or interesting part of this chapter was when we were going over the Autonomy in class today and talked about when professors had their due dates, and I would have to agree that it does depend on when we have assignments and when they are do, when I determine how well I like or dislike the professor.
I would have to rate myself as a medium for autonomy because I like when my professor gives me a deadline, but I also like to know well in advance so that if I have time to do it I can and not wait till the last minute if I have something else going on. I would say I would be a low when it comes to competence because I don’t pay attention to how I interact with the environment, and I would say I would be high with relatedness because I do care about having friends and people to go to when I need someone to talk to.
Relatedness is extremely important to me because for me friends and the relationships you make because you never know when something is going to happen and you need one of those friends to help make it through. It also can be beneficial in the business world because a lot of times it’s who you know that will help advance up the ranks to where you want to be.
I’m taking a wild guess on this fish thing, but I think it could be because the fish is all alone and it is jumping into another bowl to have someone he can turn to.
Terms Used: Psychological Needs, Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness
Chapter six goes more into depth on psychological needs. It talks first about the organismic approach to motivation. These three psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) get their name because organisms survival depends on its environment. The approach makes two assumptions; one the people are inherently active, and second that people use psychological needs to engage in the environment and the environment sometimes supports but other times neglects the inner resources. We as humans have a natural motivation to learn, grow and develop to become healthy and mature.
Autonomy is the need to experience self direction and personal endorsement. We want to be the ones to decide how, what, and when we do something. We do things because of our own interests and wants. This gives us a sense of freedom and we feel we can make our own goals. I do specific things like go to school to gain a Psychology degree because I am interested in it, and I made the decision to do so, no one else. This is an example of my need for autonomy.
The second psychological need, competence, is our need to interact with the environment. We want to feel competent in all aspects of our life, school, work, sports, parenting, etc. If in a challenge, we want to feel like we can give it our attention. We want to progress when given the chance in all aspects of life. I also go to school for Psychology to fulfill my need for competence, I want to know I can do it and it is a challenge for myself that I want to face. I want to grow my skills and talents and this helps me do so.
The third psychological need is relatedness. This is the need everyone has to belong. We want to feel social interaction. We want relationships with others and we want others to want to have relationships with us. This is happening in school, work, family, marriage, etc. We want to be part of a group, part of a organization and part of our community. I do many things in my life to fulfill my need for relatedness, such as joining groups at school, going to work and participating in community groups. I have friends, enjoy my family, and teach my daughter the importance of strong relationships.
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was the idea under failure tolerance that the one hallmark of optimal challenge is that success and failure are equally likely. This surprises me because it seems like we should succeed more than we fail in order to keep our will up to keep trying. But this still helps fulfill our need for competence.
I would rate myself high on each one of the psychological needs. I want very much so to feel competent, I like knowing I did something because I wanted to and not because someone else told me (autonomy) and relationships in my life are extremely important to me.
I would say relatedness the highest because family and friends mean more to me than anything else in my life really. I want to keep those bonds strong and I stress to teach my daughter to treat people with respect and how important it is to have good friends and how important family is. I also think it is important to form other strong relationships at work and in the community.
That fish, I think he needs relationships (relatedness) and doesn’t want to be alone, and is doing what he wants to do regardless of what he is supposed to do. (autonomy)
Terms used: Organismic approach to motivation, autonomy, competence, psychological needs, relatedness, failure tolerance
Chapter 6
This chapter is about our psychological needs. Psychological needs are not driven by our bodies in a biological sense but instead are more of a mental state. It is what drives us to take on challenges or do things that we feel interest in. The book emphasized three main psychological needs that we have which are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is our desire to be able to make decisions. We need to be able to feel like we are in control of our lives and get to decide how we are going to spend our time. There are three experiential qualities that work together or define when someone is experiencing autonomy. The first is perceived locus of causality which refers to a person’s understanding of their motivated actions, in simpler words it is knowing what you would like to do or what activities and behaviors you enjoy. Volition is next and it is the willingness to engage in that activity and not be made or told to do it. Finally perceived choice refers to the feeling we get when we were able to make that choice and decide for ourselves. A simple and obvious way to enhance ones feeling of autonomy is by the conundrum of choice which is simple giving someone two or more options and letting them choose what they would like to do.
Competence is the need to interact effectively with your surroundings. It is the desire to want to be good at stuff and feel that sense of accomplishment or achievement. Often when we are good at something and enjoy it we are in a state of optimal challenge and flow. When you are in this state flow refers to the feeling that time is flying by, when in this state you could be working for hours and it wouldn’t feel like it. Another important aspect of competence is the interdependency between challenge and feedback. This is basically saying that we have challenges and difficulties everyday but what makes that challenge turn into a competence issue is when we get a feeling of feedback or reward. For example some people hate taking tests and never feel like they are competent in that are but that is because the feedback is not rewarding to them a person who received an A might have an entirely different experience and feel very competent.
The last psychological need that the book talks about is relatedness. This is the need to belong and be with others and have those intrapersonal relationships. Relatedness also helps us form internalization. This is when you take an activity that may not have been as fun or have that flow quality but because you associate it and do it with friends or in groups it’s not so bad. For example work often is not fun but if you get along with your coworkers it can become fun and you may look forward to going to it. Relatedness also increases engagement which is a term that speaks to the intensity and emotional quality people show when they initiate and carry out activities.
The thing I found most interesting in the whole chapter was the section about autonomy and all of the feelings that go into it. I think this is because that is my highest ranking quality I have a high need to feel independent. When I was growing up my mother always told me what I could and couldn’t do and was very controlling in her own way so now I feel like I need to be my own person. Even to this day I find that in the relationships I form I feel like I have to be in control of the situation. I also have a medium to high need to feel competent and succeed. This probably comes from being competitive throughout my life. Lastly, I feel I have a medium to low need for relatedness because I’ve always liked my alone time just as much as I have enjoyed a good party or social time. This is due to the fact that I have five other siblings so any alone time I got was a blessing.
If I had to make a guess about why the fish is jumping out of the bowl it would be because he is lonely. The fish is experiencing the psychological need of relatedness but when he is all alone in the bowl he has no one to comfort him and fulfill the need of having that relationship connection.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived locus of causality, volition, perceived choice, conundrum of choice, optimal challenge and flow, interdependency between challenge and feedback, internalization, engagement
Chapter 6 focuses on our psychological needs as people. We learned that these three needs are also called organismic psychological needs. It is called this because we are alive and experiencing our environment. The other type of psychological needs is mechanistic which means the environment acts on the person and the person then reacts. We also learned that there is the person-environment dialect. This discusses the relationship between the environment and us. How this works is that the environment fulfills a person’s needs and the environment produces new forms of motivation in the person. The psychological needs of humans are autonomy, relatedness, and competence.
