I want you to go to PostSecret http://www.postsecret.com/ or OneSentence http://www.onesentence.org/. Browse around. If you've never been here, you'll be addicted. Guaranteed. You will laugh. You will be surprised. Maybe even shocked. These are glimpses into personal worlds. Many of them are also good examples of psychological needs.
What was your experience reading these? How do they make you feel? How do they make you think? Choose a couple of examples (provide them in your comment) and describe in detail how they reflect the presence or absence of a particular psychological need. Justify your answer by providing evidence from the book about that psychological need, and you linking it to the secret or OneSentence you've chosen.
It was interesting to go through these websites and catch a glimpse into the lives of other people. Rather than secrets, I see most posts as more like stories. We pass by people every day and yet I think we forget that each person we encounter has a life story. Sometimes their stories are not that riveting and yet sometimes we meet people that either have a knack for creating a great story out of their bland lives or they truly have lived an extraordinary life. While these posts are just snapshots of daily life, it’s not too hard to recognize in many posts a longing for an unmet psychological need. Most of the posts center on the need for relatedness. Not only is relatedness a poignant need in everyone’s lives, it’s also one that people spend a lot of time ruminating on. Relatedness seems to have a very noticeable effect in peoples’ lives. While autonomy and competence are important needs, I don’t think people spend as much time venting about their lack of feelings of autonomy and/or competence as they do when they feel a lack of relatedness. Although relatedness was the most common need discussed that I found, I tried to pick one post for each need.
Relatedness: The happiest moment of my life took place while I was crushed under my 2000lb car, knowing that my boyfriend was completely okay (onesentence.org). According to the book, in order to feel a bond with another person, one must feel like the person they are friends with both cares for them and likes them. In this post, although the one person was near death, they found refuge in knowing that the person they cared for was okay. The one must truly care for (and like) the other. I can make an assumption that these two have a fairly strong and bonded relationship and that both of them generally feel as though their need for relatedness is satiated. I don’t know what the day to day of their relationship is like. They likely go through many struggles just as all couples do, yet when a major event like this takes place, true emotions can be tested. This is not to say that the person that has been crushed is not worried for their own life, but they experienced great and genuine happiness in knowing their partner was safe. The one truly cared for the well being of the other.
Competence: My deep resentment towards your family began when you were diagnosed during my FIRST semester of nursing school, because they expected me to be an oncology expert, and when I didn't have an answer they told me I was going to be a horrible nurse (onesentence.org). This post tells us how a person feels when their need for competency is being threatened. This nurse in training did not have the skills set possible to provide the family with any answers even though she was expected to know. The situation this new nurse was placed in did not provide her with an optimal challenge. Her skill set did not match the challenge that she was presented with and I’m sure this led to frustration as well as the resentment mentioned. When she failed to provide the family with the information they desired, they were upset and did not tolerate her failure (according to this post). In order to foster a feeling of competence in others we need to accept that they will likely fail when they are learning new things. It’s hard to blame this family though when they are going through such a difficult time themselves. They likely expected to be consulting someone who was more competent and able to reassure and encourage them. When they did not, they naturally became frustrated I’m sure.
Autonomy. My British boyfriend broke up with me after months of refusing to spell color with a u (onesentene.org). This one is not quite as serious as the others but it can still be a good example of the psychological need for autonomy! The poor girl just wanted to spell color/colour in the way that she felt was right, yet her boyfriend took some sort of offense to the fact that she would not spell it with a ‘u’. Had this gal given in to the pressure her boyfriend placed on her to spell color a certain way, she would have sacrificed her autonomy. More specifically, she would have lost her personal volition to spell color: c.o.l.o.r. Had she given in, she would have succumbed to her boyfriend’s pressure and not been able to willingly spell color the way she wanted to. This person also did not have the ability to make the choice she wanted to. She was forced into choosing her boyfriend or her preferred way to spell color (or perhaps her integrity). In motivation and emotion terms, this relationship provided the girl with no perceived choice. Her relationship was not highly autonomy supporting because her boyfriend was attempting to control and stifle her. He was not willing to let her do what she wanted.
Over the past few years these sights have gotten very popular and I am familiar with them. However, I haven't visited the sights in a long time. When reading these "secrets" I react by thinking more indepth about the story behind the short phrase. Many are very serious and others are funny and expected. Overall, these people telling the secrets want someone to have insight on their life, that in short covers the need's of all of the individuals who write.Generally, these statements are most related to the psychological and social needs within a person. These statements make me feel more aware, I know that there is bad in the world and sadness. These websites make it present.When reading I think majorly about how the people surrounding me on a daily basis most likely have similar secrets. I find myself to be a positive person, therefore, I see negativity less. I need to be more aware of the issues and emotions around me.
"I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job..and I'm gay."
This quote is so intriguing to me, I find it interesting the extent of a lie a person would go to for competence insane. This individual is not only hidng their true sexuality, they are in a relationship that is fake. This person is extrinsically motivated. The personal organismic psychological needs are being used to support an outcome. The initiative to naturally motivated to recieve autonomy, competence, and relatedness is very high. Behavior is self-determining and he is letting work control how he behaves. What this person wants is his needs to be met in the psychological needs area by completely avoiding his social needs and psysiological needs. This issue is so layered that the statement made me think indepth about the individuals needs. He wants to recieve a raise to show competence with an outcome of a raise, however he is avoiding his psysiological need of sex and his social needs for his personal experience. This person will never fully experience homeostasis. He is setting himself up for further failure. The enviroment plays a large role in this persons motivation as well as his relationships.
"People spot me as a difficult child..nobody ever spots my mother as having BPD."
This person is lacking the psychological needs of competence, relatedness and autonomy. The need for self direction and regulation of ones behavior is lacking. She shows that people see her has a difficult child, she is not within the social norm and the statement directs us to think it is not under her control and her behavior is based on personal experience. The need to be effectived in the enviroment is also not met. The statement suggests natural enviroments are hard for hear to handle and her interactions are not effective. The final need for relatedness has a strong desire to be met. She wants people to know the reason behind why she behaves the way she does. The understanding that she seeks is for people to understand her as an individual and accept her.
Everone has struggles, the behavior based on them is self-determining. The needs for each person are the same, the organismic theory states all organisms posses the skill to adapt to meet their hunanistic needs.
Key Terms: Need, psychological, social need,competence,extrinsic motivation,psychological needs, outcome, autonomy, relatednesss, Behavior,organic theory.
I’ll be honest and say I’ve never heard or been to these sites before. They were much simpler than I thought they would be and I rather enjoyed reading all of the comments and “secrets.” The comments I read made me feel intrigued because I know behind all of these secrets lies much more. Some of the comments are funny and more entertaining while others are outright depressing! It’s crazy how reading one sentence can make you feel so many different feelings from sadness to joy, from empathy to shock. Reading these makes me think about all of the deep secrets people harbor. Yet, until you get to actually know a person well, you only get to see the surface of their self and may never get to see any of their secrets. Reading of all these reminded me of the popular quote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
I found a comment on OneSentence that said “I was the only one who could swim and could've jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself.” I believe this is a prime example of the psychological need of competence not being met. The girl who posted this clearly believed she was competent to save the victim but was angry at herself for not being able to overcome the challenge of initial shock. From this sentence, we don’t get an accurate estimate of how high her skill level was at swimming but we do know that she was the only one who could swim. If we compare this to the Flow Model in chapter 6, it’s difficult to know exactly where to place this girl within the four quadrants of anxiety, worry, flow, and boredom. The challenge was met with a third variable besides just skill and challenge: shock. It’s not necessarily that she was being over challenged because she might have been able to save the victim easily; it was, however, a matter of her being able to overcome the challenge of being in shock. Because she was so in shock she could not move, she deeply regrets her actions and will never forgive herself. If we go further and examine the relationship between challenge and feedback, we can guess that at least one person might’ve said “why didn’t you jump in and save him/her?” or “you were the only one that could’ve save him/her, what were you thinking just standing there?!” This negative feedback only hinders the girl’s competence more. Moreover, we can take a guess that the failure tolerance was pretty low for the girl’s actions in that a life was lost because of her supposed “failure.” Chapter 6 discusses the impacts of failure intolerance and how that can decrease competence.
Another comment I found on OneSentence dealt with the psychological need of relatedness. This one said “I got more action playing spin the bottle on the beach, kissing both boys and girls, in one night than I did with my girlfriend in over a year.” Obviously this guy (or girl) is not in a warm, affectionate relationship. It sounds like the interactions between the couple are slim, especially physical interactions. According to chapter 6, for a social bond to be satisfying, the individual needs to believe that the other person cares about their welfare and likes them. However, we can see from this sentence that this person doesn’t feel like they are liked or, most likely, cared about. The intimacy does not exist in this relationship; the relationship seems more like an exchange relationship (a relationship between acquaintances) than a communal one (a relationship between people who care about the welfare of one another).
I enjoyed this website, and as predicted, became addicted. This assignment took me much longer than it should have because of how distracted I got by reading the different comments; but I loved it!
Terms: competence, relatedness, exchange relationship, communal relationship, social bond, failure tolerance, flow model, challenge and feedback
I just want to start by saying that I am a HUGE PostSecret fan. I have multiple books, have sent in a secret, and saw Frank Warren (creator of the project) at the GBPAC last year. I got to sit in the second row! I was slightly star struck! I read the new secrets every Sunday on the blog as well. I love how this project brings so many people together. It really makes you realize that you are not alone or the only one that feels a certain way about something. I've seen many comments to secrets saying "I thought I was the only one!" or something similar. It makes people really realize that they have a community of supporters and people that think the same way that they do. I think that it is an amazing project and I love finding secrets that I can relate to. It makes you feel connected to people. Sharing similar feelings with people you have never met before, and probably never will, is a good feeling. It really gives you a feeling of relatedness. I think that is what is so inspiring about the project.
As for One Sentence, I had never heard of it until this assignment. I am now hooked. It gives you a small glimpse into peoples lives just like PostSecret does. I personally like PostSecret better because it seems more personal. I think maybe because most of the secrets are hand written and paired with some form of art on the postcard, or what ever it is someone sent in. All the different sentences made me feel a certain way. Some were sad, some made me giggle, and some really made me think. I personally really like seeing silly posts/sentences. I guess because it gives me a good feeling getting to laugh at something that someone, somewhere, found funny. I guess it goes back to what I stated earlier about feeling connected to people. One that made me laugh was, "We have a bluejay in our backyard whoes breakfast consists of stolen cat food." Another one that I found funny was, "On a one lane dirt road 30 miles deep into a rain soaked state forest it finally occurs to me, this is no place for my Toyota Corolla." I like seeing posts like these simply because it gives you a glimpse of someones thoughts, and it's amusing.
One post on OneSentence that stuck out to me was, "All the skills I acquired as a violent boy have made me a helpless man." I feel that this is an example of someone that is laking a feeling of competence. According to the text 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 feel that this person thinks/feels that he is not getting his desire of competence met. I think that he wants to develop skills to improve his potential in relationships. I think that not being able to do this is what makes him feel helpless. The text also explains that we get a feeling of satisfaction and happiness when we make progress. I feel that this person most likely feels that they have not made progress socially, or in realationships, which in turn makes him unhappy. This person may also be lacking intrinsic motivation, which is a natural motivation that emerges spontaneously out of people's psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
What makes these projects so popular, I feel, is the feeling of relatedness that people get from them. According to the text 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." When you can find a secret or sentence that you can relate to it makes you feel good. Although you most likely don't know the person who submitted it, you feel connected to them. It is a special feeling when you realize that you are not alone, that you have some small connection with someone you don't know. This small connection is why I love PostSecret. Knowing that you are connected to someone is some small way is an amazing feeling. It gives people hope, and that is why it is so great to have projects like these.
Terms:competence,psychological need, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, interpersonal
I LOVE PostSecret! I check the website every Sunday regiliously. I also own a couple books and I saw Frank Warren last year when he came to UNI. However, I have never heard of onesentence. I chose to go with PostSecret, since I love it and have to stay faithful to it. Most of the time, the secrets are relatable, and some of them are really funny. Relatedness makes you feel like you belong and that you're not alone, which is what you can take away from reading PostSecrt. This was an interesting group of secrets this week.
From PostSecret, "I don't like sex." This secret not only goes along with psychological needs, but it also goes along with our physiological needs that we discussed a couple weeks ago. Sex was one of the physiological needs, so for this person to share this secret, it makes you think why? Competence may be a reason why this person doesn't like sex. Competence is to be actively engaged in interactions and to pursue them. Most importantly, what relates to this secret, is flow experience. Flow is the deep involvement in an activity where the challenge and skill go together. However, when skill is higher than challenge, then the task becomes boring and undesirable. This simply means that the person doesn't care about the task. This could be a reason as to why this person doesn't like sex.
PostSecret: "I made a popular 'It Gets Better' video. Now my life is crashing down around me. I wish the nearly 1,000 people whom watched my video could see what a fraud I am. It never gets better." At one point, this person was full of hope and wanting to help other people, by making the video. Now, the person feels as if the world is if life will never be okay. A comment was posted to this secret on the website and it said, "Maybe 'better' appears at first in a way you can't understand. Or maybe you feel like it takes more time for you than someone else. But better is there, in front of you, even in the smallest of ways." The person who wrote the original secret is looking to relate to someone. They want to be emotionally connected with someone, and it doesn't matter who. Naturally, we move towards people whom we trust and know that they want the best for our well-being. But sometimes, being close to someone anonymously over the internet, can work as well. Sometimes, people just need the social aspect of talking to someone who they know that they won't run into. Most likely, the people whom watched the video were probably feeling pretty low and could relate to the video. Now, this person is wishing that someone would relate to them and see that they aren't doing so well.
One Sentence: "Today I washed my mother's hair for the first time." This would be a difficult task to grasp. As I see this, his (or her) mom has gotten to the age where she cannot take care of herself anymore. Or, she was in an accident and needs help with the small activities that we don't really think about. Being able to do this task involves relatedness and internalization. This person has a good relationship with their mom, as they are willing to help wash her hair. With internalized thinking, this person would ask "Why is it important that I wash my moms hair?" An answer to that question can simply be, love. Your mom washed your hair, and now you have to help her out, which ends in satisfaction. You would be satisfied that you're making a difference and you're able to help someone in a time of need.
Terms: Relatedness, psychological need, physiological need, competence, flow experience, internalization.
I've never been to either of these sights, or ever heard of them either. I'd have to say PostSecret was more intriguing than OneSentence. I think both of the sights are quite interesting though. They remind me of blogs from back in the day when kids use to have livejournal. They're just true stories and small words about someone else's life. It can be addicting but personally, I wouldn't look around for too long because they remind me of reality TV shows. Yeah, everybody has secrets and everybody has troubles they want to share in their life, but to be completely honest, it's made for drama (not to sound rude). Only really bored people who are looking for some drastic story would go through these hours on end.
I'm going to compare it to listening to sad sappy songs...people who are depressed or are sad usually listen to sad songs. People who are in love usually listen to love songs. People who are just happy because there's competence (psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and reflects the desire to exercise one's capacities and skills, to seek out and master optimal challenges)usually listen to happy music. People who are truly happy though, wouldn't even care about these postings from other people (unless they're bored) There's usually a motive or incentive to why people are looking at these. This does, however definitely relate to our emotions, and also the stories on these websites.
I'm going to take an example I found from Sunday's Posts on PostSecret. "I didn't start liking you until I heard you had a big penis..sorry." I do think this is really funny. Honestly though, I think this person is bullshitting everyone (pardon my language). There's no way you could start liking someone just because you found out they had a big penis. Unless your a slut and only want to get laid for pleasure (which is a psychological need) so this perfectly relates to this quote. I believe in order to like someone, there needs to be relatedness, which 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. The person who wrote that quote is either a)a slut or b)a liar. period.
Another example I found on OneSentence that was sad, but I'm sure no doubt, true, was this one: "My mother believed I seduced her husband, even though my stepfather had me pinned to the bed, his hand over my mouth so I wouldn't scream." I think this child has/had a very controlling motivation style. Very controlling further adds interpersonal behavior to suppress and even deaden students' inner motivational resources (reducing reacting to students expressions of negative affect with authoritarian power assertions). Although nobody really knows the full story, I'm sure this person probably doesn't stand up for them self, especially if he/she can't get their own mother to believe that it was rape. They mother is probably also controlling or just doesn't care about their child because of the circumstances. This person needs help and they're trying to get comfort by interaction with those who can relate through this website. Interaction with others is the primary condition that involves the relatedness need. People seek emotionally positive interactions and interaction partners and in doing so they gain the opportunity to involve the psychological need for relatedness. This is exactly what this person is doing. They are seeking out to others because they don't know what else to do.
Overall, this was a great assignment to do to relate it to psychological needs.
Terms: competence, need, relatedness, sex, controlling motivation style, interaction, incentives, motives
I can honestly say I’ve never been to either Post Secret or One Sentence. I really enjoyed the Post Secret website, but I really didn’t enjoy the Once Sentence website. Personally I didn’t find it as interesting, but Post Secret is awesome. The posts really made me feel like I was peering into the personal lives of someone even though I did not know that person. I felt like I was almost playing God. Most of the posts really make me sad to know that people go through those situations.
One big post that stuck out to me was the post that said “I don’t like sex.” This kind of relates to me because I know someone that struggles with that while in college. Young adults are stereotyped with enjoying sex and engaging in it whenever possible. This is extremely difficult to deal with because it would be difficult to discuss this with someone because people wouldn’t understand what you go through. It’s really difficult to explain why you don’t like something that people generally enjoy. This would also be difficult because people want and desire to have relationships with others, but the adversity to a large component to a relationship would be hard. These people struggle to have intimate relationships with others.
The next one that stuck out to me was “My mother had an affair with my high school principal.” That one just absolutely blew my mind because affairs in a school system happen more often than what people would like to admit. I would assume that the teachers or other school employees get a large serotonin boost from the sexual experiences. The also get a rush from “living on the edge.”
Parts of me actually thinks this is a great idea. I have never been to either site before, so I was very intrigued as to what was in store for me. Some of the posts were extremely personal and in any other setting, may be deemed inappropriate. This is why I think this is a great idea. Sometimes you just need to share things with others, but you don’t want to because they are way too personal. You don’t want to put your friends, family, etc. in an awkward position of not knowing what to say and feeling uncomfortable for the load of information. When we hear cases like these, a lot of times we are told to write it down as a way of getting things off your chest. However sometimes that isn’t enough; we need to actually express our thoughts and feelings to others. Having an anonymous website like this is an excellent resource for those who need to express deep feelings and feel like they have no other outlets.
Reading some of these definitely puts things in prospective. Right now I am very stressed with school – I take the GRE in ten days and I am very nervous about it. I’d be lying to say I haven’t thrown a pity party or two for myself from the stress. However then I read these sentences and picture captions and realize that things could be SO much worse. There’s a philosophy, saying, whatever you want to call it that goes along the lines of “If everyone through their problems in a pile, we’d all take our own back.” I feel like this site is a good representation of that.
While I have said many good things about this site, I also believe there are some downsides to the site. Misery loves company. I’m afraid that some users could just drown in a pool of negativity. I’m unsure if this is the healthiest way to deal with certain issues and problems. The website obviously has both its up and downs.
One example of a psychological need I found was on the PostSecret website. The sentence was, “I didn’t wear panties to your funeral.” This is an example of exerting the psychological need of autonomy. Autonomy is the control we have in our decision making. We want the freedom to decide what is important and what is not. We want to be the one who determines our actions. A decision we make every day is whether to put on underwear or not. I believe it is safe to say that most people most of the time decide to wear underwear. However this individual decided that for a certain person’s funeral that wearing underwear was not important. Therefore, he or she did not put on any knickers for the ceremony. I would assume that this behavior of not wearing any underwear came from intrinsic motivation. We do not know enough about the story to see if he or she was rewarded from an external source, so I would assume he or she was not.
Another example that I found interesting on PostSecret was one a man wrote. In the little postcard, it said “I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job… and I’m GAY!” For starters, I thought this was very sad. It hurts me knowing that these types of scenerios do occur – employers won’t promote certain employees due to discrimination, whether it be for sexual orientation, race, etc. But perhaps the employer was fair. Maybe the man just wasn’t doing a well enough job, or was doing a good job, yet someone out there was doing a great job? No matter what the case, it is easy to see how this is an example of relatedness. Relatedness deals with psychological need of belonging. This man wanted to feel like he belonged and deserved a promotion. He wanted a better relationship with his employer in order for his employer to give him a promotion, and he thought he could do so by conforming to social norms of appearing to be straight. He was extrinsically motivated because he wanted the reward of the promotion. You could also look at this as an example of our psychological need of competence. The psychological need of competence deals with wanting to be effective, better ourselves, and to develop and improve our skills. Perhaps the man felt incompetent at the lower level job, and he needed the promotion in order to fulfill this need. No matter what psychological need was the driving force of motivation for him to impersonate a straight man, I do feel badly that he had to go so far.
Terms:
Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, reward, behavior, competence, relatedness, autonomy, psychological need, drive,
I love Post Secret! Every Sunday I read the new secrets and last year I saw Frank Warren here at UNI. What I love about the Post Secret blog is that people can relate to some of the secrets. It makes you feel better knowing you are not alone and other people are experiencing the same things or feelings as you. I have not heard of the website One Sentence but I really enjoyed reading all stories. One Sentence is very similar to Post Secret but instead of mailing in your secret you can post it online.