Autonomy means that we want to control our lives ourselves or how we spend our time. It basically means making our own decisions. Three things work together to define autonomy and those are our internal perceived locus of causality, volition, and perceived choice. The conundrum of choice tells us, however, that it cannot be a choice that requires something be done. Autonomy comes from when people have a true choice over what they do. Benefits from autonomy include growth and fulfillment in motivation, engagement, development, learning, performance and psychological well-being.
Competency means that we have the need to prove ourselves and our skills and measure up to others. It is the need to be effective in interacting with our environment. There are different aspects to competency. One explained to us that when our skills are matched with our challenge, we experience “flow.” Flow is a positive experience that means that we are enjoying the activity and will most likely repeat it.
Relatedness is the need we feel to fit in with others or belong. We have a strong need for friends and close relationships. This also shows our need to have others accept us and understand us as individuals. One interesting thing, however, is that, because of our high need for relatedness, we create social bonds easily. The two main types of relationships are communal and exchange. Communal relationships fulfill the need for relatedness and are between individuals that care about each other. Exchange relationships do not fulfill the need for relatedness and are between people working together or acquaintances.
The most surprising thing I learned was that structure is one of the key environmental conditions of competency. I initial thought that structure would be something that hindered autonomy. However, the text explains that structure means the support and guidance for the person’s goal and also the information about the road to desired outcomes. After the text explains it, it makes sense. However, structure, initially, wasn’t something that I would attribute to being key in meeting the need for competency.
If I had to rate myself on the varying psychological needs, I would rate myself as medium on autonomy, and high on both competency and relatedness. I initially thought of myself as low in autonomy. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t the case. I am indecisive and am okay with people making decisions for me. However, I really dislike when I don’t even get to voice my opinion or thoughts on the matter. I don’t need to make the final decision but I do like to have a say in what happens or changes before the change occurs. This has been very evident in my job this year because many changes have been occurring and it frustrated me whenever I felt like no one was listening to my thoughts on the matter.
I am high in competency because, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt like I must prove myself. I am the type of person that gets easily overlooked, which drives my need for competency even more. I feel like I always have to prove how good or great I am in my job, in my student organizations, or in my classes. I enjoy challenges and succeeding. I also must have structure with what I do. The need for competence also drives what I do. This is very evident in my work with my student organizations because I always make sure I am doing the best I can and that one person notices what I have done.
I am also very high in relatedness. I once took the “Top 5 Inventory” for RA training. This personality test has 60 different traits and it tells you which 5 were at the top of your list for matching your personality. In interacting with others, one type of personality (Woo) is that you like to have a lot of “friends” and people around you. I, however, was a “Relator.” This means that I put great emphasis in developing close and meaningful relationships. I agree with this 100%. To me, relationships are key in life but a relationship is not worth having if it doesn’t go both ways and if it isn’t meaningful. The evidence that I put emphasis on relatedness is that I have many people I know, but if you ask me, I will say I only have 1 really close friend and my fiancé but I tell them both everything and spend as much time with them as possible. I also talk to my dad on a regular basis and I feel alone if I haven’t talked to each of those 3 people in my day.
My psychological need for competence drives me every single day. My need for competence pushes me to complete my RA paperwork ahead of schedule and thoroughly. It also makes me work on homework and study so that I can achieve the highest grade attainable for myself. One of the biggest ways it impacts me is in my student organizations. I am always trying to come up with new ideas and I meet with my advisor to work on how to make these ideas happen. I am currently working on a new one and spend time each day coordinating the event and guests to make sure the event will go off without a hitch and that everyone will enjoy it. The best way to make it specific as to how this need impacts me is to discuss the reaction I work to get from those above me. Whenever I work on anything, my goal is for that person to say “Thank you, Nicole. You did an excellent job.” It may sound silly but I enjoy that reaction because it means that I did something that was appreciated and done well.
I would guess that the picture of the fish symbolizes the fish’s need for autonomy. He is stuck in that boring bowl all the time and has no say as to where he is and what he does. He is trying to satisfy this need for autonomy by making the decision to jump out of the bowl because he probably sees it as the only choice he can make. He could also be trying to satisfy the need for competence by proving that he is worth more than just something to look at and that he can do something that you wouldn’t expect him to do.
Terms Used: Psychological Needs, Organismic Psychological Needs, Mechanistic, Environment, Person-Environment Dialect, Motivation, Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence, Internal Perceived Locus of Causality, Volition, Perceived Choice, Conundrum of Choice, Flow, Communal, Exchange, Key Environmental Condition of Competency, Structure
The chapter discussed the organismic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in terms of the Person-Environment dialectic (i.e., the person affects his/her environment, and the environment also affects the person).
Autonomy involves our freedom of choice, and it is impacted by autonomy-supportive or controlling environments. The controlling approach is directive and imperative (one-way communication), whereas the autonomy-supporting approach nurtures inner motivational resources (two-way communication).
Competence is “the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment” (Reeve, 155). The environmental conditions required for competence are optimal challenge, clear & helpful structure, high failure tolerance, positive feedback, and the perception of progress. When environmental requirements are satisfied, we may feel ‘flow’, “a state of concentration that involves holistic absorption and deep involvement in an activity” (156).
Relatedness is “the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people;” to be satisfying, the relationship must be characterized by the belief that the other individual cares about your welfare and also likes (the authentic) you (162).
When organismic psychological needs are satisfied, we may feel ‘engagement’, “a term that captures the intensity and emotional quality people show when they initiate and carry out activities” (e.g., on-task attention, effort, persistence, interest, enjoyment, preference for challenge, self-regulation, expression of preferences and interests) (165).
The most surprising (or confusing) thing to me was how Reeve lauded the autonomy-supportive environment and disparaged the controlling environment, but then threw in the caveat of the need for ‘structure’ - which would certainly be a controlling factor. I am also surprised (or possibly confused) that the autonomy-supportive environment is so broadly endorsed, when it seems untenable and ineffective in many situations. (I’ve held a number of leadership roles and I have experimented with the various leadership styles - authoritarian, democratic, laissez-faire - and the best results generally have come from the authoritarian, goal-directed style. I’ve also seen a number of children raised in the ‘autonomy-supportive’ style, and they generally seem to be spoiled brats.)
I would rate my autonomy fairly high (though I consider many of my ‘choices’ to be the lesser of two evils, such as writing a blog vs. losing the points); my competence medium-low (I’ve been out of school for 10 years, and tomorrow I have my GRE); and my relatedness medium-high (low quantity, but high quality).
The need for competence has motivated me to come back to school, so that I can get my MA and work with other disabled vets as a voc rehab counselor. I want to become an effective counselor, so I am trying to learn as much as I can. I do the reading and try to engage the material (with, I admit, little success regarding this textbook).
The fish is dissatisfied with its environment; the bowl is, perhaps, too confining, too hot, or too polluted for its tastes. The fish is exercising autonomy by leaping from the bowl; the question is, will it be able to exercise competence as an air-breathing creature?