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. One secret on the One Sentence blog was “I was the only one who could swim and could've jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself.” This is an example of competence not being met. It makes me wonder why the girl did not jump in to save him. The flow model in chapter 6 compares a person’s personal skills and competencies with opportunities for challenge. If the opportunity presented outweighed her skills then she could have had performers worry or anxiety and that could have caused her to not jump into the water.
On the Post Secret website, someone posted a secret saying “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid abuse.” I think this is a good example of relatedness. 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. The person who sent this secret probably does not want to ruin his relationship with his parents because he feels like he has a close and warm relationship with his parents. His parents provide him with warmth, care, and mutual concern and telling his parents about his steroid abuse could ruin that.
Terms: Competence, relatedness, psychological needs, flow model.
I've been a regular viewer of the Sunday Secrets for a few years now and I have seen Frank Warren speak & own several of the books, so visiting the Postsecret website was not much of a novelty, though it is wonderful. However I had not heard of One Sentence before this assignment and found it interesting upon discovering it was a lot like Post Secret. I really enjoy Post Secret a lot because it is such an unedited display of the humanity, and sometimes the lack there of, in the world still today. The secrets make you laugh, they make you sad, and a lot of times they make you realize that there are other people in the world who have the same exact secret; whether it be embarrassing or tragic, you are not the only one carrying this burden of a secret. I did not connect as much to One Sentence, simply because it felt much less personal. To me, One Sentence seems superficial in the sense that many of the sentences seem to just skim the surface of whatever the individual posting is trying to convey. With Postsecret people not only write their secrets (without limitations) but they often make the postcard it is written on, adding an additional layer of sincerity and depth to the project.
One of the secrets that caught my attention during this assignment was "Sometimes being an interracial person who only looks white is really embarrassing and lonely." This is a perfect example of a psychological need of relatedness not being met. The individual who wrote the secret does not feel that they are accepted by the categorization of 'interracial' and they do not feel like they belong in the ethnic categorization of 'white' either. Humans have an innate physiological need to feel that they belong with people who are similar to themselves. Because this individual can not relate to other people, they are not receiving the emotional support from anyone to meet that need. It is possible then that because this individual lacks a sense of belonging to a racial group, they lack a sense of relatedness. When an individuals sens of relatedness they often fail to internalize certain behaviors of either group. Internalization is important when establishing an individuals beliefs and behaviors. Though relatedness is not necessary, a low sens of relatedness causes a significant decrease in internalization.
Terms: Relatedness, Psychological Need, Internalization
I thought these websites were very interesting and sometimes entertaining to explore. The first example from the chapter on psychological needs that I found had to do with relatedness. The sentence is, “I stopped complaining about school the day I found out my boyfriend was in special education and longed to be in a normal school.” Relatedness is the idea that everyone has the need to belong and everyone desires social interaction. Everyone wants friends and we go out of our way to maintain such friendships. Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with others and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. Relatedness has to do with motivation because people function better, deal with stress easier, and report fewer psychological difficulties when their interpersonal relationships support their need for relatedness. Although interaction with others is sufficient for the relatedness need, the satisfaction requires a social bond between the self and another or between the self and a group. In this particular example, the boyfriend desires a social bond between himself and being in “normal” school. To be satisfying, this social bond needs to be characterized by the perception that the other person or group cares about your welfare as well as likes you. However, more than caring or liking, relationships that are deeply satisfied in the need for relatedness are those that have the knowledge that one’s true self, or one’s authentic self, has been shown and deemed to be important.
Another concept from this particular post is that of internalization. Internalization refers to the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed regulation or value into an internally endorsed one. Relatedness to others, as discussed above, provides the social context in which internalization occurs. However, this person (the boyfriend) felt emotionally distant and interpersonally neglected, so relatedness was low and internalization did not occur. Even if there is high relatedness, there is no guarantee that internalization will occur. For internalization to occur, the person must also see the value, meaning, and utility in the other’s prescriptions and proscriptions.
Another example is, “Three-and-a-half months after giving birth to the baby I never thought I could have, I was in the hospital wondering if I would live to hear her first words.” This has to do with the organismic approach to motivation. Organismic theories get their name from the word organism. The survival of any organism depends on its environment because the environment offers resources like food, water, social support, and intellectual stimulation. All organisms are equipped to initiate and engage in exchanges with their environment because all organisms possess skills and the motivation to exercise and develop these skills.
Terms: relatedness, internalization, organismic
I was kind of reluctant to start reading these because of the addicting aspect. I am already addicted to facebook, twitter, and pinterest. But why not add another? My experience reading these post ranged from humor to sadness on some of them, and even disgust. The postsecret items were even more vivid because they had a picture so we could actually see the emotion in a sense. Most of the posts made me feel upset and sad for the person who was posting these secrets. They also made me feel shocked and intrigued because I know there is more to the story and I want to know what it is! Also, hearing that other people have worse problems than I do makes me concentrate a little bit less on the problems in my life that I think are so huge. Thus, they make me think in a little more positive way about my own life. It is definitely a wakeup call! However, this makes my motivation to get my school work and other things accomplished even less than it already is.
One example I saw pertained to the psychological need dealing with competence. One person write, “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid abuse.” At some point, this boy didn’t feel competent in his strength abilities, so he began using steroids. His incompetence within himself has not allowed him to tell his family what he’s really doing. He also doesn’t want his family to see his incompetence because they’ve already seen his strength (most likely) as true competence, so it would be a huge let down to them. He may have taken the steroids for many reasons such as being a stronger person when lifting weights or playing sports. He may also have wanted to find a relationship so he wanted to look stronger. There was even a picture since this was from postsecret, so we could see the scrawny child compared to the buff man after steroids. He may have wanted to increase his ability to overcome a challenge as stated in chapter 6 of the book. Flow, a state of concentration that involves a holistic absorption and deep involvement in an activity, exists in many sporting events. This guy probably experienced flow when he was involved in physical activity, and wanted to increase this. Being over challenged can threaten his competence, which is where the steroids would have stepped into play. He probably kept getting good feedback for his competence created by steroids which caused him to keep taking them.
Another example I saw linked to relatedness. This might be stretching it, but the statement that says “People spot me as a difficult child. Nobody ever spots my mother having BPD.” Relatedness is the need to belong or social interactions. We have a want for others to really care for us and we want reciprocal relationships. It would be very difficult to establish a close emotional bond or attachment with a mother who has BPD. It’s hard to form a bond with someone like that as well. Many people get pushed away by people with BPD. The child got the brunt of the blow growing up because the lack of relatedness affects the child negatively. Then people look at the child as having a behavior problem instead of looking towards the parenting. Thus, the absence of relatedness is very evident in this post.
Terms: flow, competence, psychological need, relatedness, emotional bond, reciprocal, interaction
After reading chapter 6, I found that the chapter mainly dealt with autonomy vs. controlling environments, competence, relatedness, internalization and engagement. When I read some of the posts on Post Secret and One Sentence, I was really taken back at the emotional tone of each of the websites. I had never come across something like this before so I had no idea what to expect. My first reactions to the websites were how personal some of the quick stories were. It is amazing how one sentence can’t paint a picture to what that person has been going through for a life time. I had a hard time not relating to some of these stories while others kind of gave me a wakeup call.
Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the intuition and regulation of one’s behavior. Basically when deciding what to do, we want to be the ones who decide 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. I found two funny posts on Post secret, the first being, “I didn’t wear panties to your funeral.” This could be a woman who was controlled by her husband her whole life and now that he is dead she can finally be free. Now that was just an assumption but that shows controlling vs. autonomous actions.
Another post was, “I didn’t like you until I heard you had a big dick.” This shows autonomy because this woman is choosing what attributes she likes in male. She was motivated to “get with him” because he had a certain feature that she desired. I definitely chose the two dirtiest examples but that’s okay.
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’m not sure is this applies to competence but it’s the best one I could find, "I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job..and I'm gay." This applies to competence because he is participating in activities so that he has a chance to express his capacities and skills and seek out his optimal chances at his profession. This wouldn’t have happened unless he took the necessary steps of dating a girl just so he could get a raise. That is a challenge in itself, thinking he can pull of such an endeavor.
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 found a post on One Sentence which said, “Five years and five phones later, I still add your number every time.” For me I can relate to this post even. Every time I get a new phone I put my ex-girlfriends number in there. Even though it’s been years, I continuously do it. I never understood why I did but it just happened. Knowing that there’s other people out there like that gives me an emotional tie to them. We are able to relate to specific effects.
Internalization refers to the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed regulation or value into an internally endorsed one. An example of this from One Sentence was, “I ate in the restaurant where we'd met for the first time and I remembered her only after I'd paid the bill.” I chose this because in society we tell people to move on when they break up with someone. Obviously this is a lot harder to do than people think. So the fact that this person didn’t even remember that personal moment at the restaurant until the end shows that he has internalized the notion of moving on.
Terms: internalization, engagement, autonomy, relatedness, controlling, competence.
I have never been on these sites before, but I really enjoyed reading what people had to say. Some of the posts I could easily relate to, but others were shocking and made me feel very blessed. According to some of these posts, I have lived a very charmed life! I found myself putting myself in the shoes of those who wrote the posts, and thought about how I might do things differently if that scenario were to happen to me; I know that unless I actually end up in that situation I will never know for sure what I will do, but it is a good exercise to make me think about my own values and beliefs.
I thought the section of the book that discussed communal and exchange relationships was interesting, and that section came to mind when I read the following sentence on the website: “Sometimes, learning that you're the other woman is just as emotionally wrecking as discovering that there is another woman.” The book listed romantic relationships as being communal ones, but I think in this case that the romantic relationship was communal only from the woman’s end; for the man, it was exchange. I say this because a communal relationship should be when the individuals in the relationship care about the needs of others more than their own needs, and the man that this post did not care enough about his wife or girlfriend to maintain a healthy, monogamous relationship with either of them. In fact, he ended up hurting the women more than he satisfied their needs.
I read a post that said “BPD: I was a mean big sister, and I’m afraid it is my fault that my little sister has so many problems.” This reflects the absence of the psychological need for relatedness. The book states that “Relatedness is an important motivational construct because people function better, are more resilient to stress, and report fewer psychological difficulties when their interpersonal relationships support their need for autonomy” (pg. 162). What we can imply from this post is that the younger sister did not have the love or support of her older sister growing up, which is a relationship that most of us would find very important. The inability of the younger sister to relate to her older sister may have deprived her of the psychological need for relatedness to such an extent that she now has the problems that the post refers to.
Another post said “I didn’t think I could survive my children’s childhood without being drunk. I’ve been wrong for almost two years.” I perceive this statement as a challenge that this person overcame, which falls into the competence category. The book defines competence as “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” (pg. 155). What we can infer from this post is that the individual was at one point an alcoholic; (s)he was able to overcome that problem in order to be a better parent for his/her kids. I get the impression from this post that this is an accomplishment that the person is proud of, which means that the psychological need for competence is being met.