Terms: organismic psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, Person-Environment dialectic, autonomy-supportive, controlling, optimal challenge, failure tolerance, feedback, flow, holistic, authentic, engagement, structure
Chapter six summarized the three psychological needs of: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy can be defined as the state of being self-governing which really means that you do what you want when you want. Competence means having the possession of skill, knowledge, qualification, and capacity. When we are competent we enjoy optimal challenges and want to better ourselves to complete certain tasks. Relatedness refers to belonging and desiring social interactions. To have a sense of relatedness means to have close bonds and attachments with others. This can range from anything such as friends to husbands/wives.
Each of the three psychological needs has a kind of requirement to be filled. To have a sense of autonomy means to have volition, perceived choice (appearing to make a decision even when your hand could be forced), and perceived locus of causality. Perceived locus of causality is a fancy way to say what is the source of your motivated behavior. The chapter spent a large section describing how to have a more autonomy supporting motivating style. The basics of this include: active listening, valuing personal growth, and flexible language.
To have a fulfilled sense of competence means that we must interact effectively with our environment and improve our skills and potential. The fundamentals of competence were explained in the flow chart, which is a basic representation of the correlation between skills and optimal challenges.
Relatedness was the easiest of the three sections for me to understand and the basics of relatedness include having solid relationships, interactions with others, and social bonds.
The most surprising thing that I learned from the chapter was how our psychological needs can affect the kind of day we are having. When our needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are all high, we are on top of the mountain. On the other end of the spectrum is when we are low on the three needs. When this kind of day occurs, we want to go home and avoid the world because it is a crappy day.
The rating of myself was a rather difficult thing to do because it changes from day to day. If I have plenty of time to do what I want, I have a high sense of autonomy. On the other hand, I have days where it seems that my schedule is full and I have no control of what I am doing. On these particular days I have a low sense of autonomy. The same thing occurs with competence and relatedness. There are days when I am doing things that fit my skill level and there are days where I feel like I am doing things below me. This is my sense of competence changing from day to day and even hour to hour. Relatedness would have to be the most stable of the three psychological needs because I feel that friends do not fluctuate from day to day and if I don’t want to talk to one friend I can go to another. Because of this, I would rate myself as a medium on relatedness. All three of the psychological needs fluctuate on a day-to-day basis and this is what causes bad days and good days.
I feel that relatedness motivates my behavior more than the others. This may be completely false but I am just going with what I feel. I believe that relatedness motivates my behavior to be more open with friends and overcome fears of commitment and social bonds. I am not naturally a friendly and open person but I feel the need of wanting somebody to be connected with which alters my behavior to be open and friendly.
If I were to take a guess on the fish I would say that he is fulfilling his psychological needs. He is doing what he wants by jumping out of the tank (autonomy), going outside his comfort zone to complete a task (competence), and looking for new friends (relatedness) This relates to the chapter because it shows how even a fish has psychological needs and it is not just our physiological processes that affect our behavior.
Autonomy, competence, relatedness, optimal challenges, volition, perceived choice, locus of causality, flow, psychological needs
CHapter 6 was all about the psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. These are also called organismic needs because these three are needed to support and nurture a person's needs, increase positive emotions, optimal experience and healthy development. These needs are different then physiological needs in a way that we can satisfy our psychological needs by doing something that we consider fun or interesting. This will help create positive energy and intrinsic motivation in a person.
Autonomy is the need to make our own choices. As a human we want to be connected in our interests, wants and desires. There is a controlling approach to autonomy and can create pressure and a negative environment. Words used in this approach are should, must, have to etc. There is no freedom of choice really. The other approach is autonomy support, which is a postive outlook. This person values the person's perspective and likes to listen. They give them freedom of choice and the ability to develop anothers inner motivation.
Competence is the need to develop skills and improve our overall potential and talents in all aspects of our lives, school, work, relationships etc. We want to be able to feel good about doing something. The most important thing I got out of this section was flow. Flow is a state of concentration that involves intense involvment, but is actually enjoyable that you don't even see the time ticking.
Relatedness is the need for social interaction and relationships. Humans are naturally social and this need is to establish close emotional bonds. A person can be lonely even if they are surrounded by friends. This could mean that they just don't feel an intimate satisfying relationship.
When all of these needs are met, we can engage in behavioral, emotional, and cognitive ways. Autonomy, structure in competence and involvement in relatedness increase our engagement. High levels of competence and autonomy especially are two indgredients of a great day.
The most surprising or interesting thing I found in this chapter was how the needs all work together to create our engagement in different aspects of our lives. It still surprises me learning about all the different ways to disect behavior and why we do what we do. In this case autonomy, competence and relatedness all work in a way that pursues us to have a good day, or high engagement.
When it comes to rating myself on the scale of high to low for autonomy, I would consider myself to be medium on this scale. I like to have control of my choices and decisions to a point, but I also like it when other people sometimes pick places, or tell me what assignments to do, it takes pressure off. But don't get me wrong, I do love having independence. On the competence scale I would rate myself high. I am the type of person who continues to challenge myself. I like to set goals to achieve than see myself surpass them. Competence runs my behavior. I see this a lot with school, to try and do my best and to learn as much as I can for future possible careers. I also see this when I'm running, to strive and go as far as I can. On relatedness, I rate myself high as well because I am very social and close with my family and friends. I still like my alone time, but I have a strong close bond with my friends, and friends. I am naturally shy and I have to push myself to be outside of my box, but I do enjoy being around with people and having a good time so I believe I have high relatedness.
The one need that motivates my bevaiors most, is competence. Like I stated above, I like challenges. I am one of those people who makes lists just to be able to suceed and check them off. A big part of competence is flow. Flow is when you get in the "zone". It is an intense concentration on something that is very pleasurable and enjoyable. I see this most in my running routine. I get lost in my music when I run and just keep going till I can't. I also notice this, of course, in my every day schooling. Homework is a challenge and taking hard classes gives me a challenge throughout the semester. I enjoy pushing myself to see myself get further.
In my opinion, the fish doesn't want to be in the bowl anymore, because he has done everything in that bowl and wants to explore and to use his autonomy to leave. I also would imagine it would be very lonely in the bowl alone, so he may be venturing out to meet friends as well. Being a fish and leaving the bowl is a challenge, so he is creating competence to try and improve his intellectual abilities and moving out of his comfort zone.
Terms: Psychological needs,physiological needs, autonomy, autonomy support, controlling, competence, flow, relatedness, structure
Chapter six discussed 3 different psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness. Psychological needs are needs that we are more motivated to do because it is things that we enjoy to do. Autonomy is the ability for an individual to make their own decisions. This allows for flexibility and a sense of control. Autonomy has three aspects to it. The first is perceived locus of causality, this is a continuum of whether an individual sees the motivation as internal or external. Volition is how willing an individual is to do an activity on their own. For example I have a high volition to watch movies and a low volition to do homework. The last is perceived choice, which is as it sounds, which is how much an individual feels they have a choice in different situations.
Competence is the ability for an individual to use their skill and capacities in different environments. For example an auto mechanic would be very competent when it comes to fixing a problem in a car. Individual may be motivated by their competence, because they want to master skill and knowledge in a certain area. Competence can be a negative thing when it is low, because it can cause an individual to be overwhelmed and not perform as well.
The last is relatedness which is the desire for social interaction. Individuals desire to have a sense of belonging and to be emotionally attached to others. Individuals choose to go out of their way in order to have close emotionally attached relationships with others. This is a strong motivation and it is very rewarding to an individual to feel that connection and satisfying their desire to belong.
The most surprising thing that I learned was what makes a good day. Researchers found that individuals recorded their best days as days that they experienced competence and autonomy. Originally, I felt like this was strange, but then I thought about my own life and I really like to be busy and have a lot going on then to do absolutely nothing. On days in the summer or over a break when I have nothing to do but sit on my computer and watch TV, I feel so worthless. I prefer days when I am accomplishing things which would involve competence, and even when my schedule is busy there is still autonomy because there are a lot of things outside of class that I choose to be a part of. It was really interesting that this is the same for most people, at least as far as desiring competence and autonomy in a day.
If I were to rate myself of each psychological need I would put myself at medium autonomy. I like to have a structured schedule, but I also like to be in control at what is on that schedule. I fill a lot of my time with things involving my faith such as bible studies, one-on-one discipleship, time in the word and prayer as well as other things. This is very time consuming but it is what I choose to do. For competence I would put myself at medium. I like to be competent in certain areas, but I am also okay admitting I am not competent in some areas. When I am not as competent in an area I would like to be it does motivate me to become more competent, but it typically does not overwhelm me unless I am under pressure. I would also rate myself medium in relatedness. I really enjoy interacting with others, but I do need my space. I consider myself a social introvert because I like to talk and be social but I also like being alone. I really value close friendships and they are really important to me.
Being medium in autonomy I believe helps me with certain behaviors. It makes it so I desire some control, but I am also able to handle and find contentment in situations where I do not have a choice. For example this summer I went on a summer training program in Jacksonville Florida for two months. Our days were very structured and we didn’t have much free time. This was hard at times especially since we were working 40 hours a week and then had our program activities after work and on the weekends. Since, I am able to cope under low autonomous situations I was able to enjoy the program. We did receive some autonomy which happened on Tuesday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday afternoons and evening. This allowed for some autonomy which was really nice to be able to make some decisions for ourselves. I think my medium autonomy helped me thrive in this situation.
I think that the picture of the fish can relate to each aspect of the psychological needs. This fish has the autonomy to decide whether he wants to be in the tank or not in the tank. He has the competence to realize that if he swims vertically and high speed he can jump out of the tank. Lastly he could be wanting to get closer to another fish, or be jumping into another fishbowl that is not seen in the picture. The final underlying thing is that this fish has motivation to do his behavior just as humans have motivation for each of our behaviors.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, motivation, locus of causality, volition, and perceived choice.
Chapter 6 discussed the three psychological needs that people rely on: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Those three psychological needs are known as organismic psychological needs, which motivate people to become engaged with the ever-changing environment. In turn, the environment must help support the organismic psychological needs for them to continue at a high level, otherwise a person will lose interest or feel unmotivated in whatever task they are involved in. This interaction between the environment and people is what is known as person-environment dialectic.
Autonomy is the first psychological need that is mentioned and it plays a very important part a person’s life because it affects various aspects. Autonomy is so important because it is a person’s desire to make self-determined choices and decisions, which people have to do every single day. Autonomy can be broken down into three experimental qualities: perceived locus of causality (PLOC), volition, and perceived choice. PLOC helps people understand why they are internally or externally motivated to take certain actions. Volition is when people don’t feel pressured or coerced to participate in certain actions. Volition is a, “I do this because I want to,” attitude, not a, “because I have to,” attitude. Lastly, there is perceived choice, which is when one feels that they have the opportunity to make a choice in a flexible environment without any limits to what course of action they must take. However, if one’s choices are limited, but if they feel like they are permitted to participate in the decision making process, they are under the influence of an autonomy-supportive motivating style, verses a controlling motivating style.
Competence is the next organismic psychological need mentioned in the reading, which means that people need to feel like they can accomplish a deed successfully and master the optimal challenges one seeks out to complete. For one to feel like they have a high sense of competency they need to be able to thrive in an environment that is interesting and engaging, that also allows for flow and change. It also benefits people to get feedback on whatever task they are engaging in. People should also be willing to accept failure will come their way, but they should be able to learn from their failures and not criticize the people for their failures, otherwise it may inhibit them from participating in certain activities. Thus whoever may be in charge of a person should be willing to give positive and constructive feedback, and have some level of failure tolerance, so they can encourage the person working for them to better the next time.
Relatedness is the third psychological need mentioned in chapter 6 and is the need to establish tight-knit emotional bonds and attachments with other people. People need to be able to connect with others because it helps reduce stress, helps them function better overall, and develop strong interpersonal relationships. It is best if these relationships are positive, high quality bonds that allow people to express themselves freely without any reservations. There are two types of relationships, exchange relationships and communal relationships. A communal relationship is what helps relatedness thrive in a person.
In Chapter 6, I thought the most interesting part what how autonomous people need to feel, and how autonomous people actually are. Every day people make decisions without really even thinking about it, but if the ability to choose was taken away, it would make life very difficult. Which brings me to the next, point because personally I feel that I am a person who requires a high level of autonomy, because otherwise I feel constrained and limited in what I can do. I also feel like I have a high level of relatedness because I enjoy meeting people and I work very hard to maintain strong relationships with the people I’m close with. Plus, as an RA, relatedness is a key psychological need to have otherwise it would be difficult to get my residents to trust me or work with my staff team. As for competency, I think I need a medium level, because depending on the task I enjoy being challenged and very engaged, but I can feel overwhelmed easily so sometimes I enjoy doing simple tasks just to relax.
When it comes to the fish bowl picture above, I feel that the bowl limits the fish’s choices and decisions, and the fish would like to be more autonomous, so that is why he is attempting to escape the bowl. I also think that the reason the fish wants to leave to bowl is because in the bowl he is all alone, and he would like to be with other fish so he can build relationships and satisfy his psychological need of relatedness.
Terms used: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, organismic psychological needs, engaged, person-environment dialectic, perceived locus of causality (PLOC), volition, perceived choice, autonomy-supportive motivating style, controlling motivating style, optimal challenges, flow, feedback, failure tolerance, attachments, exchange relationships and communal relationships
Chapter six went over psychological needs, including autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When people are in environments that support their psychological needs, then positive emotions, optimal experience, and healthy development follow. The author takes an organismic approach to psychological needs, which has two underlying concepts. The first is that humans are inherently active. The second is that there is a person-environment dialectic, or reciprocal relationship. Our active natures result from our psychological needs, which lead us to interact with our environment, which may either support or thwart those needs.