Terms: communal and exchange relationships, relatedness, competence
When reading the post on both PostSecret and One Sentence I was not only shocked, but also very sad by the things that were written on the screen. Thinking back on times when I thought I had bad days in nothing in comparison to some of the things I read on these cites. When looking at the different post multiple things went through my mind. Some made me chuckle while others literally made me stare at the screen in amazement that people are willing to share such traumatic experiences with complete strangers, even though their identity is anonymous.
There were three post from the cite One Sentence that stood out to me. The first that stood out to me was as follows; “My deep resentment towards your family began when you were diagnosed during my FIRST semester of nursing school, because they expected me to be an oncology expert, and when I didn't have an answer they told me I was going to be a horrible nurse.” This sentence can be related to competence and relatedness. By the family telling this young woman that she will make a horrible nurse because she didn’t know the answer to some rather difficult answers at her level of training can be very detrimental to competence. Competence is “the psychological need to be effective in interactions with environment and it reflects the desire to exercise once capacities and skills, and in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges” (Reeve 155). By hearing those phrases and sense of disappointment from this persons significant other family could easily cause this person to see the low levels of skill they currently have and be deterred from wanting to continue with the greater task of becoming a nurse. It also can be related to the need of relatedness. Relatedness, the psychological need to fit in and belong to a certain group, is definitely being challenged in this situation in the fact that with this person is holding resentment towards their significant others family which could be affecting their need and want to be a part of their significant others family. This can then cause further problems in the future.
The second sentence from One Sentence can be related to communal and exchange relationships. The post consisting of “Your voice crossed the ocean on a telephone wire to ask if I was happy, and I was grateful you couldn't see the lie on my face when I told you that I was.” Not all relationships are satisfying for our need of relatedness. Communal relationships are those between persons who care about the welfare and well being of the other person in that relationship, such as friendships family and romantic relationships (Reeve 164). In this post, there is a communal relationship from the partner who is currently overseas in the fact that he is asking if the partner on the other end of the phone line is happy. In communal relationships, partners are constantly checking in with the others needs and seeing if those needs are being met. In this case, the person on the other end of the line is checking in with his partners needs by asking if they are happy.
These are only two examples of how these post relate to the psychological needs of humans.
Terms: Competence, Relatedness, Communal Relationships
Reading through these two websites was as addicting as you said it would be. I have been a fan of PostSecrect for a while and do own one of the books. I had not heard of OneSentence though and found it very interesting how people are so willing to share their deeply emotional stories with the world. I could probably spend hours going through both of these websites and feel all the emotions, happy or sad, that go along with each "secret". Each story makes me feel more and more like im not the only one with regrets or problems in my life. Knowing that others deal with much more difficult situations in their lives makes me feel lucky for all the good things going on in my life. I think these websites are a great idea for people to be able to let out these things that they just don't want to keep inside anymore. Just being able to release their feelings and thoughts has got to make each and every single one of them feel a little relief, even if these websites do not really make their problems disappear
One of the sentences that stuck out to me on Onesentence.org was " The summer that three of my friends committed suicide, my sister convinced me that the voices in my head were them telling their true stories of being murdered." This is a very sad situation to be in and I can tell that this person had an underlying psychological need after reading this sentence. The psychological need is relatedness. This person desires social interaction with their lost friends. Relatedness is a need to have friends and wanting to belong. A person that has a need of relatedness wants to maintain the warm and close relationships that they have with others in their lives. By this persons sister telling them that the voices are communicating with her or him, it shows that they really want to stay close with the friends they lost just by believing that they are choosing to stay in touch by being voices in the person's head.
Another example from PostSecret that I found interesting was the postcard that said "I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job.... and i'm gay." This showed the psychological need of competence. Competence is the need to interact effectively with a person's surroundings, such as school, work or in relationships. This guy wanted so badly to feel like he was worth something at his job, that he did something against his own feelings and morals. At this guys job he must have see the clear structure of how it works to get respect and a raise. Structure refers to how clears it is on what the enivronment wants a person to do to achieve the desired goals. He must have felt that being gay would get him nowhere and that by dating a girl he would be seen as a competent man and get the raise he deserved. I really hope that he does not work at this job anymore, because I think that it is so wrong of people to expect everyone to be exactly the same and be exactly want they want the person to be. He should have got the raise no matter what his sexual orientation was.
Overall, these two websites were very eye opening on how people try to meet their psychological needs in life. It is great to know that there is a place for people to share their stories with everyone just so others don't feel so alone when the same thing is happening to them. I will probably continue to look at these websites after im done with this assignment, because I love feeling not so alone when things may not be going my way.
Terms: relatedness, competence, structure, social interaction, psychological needs.
I have literally never heard or seen these websites before. This was my first experience browsing through the two websites and searching around. When reading these “secrets” it seems very unusual to me that they are just posted for the whole wide world to see. Some of these seem private to me that I would not feel too comfortable just throwing on the web. There is a wide range of topics that are posted. Some are humorous, while others are “out there.” Apparently these people who post these “secrets” want some advice on their life. On the other side of all this, it is making these “secrets” known. Who is to say the people around you, do not have similar secrets? So part of me is trying to understand the true reason I website like this would be issued online. These websites are trying to spread awareness in my opinion, and inform the true meaning of what is happening in peoples’ lives.
As the book talks about having a special bond with another person and how if it is mutual, they both care for each other and have an interest in one another. The example I really thought reflected this was, “The happiest moment of my life took place while I was crushed under my 2000lb car, knowing that my boyfriend was completely okay.” This shows exactly what that special bond is. As the person is near death, all they can think about knows their significant other is going to be okay. That is something special. In my eyes, this is kind of close to the saying, “I would take a bullet for them.” These both have a very similar concept in which you know the one you care for is going to be safe and okay. True emotion is a crazy thing when you get into the serious situations like this. I am sure this couple loves each other very much, but it just comes to show what “true love” really shows when adversity is set in front of someone.
The other comment that really sparked my interest was, “I was the only one who could swim and could've jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself. After reading that, if that does not make you take a step back, I do not know what does. Initially after reading that, I visualized something like this being in a movie. At that moment, I sit there and pray that the person will just jump into the water and save the life. The chapter talks about the need of competence not being met and this quote mirrors that. The girl truly knew she could save him, but was not able to initiate any action because she was shell-shocked. Since she is this way, she was not able to move and take action. For this, she does not seem to have ever forgiven herself. Nowhere does it say she did not have the skill to jump in and save him, but the other factor of fright played a huge role. Chapter six discusses the impacts of failure intolerance and the flow model. These two concepts relate to this quote very much so.
The last comment from these websites that I found interesting was, “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid abuse.” This was has autonomy written all over it. We (as humans) want to be the one who decides 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. This statement reflects that the person knows they are in the wrong doing steroids, but since the person is already “in deep” with them, he realizes he cannot back out now. He is delved into these pills so far that by telling his parents, it would not be a good outcome. This also reflects volition. Engaging in an activity that is an unpressured and willingness behavior.
These two websites were very, very interesting to look at. For me not knowing at all what these websites were about, it sparked some interest in scrolling through these and looking at what random and crazy information you would find. As much as some of the comments were negative, the people making these comments need to know that they are not alone. They are most likely not the only one experiencing their situation. The behavior is self-determining. Each of us has the skill to meet our humanistic needs.
Terms: competence, failure intolerance, flow model, autonomy, volition, self-determining, humanistic needs
A few years ago I had a friend show me the PostSecret website – I immediately fell in love. This is such a personal portal into so many different worlds, and it is truly addicting. I have seen Frank Warren live twice and both times his story was as equally captivating. I admire his hard work and progress to keep PostSecret open to all and to faithfully post new secrets every Sunday. I find the secrets fascinating, beautiful, horrific, detailed, optimistic, and pessimistic.
I religiously check PostSecret every Sunday. I am always in awe about the secrets that people from all over the world send to Frank. Some I ponder for quite some time, while others I scroll quickly past in embarrassment or aversion (no personal judgment – a secret’s a secret). I save my favorite secrets from each Sunday, or any that I can relate to. This gives me a sense of relatedness with others around me – even if I do not know them. Some secrets that are posted take me quite a while to decipher their meaning/s. Other secrets, if I am able to personally relate, allow me to ponder about the person who sent in the secret. Where do they live? Their secret is personally relatable; I wonder if they have any other secrets or characteristics that I could also relate? How many other people have this exact same secret or quality as in this posted secret?
A particular secret that reflects the psychological need of autonomy is the secret stating, “I’m only 20… but I know I’ll never need the advice they try to give me in magazines.” Autonomy is defined as a want to make our own decisions for ourselves. By stating that they will never use magazines for advice, this person is portraying how they are making decisions for themselves and will not be persuaded by environmental influences such as magazines and the media. A secret that reflects the absence of autonomy is the secret stating, “He said laughing ‘it isn’t rape if we are married’… I believed him.” This does not reflect autonomy because the person did not make the decision for themselves as to whether or not rape was committed. The person allowed another – their spouse – to define rape and claim the final decision as to the “definition” of rape.
A particular secret that reflects the absence of the psychological need of competence is the secret stating, “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid abuse.” Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment and reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. Competence is not present in this secret as the individual does see themselves fit to master challenges without the use of steroids. They rely on steroids to exercise their capacities and skills and to master optimal challenges – relying on environmental methods of which to achieve challenges proves that competence is not present. Competence is also not present because they feel unable to tell their parents the truth. If the psychological need of competence would be satisfied, the individual would not feel the need to hide the truth and abuse drugs in order to feel personally competent. A secret that portrays competence is the secret that states, “I’m only 20… but I know I’ll never need the advice they try to give me in magazines.” I believe competence is present here because the individual seems to be making it a personal goal/challenge to not succumb to media influences. They made their decision and plan to exercise their capacities and skills in order to achieve competence.
Another psychological need that is absent on PostSecret is that of relatedness. 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. A secret in which relatedness is absent is the secret stating, “People spot me as a difficult child. Nobody ever spots my mother having BPD.” Relatedness is not present here because the person is unable to connect or create close emotional bonds and attachments with other people due to the effect of their BPD mother. The desire to be emotionally connected is indeed present because the individual seems to be bothered by the fact that they are the only one (of them and their mother) to be spotted as “different,” when in actuality it is most likely the mother’s disorder that is a contribution to the reason why the individual is a difficult child. Relatedness is also present on PostSecret this week in the post that states, “These are my suicide notes. I kept them as a ‘safety net.’ But that’s not what makes me feel safe anymore. Thank you.” This post shows relatedness because the individual was able to emotionally connect and able to establish close emotional bonds with other people (or one person) that allowed them to let go of suicide attempts. They are able to relate to another and to create such a bond that they no longer wish to take their own lives. This secret is a wonderful example of relatedness and how it is such an important psychological need to humans.