The first need discussed was autonomy, or the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. There are three components that involved in the perception of autonomy: 1) internal perceived locus of causality, 2) volition (feeling free), and 3) perceived choice over one’s actions. Autonomy can either be supported or controlled by the environment. Autonomy support is defined as the interpersonal sentiment and behavior to identify, nurture, and develop another’s inner motivational resources whereas autonomy control is defined as the interpersonal sentiment and behavior to pressure another toward compliance with a prescribed way of thinking, feeling, or behaving. There are four ways of supporting autonomy in ones’ environment: 1) nurture inner motivational resources, 2) rely on informational language, 3) provide explanatory rationales, and 4) acknowledge and accept negative affect. When autonomy is supported, there are many benefits to the person including meaningful learning, enhanced performance, and psychological well-being.
The second psychological need covered was competence, which was defined as the need to be effective in interactions with the environment and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. The main environmental events that involve competence are optimal challenge, high structure, and high failure tolerance. When both challenge and skill are at a moderate level, flow is experienced. Flow is described as a psychological state characterized by maximal enjoyment, intense concentration, and full absorption in the task. Positive feedback and the perception of progress are fundamental to satisfying competence need.
The last need discussed in chapter six was relatedness. Relatedness is the need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved with others in warm, caring relationships. In order for the relatedness need to be satisfied, social bonds should be ones where the other cares about your personal welfare and they like you. The emphasis is on the quality rather than the quantity of relationships that you have. Therefore, communal relationships, or relationships between persons who care about the welfare of the other, are needed to satisfy relatedness need.
The most surprising thing I learned from this chapter was how vitally important our relationships with others are. The chapter states that people who fulfill this need function better, are more resilient to stress, and report fewer psychological difficulties. Another point that I found interesting was that our most satisfying relationships are the ones where we are our most “authentic” selves. While this seems very obvious, I feel like this is an important point worth emphasizing.
If I had to rate myself on the three psychological needs, I would say that I am medium on autonomy, high on competence, and low on relatedness. The reason that I gave myself those ratings is because I sometimes feel like I would so much rather do something else rather than go to my part-time job or do homework, but I constantly feel that outside pressure to do my course work or go to a job I do not particularly enjoy. Therefore, my environment is restricting my autonomy. I feel that my competence is high because I have excelled in my coursework and in my job. When I am given a challenge, I am able to rise to the occasion and perform well, which gives me a deep feeling of satisfaction. At this time, I feel very confident in myself and am very satisfied with my performance in school and at work. On the other hand, I am really hurting in relatedness. While I have many exchange relationships, or impersonal, business-like relationships, I do not have many (if any) communal relationships. In many of my relationships with others, I do not feel comfortable being my authentic self and I often feel that there is not a mutual effort from both parties. For instance, when my friends are going through a tough time, I reach out to them and offer support, but when I am feeling vulnerable or down I feel like that sentiment is not reciprocated. Therefore, I would rate myself low on relatedness at this time.
My need for competence is probably much higher than the average person’s. I tend to set high standards (or challenges) for myself, which causes me to become more motivated. For instance, when a test in a course is approaching, I will determine how much of a challenge that exam will be (depending on the course and how tough I perceive the professor to be). Depending on how large of a challenge I perceive the test to be, I will study for so many hours. I know that I have the skill to do well on the hardest of exams, but I will vary my amount of studying depending on how hard I perceive the exam to be. If I take the exam and I feel that I have done well, I feel a great sense of satisfaction. However, if I feel that I did not study quite enough, I feel worried or anxious. My psychological need for competence is reflected in all my coursework and in my job.
I have to admit that I am not very sure what the picture of the fish represents (after all… it is a fish). However, I could see the fish jumping out of the fishbowl as a metaphor for autonomy. The fish bowl could be seen as the controlling environment that was restricting the fish’s sense of choice and freedom. By jumping out of the bowl, the fish could be asserting his autonomy.
Terms: organismic approach, person-environment dialectic, autonomy, autonomy support, autonomy control, competence, flow, relatedness, communal relationships, exchange relationships
This chapter goes into detail about the psychological needs that were briefly mentioned in chapter 4. Autonomy refers to independence, competence refers to the skills and how effectively we use them and interact in our surroundings, and relatedness refers to the need of belonging. These are all concepts that we can relate to in one way or another. It is useful to know how to apply these concepts in the real world, especially for teachers. Everyone enjoys the feeling of autonomy. In a supportive autonomous environment, people are more likely to process information better because they are generally happy, which in turn makes them want to learn more, or interact in various situations.
I wasn’t surprised by anything that I read because it all makes sense. However, I am surprised and concerned with the teaching environment that I have been exposed to firsthand for the past 18 years. Multiple teachers take the opposite approach and control their environment, and punish rather than reward also associated with the mechanistic theory. As we talked about in class, punishment is not as effective, and controlling others isn’t either. The reason this concerns me is that there is proof that the organismic approach works, yet have haven’t witnessed any teachers applying it in their classroom until I took a class Behavior Modification and now this one. The organismic approach is interesting to learn about because, as I said before, it is an easy concept that makes sense, there just aren’t enough people using it. I agree completely with the statement that the organismic theories acknowledge that environments constantly change.
I would definitely rate myself as high on various psychological needs. I tend to be very independent and I am more likely to take a leading position rather than follow. I hate not feeling competent, when I don’t know how to do something I usually try to learn it, because everything is worth a try. As far as a feeling of belonging, I think I need it the most. I have always been extremely close to my family, and when I am not around them I surround myself with friends.
My behavioral engagement relies on the emphasis I put on autonomy. I am taking double the classes that I am used to because I am determined to graduate in May. On top of eight classes’ total, six of them are online, which requires even more time management on my part. Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are at play. While the goal to get my BA degree is an extrinsic motivator, I am intrinsically motivating myself everyday to get on elearning and take my classes step by step. Not only do I enjoy being independent, but my education and future depends on it.
The fish jumping out of the bowl reminds me of the movie “Finding Nemo”. When Nemo decided to swim over the drop off, he was doing so to prove his autonomy. Although providing choices and support enhances people’s sense of autonomy, Nemo wasn’t given a choice and he felt the need to show it. Once he was in the fish tank at the dentist’s office he was determined to find a way out, which showed his competence. The duration of his time spent in the fish bowl Nemo was sad and missed his father, yet the other fish gave him a ceremony to join their group, satisfying his relatedness-need.
Terms: Organismic approach, Mechanistic theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness, supportive autonomy, behavioral engagement, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, relatedness-need.
In chapter six, Reeve discusses psychological needs. People are inherently active, and when their psychological needs are being engaged they feel interest. Psychological needs encourage exploration and challenge-seeking. There are three components of psychological needs related to motivation. These include autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these three needs are being met people feel interested and motivated. This in turn supports learning, growing, and development for the individual. Autonomy, one of the three psychological needs supports people’s need to have choice and decision-making flexibility. People desire to have the freedom to decide what is important and what isn’t important in their lives. When others make these decisions for them they lose this autonomy, and their psychological needs are not being met. There are three experiential qualities that work together to define how people perceive their experience of autonomy. These include internal perceived locus of causality, volition, and perceived choice over one’s actions. The chapter also discusses the problem with giving people an option between two things. Both of these things might be bad choices and therefore still takes away from their psychological need for autonomy, but at the same time some choice is better than no choice at all. Teachers with autonomy-supportive motivating styles motivate people by nurturing their inner motivational resources. This style is proven to be the most effective since it values personal growth opportunities, acknowledges and accepts negative affect, and provides explanatory rationales. Using a controlling motivational style is less effective, since it pressures people to behave in a certain way and seems demanding. Competence is another component of psychological needs. This component takes in how people learn and get better. There is an optimal challenge and flow that occurs when people use their skills to overcome a challenge. There is an optimal level where the individual is challenged but not to extreme frustration. Relatedness is the third psychological need that stems from our desire to interact with other people. We desire to share common experiences with other people. In addition, the person needs to perceive that the individual cares about their welfare and likes them. When these psychological needs are met the person is able to experience the psychological nutriments necessary for active engagement and having a “good day.”
The most surprising thing that I learned from this chapter is how so many teachers are not using this knowledge in teaching their classes. This is priceless information that could take student’s learning and achievement to a new level. Yet people fear change, this I understand, but at what cost? I never really looked at the way I was being taught in a classroom. This information is new to me, but it all makes so much sense. Not only would this be a valuable tool for teachers, but I think that parents could use this same information and apply it to parenting.
Rating myself on the different psychological needs; I would have to say that my autonomy would be rated at medium, competency would be rated at high, and relatedness would be rated high. Autonomy would be rated at medium, because most of my classes are very demanding. This is the only class that offers any freedom of choice that I have taken before. It is new for me, but I really like this style of teaching much more that the controlling classes that I am used to taking. Also, I do understand that with some classes such as medical classes, the room for autonomy is limited but this is never explained to us. We are just expected to do what we are told. Competency would be rated high, because I am definitely being challenged in my classes, and relatedness would be rated high because I do have a chance to relate with other people on a daily basis. The people I am close to, I know care for me and they care for my welfare as well.
As said before competency is one of the psychological needs I would rate high. One of the examples in my life that I can easily see my competence is high would be in my Hapkido class. This is one area of my life that I have been able to develop skills and be optimally challenged. The forms and techniques that we practice are very challenging at quite often very painful but it provides great satisfaction when testing for the next rank is over and I obtain the next belt ranking. I am very interested and engaged when learning new techniques, also it is easy to see my skills progress through the years.
The picture shows a fish that is being controlled by its environment. Fish were never meant to put in glass jar. They were meant to swim freely in the lakes, rivers, and oceans. This fish is jumping out of the bowl, refusing to be confined to the demanding and controlling constraints of that little glass bowl. In comparison, people are also confined and controlled by things that limit and prevent their psychological needs from being met. In order for us to take that step closer to having all our psychological needs met we must take that first leap by obtaining the knowledge about what our psychological needs are. We all took that first leap by reading this chapter. What we don’t know can hurt us, or at least keep us from having our psychological needs met.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, autonomy-supportive motivating style, competence, relatedness, experiential qualities, internal perceived locus of causality, volition, autonomy-supportive motivating style, optimal challenge
I enjoyed reading chapter 6. I thought it was nice to read about psychological needs, that basically everyone has. Psychological needs are something that everyone has in common. Autonomy is the first need talked about in chapter six. Autonomy is how we live our lives and the choices we choose to make. Everyone enjoys autonomy, otherwise we would be controlled our whole life. We determine our future with the actions we choose or choose not to do. People like to make their own decisions and that's exactly what autonomy is. Without autonomy people would be very unhappy. The second psychological need discussed in chapter six was competence. Competence, is how we interact with our environment and every part of our life. Competence is when you want to share your skills and abilities with the world. You want to challenge yourself and seek out ways to grow. We want to feel satisfied with the way our life is going and the decisions we make with our life. Finally, the third psychological need discussed in chapter six was relatedness. Relatedness is a huge part of everyone's life. Relatedness is the need to socialize and interact with people in your life. Without relationships with other people we would be lost. People, psychologically need human interaction in their life. As well as good quality relationship to make themselves feel good inside. Starting new relationships happens all the time, including; moving away, going to college and starting a new job. Those are all common ways to start new relatedness relationships. The need for social bonding is certainly normal and valued in our society.
The most surprising thing I learned by reading chapter six was when I was reading and the chapter and it talked about how students would rather go to class or do their homework and go to their part time job rather than sit at home and watch tv because their job and school work gave them a challenge. I am the totally opposite. I would rather sit at home and watch tv then challenge myself because I feel like I've been challenging myself and learning new information everyday since kindergarten. That information really did surprise me though, because that just shows that they are people out there that like being challenged. I just happen to not be one of them.
If I had to rate myself as high, medium or low with these three psychological needs I would do so in this order. High, would be my autonomy because I need to make decisions on my own. I like to be in control of what I do and when I do it. Medium, would be relatedness because I also really enjoy my social interactions with my friends and family. I like to meet new people and I feel like I need that engagement in my life. Low, would have to by competence. Although, I need competence in my life, it would be last in these ratings. However, competence is still very important in my life and I need to continue to have personal growth and develop as a person.
Autonomy, definitely motivates many of my behaviors. Mostly, everything I do is because I choose to do it. Life is full of choices and how you choose to live your life. We are blessed to not be completely controlled and we can make decisions on our own. I chose to be a student so when my teachers tell me when something is due that gives me less autonomy in that situation but that's because it was my choice to go to college. Most people have some sort of lower autonomy in their life because they either go to school, or have a job. Autonomy-supportive motivating style would be the ideal way to live life. That is one person would be willing to take the other person's perspective into account and enable that person to grow. An autonomy-supportive motivating style is a good way to motivate people because that shows that you care about their opinion and psychological needs. A more controlling style would give people less motivation to get anything. Also, it might be a lessor quality job done at the end.
I really have no idea what the fish picture is trying to tell us but my guess would be that the fish is trying to jump out of water because water is one of its needs? Maybe I am completely wrong but that fish won't live long without water. Just like how we won't live a satisfied life without our needs.
Terms: psychologically needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, Autonomy-supportive motivating style, controlling style
Chapter six explains psychological needs. The three that were discussed were autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the desire to make decisions and have self control. When a person is choosing what to eat for breakfast, what wear to school, or even what college they want to go to, they are experiencing autonomy. They get to make the decision, knowing themselves well, they would choose what they want. We find ourselves in perceived choice, or the experiences that allow us many opportunities to make flexible choices. Autonomy creates a sense of independence as well. A person allows themselves to mature and become a person of their own ideas with autonomy.