Post Secret is a website that provides glimpses into personal worlds that will never get old. I have been on it multiple times before, and I get something new out of it each time I visit. I experience many different feelings after reading all of the different secrets that people mail in. Some make me feel sad, some make me laugh, and others are just gross or plain ridiculous! All of the secrets on there definitely have an impact on how I think, though, because of all of the emotions that are involved. It makes me realize that some people are going through very different things in life than I am, whereas some people are going through very similar trials and tribulations as me.
One secret off of Post Secret says, “Sometimes being an interracial person who only looks white is really embarrassing and lonely.” Right away, I realized that this particular secret reflected the presence of the psychological need of relatedness. This is obvious because, as quoted in the textbook, “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,” (p.162). We all want to belong, and we all desire social interaction and close friends and relationships. The person who posted this secret apparently feels embarrassed and lonely about whom she is because she does not feel like she is connecting with anyone or feeling valued or cared for by anyone. Her need for relatedness is definitely showing.
Another secret off of Post Secret says, “I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job…and I’m gay!” This particular secret reflected the presence of the psychological need of competence because of the fact that that this man did not feel good enough with whatever he was doing at work and therefore assumed that if he dated a girl it would get him a raise. According to the textbook, “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,” (p.155). This secret struck me as an absence of competence because of the fact that this man wants to interact effectively with his surroundings at work, but must feel like the only way he can move up is by doing something that he thinks is expected of him or wanted from him.
A final secret off of Post Secret says, “I didn’t wear panties to your funeral”. To me, this secret reflected the absence of the psychological need for autonomy. As defined in the textbook, “Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior,” (p.146). This person obviously already has a sense of autonomy based solely on the fact that pretty much everyone usually wears underwear to funerals, but they are exercising their autonomy and self-direction by making the conscious choice to not wear any. This person made their own decision about whether or not they were going to wear undergarments to the funeral, and the way the secret is stated makes it seem as though they are fine with the choice that they made.
Before this assignment, I had never been to the One Sentence website. It was intriguing to look through the different sentences that people put up to tell different kinds of life stories. A lot of these sentences made me kind of sad, and I had to think a lot harder about some of these than what I had read on Post Secret.
One post on One Sentence says, “Sometimes, learning that you’re the other woman is just as emotionally wrecking as discovering that there is another woman”. Here, I believe that this reflects a presence of the psychological need of competence. Above, in my section on Post Secret, I defined what competence is. It makes sense in this example because of the fact that in relationships, we want to grow and make progress and then feel satisfied and happy because of it. We want to interact effectively in our relationships, and we definitely do not want to hear that there is another person who is competing with us for the same mate that we strive to achieve the need of competence with.
Another post that really stood out to me on One Sentence says, “I ate in the restaurant where we’d met for the first time and I remembered her only after I’d paid the bill”. This sentence demonstrates the absence of the psychological need of autonomy. This person has obviously moved on from a past relationship that was probably really important to him, and he was able to go through a whole meal at a place that the two of them sort of shared without even thinking about her. He must have felt sort of empowered after that. From personal experience, it sucks not being able to go a day without missing someone you were once with, but when you are finally able to get over it a little bit and move on with your life, it is such a good feeling. That is what this post meant to me.
All in all, it was great to look through all of the different posts on Post Secret and One Sentence. It has become easier to spot where presences or absences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are within the different posts. I enjoyed this assignment and I hope that there are more like it in the future!
Terms: emotions, psychological need, relatedness, competence, autonomy, behavior
I didn't like the PostSecret website too much, partly because I don't understand some of the art works. The other reason I don't like it is that it only shows pictures on one day. Where are the previous entries? Nevertheless, some of the postcards are really funny. The One Sentence website is much easier to navigate, and it seems to contain more information than the other one does.
Some of the posts describe the plain silliness occurred in the lives of other people. They make you laugh and reflect on those similar stupid things you have done yourself. Yet some other posts simply tell stories of illegal events. These entries made me uncomfortable with merely dozens of words.
I thought about the way the PostSecret website operates. Do they take all the past entries off the site and publish those works to make money themselves? If that is the case, then these people are really donating their own intellectual property to benefit the website crew members. Now that is a unique business model which manifests capitalism. I wonder what motivated Frank Warren to start this website. How did he come up with this idea?
First Quote
"Mars: Today I washed my mother's hair for the first time."
This event demonstrates changes in two psychological needs: competence and relatedness. The relatedness is more obvious as the child forms a close bond with the parent. This genuine care of family member is a good example of communal relationship. Members in this relationship are devoted to the welfare of another and act without asking for anything in return. This psychological need is then satisfied in the family. The fact that the mother could not wash her hair may have showed a loss of competence. On the other hand, the child used to need assistance from the parent, and now the person could return the favor to the parent. This transition shows that the person have gained competence thus satisfying this need.
Second Quote
"Broken No More: I ate in the restaurant where we'd met for the first time and I remembered her only after I'd paid the bill."
This story shows autonomy as the satisfied need. After the person finally forget about her presence, the restaurant becomes one of the desirable choices. The place no longer provokes sad responses, and the person can dine here freely. This situation shows that the volition is adequate, so the psychological need can be fulfilled. The story also indicates that the relatedness to the woman is absent at the time, or have been reduced to an insignificant level.
I thought it was very interesting reading the posts on both postsecret and onesentence. I experienced a range of emotions while reading through these. I felt sad, grateful, surprised, and some even made me laugh. I felt sad because of what these people experience and how oblivious some people are to it. But at the same time, I felt grateful for the life I have. It made me realize some people aren't as fortunate as me and I shouldn't take what I have for granted. The posts from postsecret were more serious than the ones from onesentence. I found more humor in posts from one sentence. The ones from postsecret were more appealing to look at because of the art that went along with the words. I think these websites are great things for people to share on because they are able to express themselves and know people are listening. It always feels good to be able to tell something to someone that you have bottled up deep inside. Its feels relieving, like a weight have been lifted. The two websites showed good examples of three psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness).
Autonomy as described in the book is the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior. It is basically the one's freedom of being able to choose what they want to do to make them feel better. A good example from onesentence was written by Grace. She said, "I was the only one who could swim and could've jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself." There was an absence of autonomy. She had the opportunity to do something to, but didn't. And now she lives with the regret of not making the decision to do something.
The book defines competence as the need to interact effectively with the environment. It reflects the desire to exercise one's capacity and skill. A good example from postsecret displaying competence (or the lack of) is where a guy says, "I can't tell my parents about my steroid abuse." At one point this person did not feel that he was competent or confident enough of either his strength or the way his body looked. Therefore, he started using steroids to feel good about either his self-image or his bodily strength.
According to the book, 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 in warm, caring relationships. I thought a good example showing this was from onesentence. It was written by neinlives, and she said, "The happiest moment of my life took place while I was crushed under my 2000lb car, knowing that my boyfriend was completely okay." This was very touching because although she was being crushed by a car, she didn't care as long as she knew her boyfriend was okay. She has a very caring relationship with her boyfriend to care more about him than herself, although she was in severe danger. Her relatedness is satisfied with her boyfriend because of the communal relationship with her boyfriend.
I first heard about PostSecret a couple of years ago in my Oral Comm class. The creator of the idea and website (Frank Warren) came to our class to speak to us and promote his book and website. I think it is a neat idea and outlet for anonymous people to speak out what they have been holding in. However, many of them are very tragic, emotional, and heartbreaking. It pains me to read some of the truths that people bury down deep inside of them, and will probably never reveal outside of an anonymous blog. It’s hard for me to read a tragic secret that someone is trying so desperately to hide and just scroll past it. I find myself wanting to comment on many of the secrets, wanting to urge the person to seek help, reveal their secret, or move on with their lives. I guess when people cannot bare to share a secret, this blog allows them to get as close to relatedness as possible. Maybe knowing that someone will read their secret gives them some distant form of belongingness or acknowledgement.
“Mom laughed and said, ‘I'm not going to let the doctor put you on ADHD meds just so you can see if it helps you draw better!’ ”
Although this sentence was meant for humor, it serves as a very real psychological need that we all have: competence. Everyone wants and strives to be good at something. This need extends to all areas of our lives: school, work, relationships, and hobbies such as arts, music, or sports. We all want to develop skills and hone our talents to be successful at things. When we work hard at improving our skills and in turn develop expertise at something, we feel satisfied and happy. This need creates motivation for us to seek out challenges. The person that wrote this sentence is seeking out the challenge of drawing so that it might satisfy their need for competence. The problem with optimal challenge is that we are just as likely to experience failure and frustration as success and enjoyment. No one wants to fail, and it is common for people to avoid a challenging task because of this dread of failure. This person is aware that failure may occur, and they are looking for ways to ensure that it won’t. They are willing to take prescribed medication just to see if it will enhance their skills and guarantee success, all for competence.
“Sometimes, learning that you're the other woman is just as emotionally wrecking as discovering that there is another woman.”
This secret is a prime example of our need for relatedness, or the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. We have a strong desire to be emotionally connected to and involved in warm relationships. Because we need relatedness, social bonds form easily. This can contribute to the reason of why people cheat on their significant other. In this secret, the man’s need for relatedness was not being satisfied by his relationship with his wife or girlfriend. Even though he probably knew and felt that it was wrong, he easily formed a social bond with another woman. If this new relationship satisfied his need for relatedness, he probably kept it going for as long as he could. Although this psychological need for relatedness does not justify his behavior, it does help to explain it. We all want others to understand us and be responsive to our needs. This is probably what the man was looking for (and he obviously found it) in his affair. Part of our need for relatedness is that we want our relationships to be reciprocal. Just as we want to form close, responsive, caring relationships, we also want the other person to want to form the same type of relationship with us. In other words, we want to be wanted. This helps explain the heartbreak that the wife or girlfriend experiences when she learns that there is another woman. When she finds out that her husband or boyfriend was seeking out relatedness elsewhere, she feels devastated that he could not find it in her.
Terms: competence, psychological need, relatedness, emotional bond, reciprocal interaction
I had never been to either one of these two sites, so I decided to take a look at both. As you said it would be, it was incredibly surprising to read some of the posts on both sites, even unsettling and sickening at times. Some I had to read more than once to make sure that I really read what I thought I read. Of the secrets and sentences that I read, I found some that were uplifting, but the majority that I saw were saddening and disheartening. Reading the true stories of these anonymous individuals made me put my life into perspective. Some of these individuals have little control over their life situation and have little opportunity or do not know how to change it.