Competence is the desire to understand environmental situations. When a person observes how other act in situations, they gather that is what they are to do. Through experience they learn how to effectively interact with their surroundings. At work, in a relationship, and at a funeral, people would behave differently at each. People will gain the knowledge to act professional at work, love in a relationship, and have sympathy at a funeral. If a person behaves incorrectly at a funeral, they most likely would get dirty looks from others. This would weaken their competence satisfaction level. However, when a person gets positive feedback from their previous behavior, they are satisfied with their competence level. Feedback may come from the task itself, comparison of current to past performance, comparison of own performance to another’s, or evaluation of others.
Relatedness is the desire to have close relationships. People feel the need to belong and desire social interaction. We crave the understanding of ourselves by others. When we feel as though we have people in our lives they we relate to, we higher our level of relatedness. This can be fulfilled by family, friends, intimate relationships, groups, communities, and many other form of a connection.
The most interesting and surprising topic discussed was the day-to-day study. This showed that a person’s success rate of their day depended on meeting their psychological needs. If they met their autonomy, competence, and relatedness satisfaction, they had a “good day.” However, they had a “bad day” when they didn’t meet all the needs. I feel like if people made more of an effort to satisfy their needs, or do what they wanted, they could have more good days then bad. This would decrease the negativity in the world.
When I rate myself on the satisfaction of those needs, I find that the levels are different for each. Autonomy varies on my situation, so I will go with medium. When it comes to knowing what I want, I generate an answer pretty quick. However, if it comes to making a decision on how I feel, I take my time. I ask opinions of the people closest to me to help me decide what is best. I enjoy hearing many opinions and ideas, which keeps my open-minded. I am very independent most of the time too, so this helps increase my level of autonomy. I desire to understand different environments very much. This making my competence level high, but when I am unsure and just don’t understand, I tend to decrease my motivation to learn more about the situation. I have a very high level of relatedness, I would say. I deeply desire to feel like I belong in many different parts of my life.
The main psychological need that I would like to talk about is relatedness. It motivates my behaviors in many ways. I recently come out to my family as bisexual, so I am trying to find a place in the gay community. This motivates me to research the “safe zone” groups/places here at UNI, and other places. I am also still trying to help my parents understand I am the same person and should still fit in with the family. Another example of needing to belong is, when I was growing up, my friends tended to changes schools , so I was continuously trying to find somewhere new that I belonged. I have now found a great group of friends, a college, and a major that I feel I fit in pretty well to them.
As for this fish picture, there are a few different ways it could be interpreted. The fish’s psychological needs are not being met. There are no other fishes in the bowl, so there is no way for it to satisfy its need to belong. Also, it could be curious as to what is in other environments outside the bowl, depleting its competence. However, the fish did make the decision to jump out of the bowl, so I would say it’s autonomy is pretty satisfied.
Terms used: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived choice, motivation
Chapter 6 details the aspects of autonomy, competence, and relatedness as psychological needs. It also talks about the Organismic Approach which has two parts. First, all people are naturally active. Second, people uses psychological needs to engage in their environment and their environments will either support or neglect/frustrate their inner resources. The second part of the Organismic Approach is also referred to as the person-environment dialect. It also introduces a few new terms such as competent environment events. Comp. environment events are the events that create a high feeling of competence in the environment in having optimal challenge, high structure, and high failure tolerance. It also states that everyone has a natural motivation to learn, grow, and develop in a way that’s healthy, mature, and supportive of our psychological needs. Finally, the chapter also talks about the engagement model of motivation. This model is the idea that relationships and social contact will either involve and satisfy ones’ psychological needs or neglect and frustrate them (the psychological needs being autonomy, competence, and relatedness).
To further summarize the chapter, I was most shocked by the intricacies of our psychological needs. It’s surprising how detailed motivation can be just in terms of our needs. The three psychological needs that make up motivation are surprising, impressive, and intriguing. I go in detail of the surprising things I learned below:
Autonomy is a sense of choice and freedom in one’s own decisions. It’s the ability to choose ones’ own direction. Autonomy is all about choice. Supportive autonomy promotes values, informational language, and accepts that the expression of the negative is ok. Supportive autonomy is about developing the inner motivations and motivation resources of ourselves. With autonomy, positive outcomes raise motivation, engagement, development, learning, performance and psychological well-being or vitality.
Competence is a need to become involved and interact with the environment. It is the desire to exercise skills that help to achieve challenges and to improve, develop, and refine oneself. Competence is environmental enjoyment that comes with the ability to fulfill challenges. “Flow” is another new word in this chapter. It is used in reference to competence. Flow happens when there is a high level of personal challenge and elevated environment skills that help the psychological state reach maximal enjoyment, increased concentration, and full task interest. Communal Relatedness is one that meets the need of relatedness in terms of internalization. Internalization is when someone opens up and accepts beliefs, values, and behaviors of someone else outside of their own personal beliefs et al.
Relatedness is the need to have close relationships and attach to others. It is a basic desire to connect emotionally and interpersonally. It shows the importance of interacting with others. The social bonds that are important with relatedness are mutual liking and caring.
Overall, the most shocking was the overarching role of autonomy. I knew that autonomy is incredibly important, but I didn’t realize that it had such a great effect on all of our choices, actions, and motivations!
Rating myself, I have a high need for autonomy. When someone tells me to do something, even if I wanted to do it originally, I will instantly fight it and resist the idea. I hate being told what to do, how to do it, or when it needs to be done. When I need to do something, I tell myself that I want to do it, for me. Everything has to be my idea. I like being the boss and I love my freedoms. I need to be in control of my beliefs, values, and behaviors at all times, and if someone were to tell me what to do, I would do everything but listen.
I also have an extremely high need for competence. I love optimal challenge! I have a high tolerance for failure and I love structure and involvement in my environment. In high school I was in 17 extracurricular activities and now I am nearly 10 as well as being a full time college student. I thrive on challenge and the goal of trying to fit and follow the structure of my environment and meet my objectives. I love the high level of personal challenge and I tend to find the resources within my environment helping me to meet my high competence psychological needs.
With Relatedness on the other hand, I would say that I have a medium-low level of relatedness. I am very independent and enjoy being and working on my own. It is part of the fact that I value autonomy so much; I don’t want to allow for anyone else to have the opportunity to put their two cents in. I think that it is important to interact with others for emotional release; however, I build a lot of my relationships on convenience. Thus relatedness is clearly not as important to me as competence and autonomy.