In most of the stories, it seemed that the authors were often lacking the psychological need for fulfillment in at least one area. The three organismic psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The organismic theories support the idea that the relationship between a person and their environment is bidirectional, reciprocal. The examples I found were both from the website One Sentence. One story said, “As I cried in front of the cash register at CVS, a woman pitied me for having my college health insurance expire the day before and paid the $200 fee for my medication, saying "Christmas came early this year." Another story, that I found somewhat amusing, read “When I was little, I used to cut holes in my stuffed animal dogs under their tails, and then I'd stuff miniature beanie babies inside of them so they could "birth" puppies.
In the first story, I saw a lack of autonomy and competence, but a presence of relatedness. Autonomy is the psychological need that is fulfilled when an individual chooses and/or initiate his or her own behavior. The author of the first story has a very limited number of options and, with that, has little freedom in what he or she chooses to do. This person basically can either not get the medication, which I am assuming is essential to his or her health, or he or she will pay a large amount of money, money that they may not have, in order to purchase the needed medication. Their perceived locus of control (PLOC), the causal source of an individual’s motivated actions, is much more external (environment in control) than internal (self in control). The individual is not able to fulfill the psychological need of competence. According to the textbook, 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 mater optimal challenges.” In this example, the author is experiences a high degree of anxiety because they are being overchallenged, they are being asked to pay an amount of money that they may not have or that will essentially break the bank for them. They lack the resources (skills) to complete the task. They are possibly experiencing failure and they are having a difficult time coping with that failure. They are emotional and crying. Although the individual may not receive psychological need fulfillment in the previous two areas, they could experience relatedness. Relatedness is the psychological need that drives us to develop close emotional and warm relationships. This need is being satisfied through, most primarily, the individual’s social interaction with the store clerk. The clerk seems to care about the author’s wellbeing and also appears to possibly like the author. These two factors contribute to the perception of a social bond.
The second example is a little quirky and kind of funny. It shows a child’s imagination at work. In the example, I can see how the psychological needs of autonomy and competence are being satisfied. However, I do not think the psychological need of relatedness is being satisfied. The psychological need for autonomy is being fulfilled because the behavior was freely chosen and initiated by the author. He or she had no limitations in their imagination. The individual had true choice over his or her action and that choice was meaningful to him or her as a child. The psychological need for competence is also being fulfilled. To a child, helping his or her stuffed animal give birth proved to them that they were capable of the task in their imagination. By using their imagination, they may have provided more of a challenge for him/herself and they accomplished their goal. I don’t believe the psychological need of relatedness is being met because the story makes me assume that the child was engaging in the activity alone, with no social interaction. However, if they child had been playing with a friend who had been showing care and concern for the “doctor” as they delivered the stuffed puppies, then the psychological need of relatedness could have been met.
Terms: organismic psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived locus of control (PLOC), perception of social bond.
These sites ran a number of emotions through me. I laughed, like you said we would, but I almost felt the need to cry, even though I did not. Some of those posts are extremely sad. I was happy for some of the funny ones because it got really dark and real with a lot of them. Specifically when people talked about rape or murder, or how other people treated them when they were already down about life. To be completely honest it made me look at my life and realize that I have it really good. I guess I already knew this in comparison to the rest of the word, just living in the united states is a blessing, but people who are from here, they see things in their day to day lives that I will never see for one second of mine. Some of these posts are very serious subjects and it made me wonder if something is ever done about them? Do they get contacted after they post something about their close loved one raping them, or when someone writes a suicide note? But then again, it's secret...? Something seems wrong about it.
I picked out one secret post from "post secret" that made me laugh, but also stuck out to me as someone who really "knew what they wanted", or in other words, had high autonomy, a psychological need (a factor in motivational behavior that generates proactive energy that helps us seek out things that are good for ourselves, our psychological needs) that describes for us our need for the phrase, "what's in it for us?". How can we control what happens to us and make the most out of it? This post stated it loud and clear... "I didn't start liking you, until I heard you had a big penis, sorry.". When I first read it I laughed out loud. Then the obviousness that this was a person with very high autonomy came into mind. This person clearly knows what she (or he) wants! They are picking this said person souly on the question "what's in it for me". I believe this person has a perceived locus of causality (PLOC) which is a person's understanding of the "causal source of his or her motivated actions" (pg. 146). This person has high internal PLOC because they are only interested in what they will feel themselves from the person they are choosing. Choosing is another topic the book talks about. Choosing a mate, we have pretty flexible choosing rights, you could choose a women or a man... anyone you want, really. This is called perceived choice. The person uses this, obviously when choosing his or her mate. The opposite, however can be true for others. You can feel obligated to chose a mate based on certain aspects, like the person is making them date them, and so on.
Terms: Autonomy, perceived choice, perceived locus of causality, psychological needs
Starting off I obviously skimmed both websites, but an hour later I
was still scrolling through the One Sentence website, for some
personal reason I found this website very intriguing. Some of the
sentences made me grin some made me full-out laugh; while others
brought tears to my eyes and made me question where that particular
thought came from. With the heart gripping sentences it just made me
think, I’m not reading some funny sentence or quote on Facebook; I’m
reading a sentence that another human sat down and wrote with some
personal trouble going in in their life. Someone either used this
website as a means of personal therapy or perhaps as a way of reaching
out and seeking help. Along with the funny sentences, that made me
grin, and for some people that may have been their only goal in
writing their thought in the first place. But eventually after reading
happy to sad sentences I started question the fact that, just because
I read this sentence in a certain way, is that how the author intended
it to be interpreted. Is there more to this website then just feeling
human after reading a sad sentence, feeling a connection with someone
you have never physically seen or verbally spoken to. To me it helped
me realize that if I can sit here for an hour reading sentence after
sentence and feel a given emotion for each individual one, why can’t I
take the time throughout my day to have that same understanding and
openness to the people who I simply just pass by while walking to my
car after buying groceries.
Relatedness: “A decade later, the cruelty of 14-year-old girls is
still unmatched” Here all the information given is that the name
section was Heather, now if that’s a 14 year old girl, a 7 year old
girl, or perhaps a 70 year old grandma, I do not know. What I do know
is that in our society it is no shocker that teenage girls can be very
cruel to one another. Taken from the book, Relatedness means everyone
desires a social interaction; we all want friends, we all want to be
understood as individuals but to also be accepted and valued. As a
teenage girl you will do anything to be socially accepted by the girls
who seem to have it all, and most likely those girls will make your
life a living hell in order to get that acceptance. I thought of this
specific sentence in many ways, I could have taken it and showed how
it fit in with autonomy and even competence, but to me relatedness
brought a much bigger picture. Our teenage years are essentially when
you are the most lost and trying to find out who you want to be, and
where you think you belong. These views are set to change as you
mature, but what I understood from this, and granted I once was a 14
year old girl, but those can be some of the most challenging times of
a teenager’s life and you don’t realize it until many years later, the
longing and things an individual will do to have some sort of
acknowledgment within a group is outstanding.
http://www.onesentence.org/stories/month/2011-01/7
Autonomy:” A man was abusing his dog so I stole the dog, got arrested
and fought a legal battle, and now every night when the dog jumps in
bed with me I know it was worth it.” I chose this sentence because I
would totally do the same thing, but it just showed me that we can be
driven to engage in a behavior that legally isn’t seen as being a
positive decision, but in our personal opinion it is. According to the
text, autonomy is when our interests, preferences and wants guide our
decision making. Obviously some people may not think twice about this
sentence; however I found an interest in the fact that it was about a
dog, and that personal interest on this person’s part is what made
them decide to ignore the illegality of their actions and continue to
do them anyways because that’s what they saw as being right.
http://www.onesentence.org/stories/tag/abuse/
I have never been on either one of these sites before. I had heard of post secret before but wasn’t really sure what it was all about. This assignment took a lot longer than it should have because I couldn’t stop looking through all the post over and over thinking I might have skipped one or I might have interoperated one the wrong way. Both of the websites were interesting. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this assignment. The posts were shocking and amusing! I wish there was a way to go back and look at previous weeks posts. Maybe there was and I just didn’t know how to navigate through the website. Posting these secrets is a nice way to get the information off your shoulders but yet still be anonymous. People can also read these posts and relate to them, it makes them realize they are not alone. I feel like even though I don’t know the individuals that posted these items, a sentence can tell a lot about someone’s life. Each person has a different story that shapes the individual and makes them who they are. Many of the post made me stop and think because most had a deeper meaning than just glancing at it. I think I will start checking in on these websites on a regular basis!
“All the skills I acquired as a violent boy have made me a helpless man”
This quote demonstrates competence. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with others. I think this man’s past is getting in the way of his new life. He doesn’t know how to interact with others or may be others don’t want to interact with him because of the way he used to be. Another quote that deals with competence I found interesting was “I was the only one who could swim and could’ve jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself” This quote makes me think this person was the only one around or the only one that knew how to swim. Someone was in trouble or drowning and they just stood and watched it happen in fear and shock. Now this person has to live with that split second decision for the rest of their life. That has got to be tough. Everyone thinks they’ll know what to do when something bad is happening but in reality you don’t. It’s either instinct or panic that sets in. An example to go along with this, when I was little I accidently slammed the car door shut with my finger inside the door. You would have thought I would have opened the car door and removed my hand which was in extreme pain but I didn’t. I just stood there in shock.
“People stop me as a difficult child; nobody ever spots my mother having BPD”
This quote relates with autonomy. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement. This young person is doing the best they can I feel like. This person’s mother has some problems so they may be trying to raise themselves.
“The happiest moment of my life took place while I was crushed under my 2000lb car, knowing that my boyfriend was completely okay”
This event deals with relatedness. Relatedness is the need to belong. Everyone desires social interactions. We all want close and affectionate relationships. This girl was worried that something might have happened to her boyfriend. When she found out her boyfriend was okay it didn’t even seem like it mattered she was pinned under a car.
Another quote that caught my eye that relates to relatedness is “Today I washed my mother’s hair for the first time” This is where you kind of have to use your imagination or discretion. Either the mother has gotten to the age that she can no longer take care of herself anymore or she has been in some kind of accident where she needs care until she can recover. This relates to relatedness because this person has a long lasting loving relationship with their mother. People go out of their way to form and maintain relationships. This is a perfect example!
Key terms: need, psychological, social need, competence, autonomy, relatedness
I had never heard of this site and I found it to be very interesting. The general concept of making your own post card or posting a sentence online is and interesting concept. Everyone has secrets or things they want to get off their chest and this seems to be a good way to do it. However some of the posts were just inappropriate so I also wonder if some people are also trying to be funny as well. After reading these I realized how large of an impact or relief it must be for an individual to be able to express how they feel in this way. These posts may seem so simple but there are other things that may be going on, the post is just the beginning or basic idea. Overall these sites are a good way for people to basically relieve some stress by admitting or expressing and idea that has been bothering them.
Everyone wants to belong and be accepted by their peers, the idea of relatedness is strongly represented in these sites. Individuals are expressing concepts on their posts cards and sentences about basically wanting to fit in and not be the odd one out. They want to relate to their peers and by posting these post cards or sentences they are able to express this concept. “Your voice crossed the ocean on a telephone wire to ask if I was happy, and I was grateful you couldn't see the lie on my face when I told you that I was.” (onesentence.org) This individual seems to want to continue to relate to the person they are talking about, however in a different way than before. Relationships change and I’m sure there are several posts about complications in relationships. It seems to be difficult for this individual to want to tell the person they are talking about what is really going on because they want to relate to them without causing problems. It is apparent that the person who did not write the sentence wants to be with this individual. According to the book when a person feels emotionally distant from and interpersonally neglected by another, relatedness is considered low and internalization rarely occurs. Internalization is the process in which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed regulation or value into an internally endorsed one. The individual who posted the post card wants to be able to relate yet it appears their relatedness is low and so is their internalization to the other individual.
I think just like relatedness we all want to strive to be competent. We basically want to interact effectively with our surrounding. We want to develop and improve skills, once this occurs we feel satisfied, thus we have a need for competence. “All the skills I acquired as a violent boy have made me a helpless man.” (oncesentence.org) This post is very interesting because this individual doesn’t appear based on this post to be very competent. It doesn’t sound like they are able to interact with their environment very effectively. They seem to have mastered skills that are not acceptable. Structure is the amount of clarity of information about what the environment expects the person to do to achieve desired outcomes. Some people provide structure to involve the psychological need for competence and in doing this they provide information about the pathways to desired outcomes and support for pursuing these pathways. It is possible that the individual in the post was not give structure and support for what was considered desired out comes as a boy, thus causing him to struggle as an adult. Also this individual may not have been entirely engaged in doing what he need as a boy to learn, he basically didn’t use any structure that was provided. Engagement is the intensity and emotional quality people show when they initiate and carry out activities.
These posts were very interesting to read and look at; it is intriguing to recognize that people feel comfortable to post these things. All of these posts have a story to them and we only see the general idea, this makes me wonder what is really going on in some of these individuals’ lives. Overall this site was entertaining and it seems to be a good way for people to express how they feel without being judged or ridiculed.
Terms: Relatedness, Internalization, Competence, Structure, Engagement, Need.
While I was reading PostSecret and OneSentence, I started thinking about a word I learned a couple days ago: sonder. Sonder means “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own...” Sometimes I get so busy that I get caught up in my own head and forget that people around me are also struggling and fighting and working as hard as they can to just survive sometimes. While I was reading these posts I realized that people post these intimate secrets and harrowing stories to satisfy two psychological needs, autonomy and relatedness. Psychological needs motivate us to seek out and engage our environment in ways that satisfy autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the psychological need for control over one's own actions, relatedness is the psychological need to form close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment.
“The summer that three of my friends committed suicide, my sister conviced me that the voices in my head were them telling their true stories of being murdered.”
Nothing takes away someone's autonomy like a mental illness. When a severe mental illness sets in, the affected individual loses the ability to behave, feel, or even think in the ways they want to. The person's perceived locus of causality, or what motivated the individual to perform an action, shifts from internal to external, since they may suddenly feel loss of control of their actions. In fact, when a person with a mental illness enters treatment, their locus of causality may shift even farther externally, because they are going to be surrounded by doctors and concerned friends and family that want to help them by making them take medications or attend treatment sessions against their will. I believe that many people post these secrets online anonymously because it gives them some sense of control over their situation because they can control whether others know about their private lives.
“After reading every one sentence on here, I have finally found someone else who has fibromyalgia.”
Realtedness is the whole reason websites like this exist. People want to be emotionally connected with each other, especially when it comes to strong emotions associated with the stories people post on OneSentence and PostSecret. In this example, this person wanted to find someone else who was going through the extreme pain that the disease causes, and they did. Although these sites do not offer a warm, emotionally close relationship, posting something personal and having others validate it lets the person know that they are not alone in their struggles, and sometimes that is all you need when you're feeling alone and worthless.
Key Terms: Psychological Needs, Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Perceived Locus of Causality
I have never heard of these sites before this assignment but after browsing them I can see how they would be addicting. It reminded me of an anonymous Twitter which is a pretty cool concept. I went into the archives and navigated awhile around onesentence.org which I thought was very interesting. I clicked on some of the tags and there were some wild stories told with just one sentence. I was reading the posts in a room with a group of people watching the Packers game last night. I read many of them out loud and the whole room seemed to be pretty entertained by the one sentence anecdotes found on the website. I also was entertained by these stories and they were actually very thought-provoking. I was able to relate a few of them to my own life and they allowed me to see some of my life events from a different perspective. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of browsing these sites.
I found it interesting because the first post on postsecret.com was “Sometimes being an interracial person who only looks white is really embarrassing and lonely.” I found this intriguing because I, too, am an interracial person who appears to only be white. I differ greatly with this person because I never have felt lonely or embarrassed about my race situation. If anything, I am proud, but honestly it never really crosses my mind unless someone asks. I don’t think race is very significant and I rarely consciously group myself or anyone else in with any specific racial group. This post made me wonder why I hadn’t ever felt the way this person felt. I really couldn’t come up with a good answer without knowing more about the anonymous poster’s life. I feel like this post examines the need for relatedness in one’s life. The poster probably feels lonely because he or she does not fully belong to any racial group. The person also most likely lives in a community where race is important. He or she would not feel unrelated if race was not a relevant mechanism for grouping. The poster does not feel like he or she can make an attachment with other people because there are few people who represent this demographic. Making attachments with other people is a very important aspect of relatedness which is a psychological need.
A sentence I found on onesentence.org really caught my eye. This sentence was posted by an person who called herself, “The Amazing Invisible Woman!” Her post read: “I am so terrified of being irrelevant that I've spent hours looking through the 'unapproved' sentences, hoping to approve my own, and see it on the site.” The tags included fear, irrelevance, and ignored. She most likely does not feel competent in her real life. Lacking the psychological need of competence can make a person feel incomplete and unable to complete tasks. Her name, however, suggests that she considers herself competent but no one else notices it. If no one acknowledges one’s competence, this person can feel their competence need insufficiently met. The woman wanted to find her own sentence because she wanted to make sure her competence could reach the masses, unlike her real life. This also meets a need for relatedness and the ability to form relationships with people. Evaluations of others is an important portion of competence and, by clicking yes, I guess I approved her competence.
I’ve been a big fan of PostSecret for quite a while and I check on the new Sunday secrets every week, usually right away on Sunday. Some of them make me laugh while others make me cringe. There are plenty of secrets you can imagine belong to people you care about and many can make me cry. I have several of the books that Frank Warren (the creator of PostSecret) has published with these secrets and went to see his presentation when he was at UNI. They are very thought provoking and emotional especially when in the large audience setting, you see people being affected by the secrets he was showing and discussing. People got up after and shared their own secrets at a microphone and that was huge step for some of them. Some had friends there to hold their hands while others were utterly alone. There is one secret from this week that caught my eye, the one with a picture of Marilyn Monroe and the words, “My mother had an affair with my high school principal”. This shows a lack of, and possibly then the existence of, relatedness. This mother was obviously not feeling high in her relatedness in her relationship with her husband and her family. Relatedness would be the psychological need for close emotional relationships, essentially the need to belong. The relationships that people have do not always satisfy this need for close emotional bonds. Relationships can exist as exchange instead of communal. Exchange relationships do not satisfy the need for relatedness because they are not caring between people and do not worry about each other. Communal relationships are the ones that are intimate and caring and thus satisfy the need for relatedness. Even in what might be considered very close relationships, they can be exchange. For the mother in this secret, she obviously did not perceive her family as caring about her and was feeling lonely in many ways. She made a decision to be unfaithful perhaps because of a lack of internalization. Internalization is the personal acceptance of values based upon having close relationships that offer values that may not have been internalized before. A value may be internalized when relatedness is satisfied by close communal relationships that explain the value of the belief to be internalized. When this did not exist for the mother, she had no internalization of why one shouldn’t cheat. She did not perceive the damage to her family because she believed that they did not care about her anymore.
Terms: relatedness, exchange relationships, communal relationships, internalization
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O1j3s0FIdj4/UFHumhmVX1I/AAAAAAAAVDM/fmm2cD2k7-Y/s1600/mostpopularfacesonsecretsmonroelvisandjesus.jpg
I have never been on either one of these sites before. I had heard of post secret before but wasn’t really sure what it was all about. This assignment took a lot longer than it should have because I couldn’t stop looking through all the post over and over thinking I might have skipped one or I might have interoperated one the wrong way. Both of the websites were interesting. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this assignment. The posts were shocking and amusing! I wish there was a way to go back and look at previous weeks posts. Maybe there was and I just didn’t know how to navigate through the website. Posting these secrets is a nice way to get the information off your shoulders but yet still be anonymous. People can also read these posts and relate to them, it makes them realize they are not alone. I feel like even though I don’t know the individuals that posted these items, a sentence can tell a lot about someone’s life. Each person has a different story that shapes the individual and makes them who they are. Many of the post made me stop and think because most had a deeper meaning than just glancing at it. I think I will start checking in on these websites on a regular basis!
“All the skills I acquired as a violent boy have made me a helpless man”
This quote demonstrates competence. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with others. I think this man’s past is getting in the way of his new life. He doesn’t know how to interact with others or may be others don’t want to interact with him because of the way he used to be. Another quote that deals with competence I found interesting was “I was the only one who could swim and could’ve jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself” This quote makes me think this person was the only one around or the only one that knew how to swim. Someone was in trouble or drowning and they just stood and watched it happen in fear and shock. Now this person has to live with that split second decision for the rest of their life. That has got to be tough. Everyone thinks they’ll know what to do when something bad is happening but in reality you don’t. It’s either instinct or panic that sets in. An example to go along with this, when I was little I accidently slammed the car door shut with my finger inside the door. You would have thought I would have opened the car door and removed my hand which was in extreme pain but I didn’t. I just stood there in shock.
“People stop me as a difficult child; nobody ever spots my mother having BPD”
This quote relates with autonomy. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement. This young person is doing the best they can I feel like. This person’s mother has some problems so they may be trying to raise themselves.
“The happiest moment of my life took place while I was crushed under my 2000lb car, knowing that my boyfriend was completely okay”
This event deals with relatedness. Relatedness is the need to belong. Everyone desires social interactions. We all want close and affectionate relationships. This girl was worried that something might have happened to her boyfriend. When she found out her boyfriend was okay it didn’t even seem like it mattered she was pinned under a car.
Another quote that caught my eye that relates to relatedness is “Today I washed my mother’s hair for the first time” This is where you kind of have to use your imagination or discretion. Either the mother has gotten to the age that she can no longer take care of herself anymore or she has been in some kind of accident where she needs care until she can recover. This relates to relatedness because this person has a long lasting loving relationship with their mother. People go out of their way to form and maintain relationships. This is a perfect example!