Looking at this fish and the fish bowl, I am perplexed. Perhaps the fish symbolizes us as humans and the bowl would be a boring environment without the adequate resources or companionship. The fish is making a quest toward meeting his basic psychological need. Clearly, the fish is in control over its actions. It has a high level of autonomy as nobody made it jump out of the bowl. It wasn’t forced, it was able to make the decision on its own to act and jump as it chose. The huge leap and leaving of the bowl was representative of seeking both competence and relatedness. It is obvious that the bowl does not contain other fish companions. Perhaps he was leaving to find a friend to which he/she could relate. As for competence, the leap was the optimal desired challenge. It was creating a structure. However, this fish better have a high tolerance for failure as that may be the next obstacle unless he/she makes it to another bowl of water. Overall, the fish bowl and the fish show how this particular fish, grew, changed, and adapted or rather decided to leave. This is also revealing of the Organismic approach to motivations showing how this fish interacted with its environment to meet the psychological needs as I just discussed above.
The fish is 1) self-motivated to leave which is autonomy based 2) because it wants to seek the challenges of the world and prove itself competent 3) and finally it is seeking friends and relatedness.
Terms: Organismic Approach, person-environment dialect, autonomy, competence, relatedness, psychological needs, competent Environment Events, flow, optimal challenge, structure, failure tolerance, motivation, Engagement model of motivation, neglect/frustrate, supportive autonomy, vitality, social bonds, communal relatedness, international.
Chapter 6 is about psychological needs. The psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are all part of intrinsic motivation. The degree to which an individual needs these three things varies. Each individual has a preferred level to operate at. At their preferred level, their performance will be optimized and they will be maximally motivated. The chapter talked about the benefits of meeting these needs and the drawbacks that occur when these needs are not met. The person-environment dialectic is the idea that the individual and their environment have a two-way relationship (reciprocity). The environment affects the needs and desires of the individual, and these are constantly changing.
I was most surprised by the realization that there were multiple factors that contributed to autonomy. I had previously thought that it was just a matter of being able to do what you want when you want to do it. This is true, but there is more to autonomy than that. Perceived autonomy consists of internal perceived locus of causality, volition, and perceived choice over one’s actions. Internal perceived locus of causality means that you have a say in what happens to you. Volition is feeling free and comfortable, and not pressured into anything. Perceived choice over one’s actions means that one has a choice over which action to choose and they have the flexibility to make that decision.
I think I will enjoy the opportunity to rate myself on these psychological needs. I would say that I have a rather high need for autonomy. For me, being in a situation where I have a low level of autonomy is terrible. I tend to feel incompetent, embarrassed, uncomfortable, and unimportant. I hate being told what to do. Needless to say, I have had my fair share of low autonomy situations. They suck. However, I do like some structure so I have an idea of what direction to move towards. I like to know what is expected of me. I also have a rather high degree of competence. I like to know what I am doing and I like to do it well. It motivates me to continue and pursue more challenges. I have a high need of relatedness as well. My friends and family are very important to me. I think this need varies the most for me out of the three because even though I have a high need for relatedness, I am an introvert. I need my alone time. I love talking to people and learning more about them. It is not satisfying to be in a relationship with low reciprocity.
My need for autonomy can be seen in my life. The classroom might be the best example of this. In classes where I have high autonomy, I feel better about class. I want to go to class and I feel like I am getting something out of it. I am able to understand the material better because I am not worried about getting my assignments exactly “right” according to the instructor. I am able to relax. I also do not get as stressed about the assignments. Therefore, I am motivated to do my assignments. In classes where I have low autonomy, I become really stressed out. Those are the classes that I enjoy the least and dread doing the assignments for. I definitely prefer to have control over my actions.
The fish picture could represent psychological needs and the idea of an organismic approach. The living thing, the fish, has to adapt and exchange information with the environment. His environment is his fish bowl. The fish bowl is very small, plain, and boring. The fish is probably not having much fun because he does not have any choice in the matter. He gets to swim around in a boring little fish bowl. He might be happy if he has a low need for autonomy, but by the looks of it, he wants to escape. Competence can also be seen by his jump out of the water. He accomplished his goal and was successful on escaping from the fish bowl. I do not know what he plans to do next, but at least he feels competent. The third psychological need, relatedness, can also be seen. The first thing I noticed when I saw the fish picture was that the bowl was empty and there was only one fish. Fish seem to be very social creatures, so the fish probably has a high need for relatedness. His need was not being met, so he felt the need to look elsewhere for friends and companionship. As a result of these needs, he jumped out of the fish bowl. I wish him luck!
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, intrinsic motivation, person-environment dialectic, organismic approach, reciprocity, need satisfaction, perceived autonomy: (internal perceived locus of causality, volition, perceived choice over one’s actions)
Chapter 6
Chapter six was about psychological needs including autonomy, competence, and relatedness and how these three things motivate us. Basically, autonomy is our self-direction and self motivation to help us feel worthy and accomplished. It's how we direct ourselves and support our own feelings to motivate us to do what we need to do. Autonomy is particularly interesting because it's solely based on self control instead of others controlling you. Another important part of the chapter was competence. Competence is essentially using your abilities and skills to achieve what you want to achieve. Also it includes the environment in which you are around, the environment effects how you challenge yourself and use your skills. The last need discussed in the chapter was relatedness. Relatedness is important is psychological needs because everyone in some aspects need to have close bonds and feelings of belonging. Attachments to people are essential in life and help us be emotionally supported by others. The last thing that was important from the chapter was the engagement model of motivation because it ties the three needs together in it's social context. All three needs are extremely important to psychological health and survive.
The most surprising thing I learned from the chapter was failure tolerance. I was surprised to learn that some people have high failure tolerance because they look at it as an opportunity to learn from their errors. Personally, I dread failure, so I am motived to achieve because I go out of my way to escape from failure. However, I understand that failure is just as important as success because we would not understand the importance of success if we've never failed before.
I would rate myself high on autonomy. I take heart to feeling less, unaccomplished, embarrassed, uncomfortable, etc. I need to feel like i am accomplishing something and doing well in all aspects of my life. I am a huge self motivator because I want to achieve more and feel down if I don't achieve what I set my goals for. I would rate myself high on competence as well. I like knowing what I am doing and strive to do the best of my ability at all times. I am constantly pushing my self and challenging myself to achieve. I would also rate myself high on relatedness. I surround myself with people that I have strong emotional bods with and find a lot of satisfaction in having important and meaningful relationships with my friends and family members.
Autonomy motivates me everyday to achieve short term and long term goals. I am always talking to myself and making lists on what things I need to achieve for the day to have self worth. I have many short terms goals daily, monthly, yearly, etc. I like to motivate myself to achieve higher goals to better my life. I also try to keep myself in check to really have a healthy psychological state of mind to be able to achieve all of the goals that I have.
I think that the fish is related to relatedness in the chapter. The fish appears to be trying to get out of his fishbowl in order to achieve some relatedness to other fishes in the world. He is trying to find other fish to bond with and have emotional connections to. I can imagine it would be really sad and lonely to be in a fishbowl all by yourself all the time.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, motives, self-direction, self motivation, self control, environment, challenge, bonds, attachment, engagement model of motivation, social context, failure tolerance, self motivator,