Key terms: need, psychological, social need, competence, autonomy, relatedness
These do become very addicting. Once you start to read one you have to read them all. Its seems funny to me that I elicit this behavior and continue to look at different pages considering I don’t know who writes them, it shouldn’t matter to me. Some of “secrets” are inspiring, others are surprising, and a majority are sad. I like that there are sites such as these out there because it gives a release to allow people to say what they want about themselves without being judged. The motives they have for doing this probably vary in the fact that some might post just so they can say they have posted on the site before while others have to tell someone something about themselves without the person finding out who they are. It puts them at ease knowing it’s off their chest since they said something about it. There is a lot of intrinsic motivation going on however. None of the people who post comments get money or rewards for it. They do it because it satisfies a need they have.
One example I have is from “postsecret”, it reads “I didn’t wear panties to your funeral”. In this quote the autonomous need is fulfilled. This person was free do write this and post it. This post I feel also reflects the need of relatedness. Once the individual elicited the behavior to post this comment they may have felt close to the person they are talking to. They might even feel like the person is reading the comment. I do not feel like competence was a need that was established considering there was no indication in the post that shows any sign of exercising one's capacities and skills.
Another post I saw that related to the same 2 needs, relatedness and autonomy was the one that said “Took me 17 years to realize things fall. Its gravity. And it’s okay.” Autonomy was a need that was satisfied for this post considering this individual was free to post in when he wanted and put what he wanted to say in the post. He/she wasn’t governed by any rules and allowed to act on their own. Relatedness is captured because the individual may feel that others feel the same way he/she does. Everyone makes mistakes and takes falls in their lives and by someone posting this it’s a way to interact with everyone and tell them it’s OK. I believe in a way it relates to competence as well. It is a way of saying don’t let anything hold you back, seek the optimal challenges and don’t worry if you fail at first.
The comments posted on this website seem to be desirable for people. The desire to voice ones secrets without getting ridiculed or shunned is a powerful thing. You can say what you want when you want and how you want (autonomy) without backlash. People can simply view them until they become satiated.
Terms: reward, autonomy, competence, behavior, motivation, relatedness, desirable, satiated, need
I can honestly say after reading these posts that I could not stop laughing. It was very interesting to see some of the comments people had posted. Many of them were funny, sometimes even embarrassing stories that you would not generally say to someone. There are many terms from our chapter that relate to some of these posts. First I began to wonder why people were posting their secrets on here. The people who post on these websites are displaying autonomy. They have the choice of posting on here or not, and they have high volition. This is because they are not being pressured to take part in posting things about their lives. In a way I think this website serves as an autonomy supportive motivating style. When people read other’s posts, they will feel less embarrassed or guilty when posting their own information. Even though autonomy is not supported in direct contact, it is still supporting it through the website and others participation.
When I read these comments, most of the time I laughed hysterically. They were funny because you don’t hear people say stuff like that on a day to day basis. I would compare these two websites to reading a script of a stand-up comedy show. When I read some of the comments, I thought of how their situation relates to motivation. After reading chapter five, it is easier to follow along and realize the types of psychological needs being portrayed in the posts. I also felt that I could have signed in and posted some comments on the website. After seeing other people freely post their own secrets, I don’t think it would be so bad to post some of my comments as well.
The first example I have of psychological needs is from “postsecret.” The post read “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid use.” The first thing that came to mind was this person’s choice to take steroids, therefore displaying autonomy. Taking steroids may be a result from a controlling motivating style. I’m guessing that this person is an athlete. Maybe their coach, or peers, put a substantial amount of pressure on this kid to perform at a high level. Driven by this motivation to achieve this, the person ends up shooting up with steroids. The goal of wanting to achieve these goals serves as an extrinsic motivater.
The rest of these examples come from “onesentence.”One of the posts read “All of life’s worries seem meaningless when your child is in danger.” After reading this article, I began to feel sympathy for anyone who has to endure this pain. This is an example of a communal relationship. There may not be any closer example of relatedness than a parent child relationship. Parents are the ones who nurture their children, help them grow, learn, and provide a supportive environment. Children, on the other hand, look up to their parents, and always come to them if they are in need. Together, both parent and child show a high level of engagement with each other.
I read another comment that read “After having an epic snowboarding fall with an ankle break and many contusions, I can now beat most speed boarders down any slope.” I had to think about what exactly was meant by this post. To me, I meant that now that the snowboarder experiences one of the worst case scenarios in that activity, he wasn’t afraid to speed down a hill at breathtaking speeds. It sounded like snowboarding gave this person competence, and gave him a sense of flow. They probably do this for a sport, giving them flow while racing down a slope. With any sport, there also comes great optimal challenges. It was apparent to me this person had a high failure tolerance, because after failing and severely injuring himself, he was still able to get back on the board, instead of avoiding this activity.
Terms: competence, flow, optimal challenge, failure tolerance, autonomy, autonomy supportive motivating style, volition, positive feedback, relatedness, communal relationship, engagement, extrinsic motivation.
I had heard of PostSecret prior to this assignment, but had never actually gone exploring on the site. One Sentence is one that I have never heard of. I was very intrigued by the PostSecret posts. Some of the posts are unbelievably powerful, which is crazy to me considering most of them are only one or two sentences. Some of them really made me pause to take it in and try to understand. Some of them I felt I couldn't relate to. And some of them were just to honest that I was shocked. These statements made me realize that even the little things can stick with someone. No one has had a perfect life; we all have secrets that we keep because society determines what is and isn't acceptable. I think that many of these secrets were sent in because these people started to feel that their secret was starting to get in their way, and they just needed to get it out there for the world to see in order to move on. I have never believed that keeping something hurtful or emotional bottled up is the solution, which is why I fully support this site. My immediate thoughts while reading these were not to relate these quotes back to this class, but after reading through them a couple times, I realized that the Secret, "I dated a girl just to increase my chances of getting a raise at my part-time job...and I'm GAY!" truly does relate to psychological needs discussed in Chapter 6, as well as, "He said laughing, 'it isn't rape if we are married'... I believed him."
The first secret relates to the psychological need, competence. Competence is the need to interact effectively with the environment. The need for competence generates the motivation to want to develop, improve upon, and refine personal skills and talents. In this secret, this guy's competence shows because he was obviously competing for this raise against other people, and was willing to take extreme measures in order to get the raise. Positive feedback and perception of progress are what satisfies the need for competence, and I would assume that if he was successful in acquiring the raise because he dated the girl, his competence was satisfied. I can't help but wonder what his feelings are about it today, however. I would assume that he and the girl broke up, but is he still working that job? Does he feel too guilty? Or is he doing what the book says and now trying to seek out and master optimal challenges?
The second Secret that I mentioned has a lot to do with the psychological need of 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 this secret, the woman is referring to her need for relatedness. Her husband must have made her feel obligated to have sex with him, even when she did not want to. She would have given in based on her need to feel an emotional bond with her husband, and not upset him. In order to satisfy this need, she felt forced into giving in and giving him what he wanted. This in turn, would have resulted, short-term, in a close feeling of relatedness to her husband, but long-term, she would eventually realize that he was taking advantage of her and would be emotionally hurt; hence, the Secret. It is awful that people are able to use psychological needs against others. So many times, by giving into psychological needs like these examples, too many people end up hurt. Psychological needs often do result in a positive outcome as well, however. They lead people to become better and achieve more. So much motivation is derived from psychological needs, and these three needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) are very important to understand.
Terms: Psychological needs, competence, positive feedback, motivation, relatedness, autonomy
First of all, I love Post Secret. I own one of the books and reading some of these comments makes me extremely emotional. The postsecret.com website did not provide a lot of posts so I Googled their archive and found several more. I also took a look at onesentence.com and I thought these were pretty emotional as well; however several people did not keep it to one sentence. One of my favorite post secret cards was that one that said “I fell in love with my husband in our 10th year of marriage”. This particular post brought tears to my eyes but oddly made me feel kind of empty inside. You wouldn’t think someone would get married without being in love first. And it also makes you wonder if everyone could work through their marriage issues if they just gave it time. I thought that this post related to the psychological need of competence. This woman had the desire to interact effectively with her husband. She stuck it out and waited because she wanted the marriage to work. It was that important to her that she waited for ten years to feel what she wanted to feel with this person. Another post that stood out to me was from a mother that said “I took two Percaset today as a gift to myself on my birthday. They do not make me miss you less, my sweet baby boy. Love, Mom.” I could feel my through tightening and just tried imagining the pain of losing a child and I can’t. I cannot even fathom what kind of pain that would be. I felt that this post could also related to competence. This mother misses her child so much but will do anything to keep moving on with her life day after day. She wanted to especially not miss her child on an important day like her birthday so she took two Percaset to get through it. The third post I found interesting was “Sometimes being an interracial person who only looks white is really embarrassing”. I think that this post could fill the psychological need of relatedness. It is so important for us, in our society, to feel the need to belong to a group, whether it is family, friends, or the community. I feel like this person probably feels like an outsider because they cannot figure out what “group” they would belong to, and maybe feels like they wouldn’t be accepted from either group they really are part of.
Honestly I thought that the onesentence website was full of a lot of bullshit, in the midst of a few honest opinions, as people are so narcissistic they think we care. Of course we care as we read them and read them and repost and get lost in this endless parade of singular thought, raging an unheard competition to be better than the post before. I’m sick, and I am not thinking straight but the guilt and the sorrow and the pain; these realistic moments put out there for us to grasp onto seems to unreal to be true. We all want to know what people think of our lives, and we all want people to approve of it, but there just isn’t the time to examine each and every individual, as I myself am just as narcissistic?
My faith in humanity was restored when in the midst of a violent and graphic abortion protest, I saw a man in a baseball jersey with a sign that said "Go Mets."
When deciding what to do we desire choice. We want to be the person who decides our actions and how we spend our time. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. Behavior is autonomous when our interests, preferences, and wants guide our decision-making process to engage or not to engage in a particular behavior or activity. For this particular example, I see perceived choice. Perceived choice refers to the sense of choice we experience when we find ourselves in environments that provide us with decision-making flexibility hat affords us many opportunities.
External events, environments, social contexts, and relationships all vary in how much they support someone’s need for autonomy. Some environments involve and nurture our need for autonomy, while others neglect and frustrate our need for autonomy.
My deep resentment towards your family began when you were diagnosed during my FIRST semester of nursing school, because they expected me to be an oncology expert, and when I didn't have an answer they told me I was going to be a horrible nurse.
Everyone wants to be competent. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capabilities and skills. The need for competence generates the willingness to seek out optimal challenges. When we engage in a task with a certain level of difficulty and complexity that is right for our skills and talents, we feel strong interests.
The problem with optimal challenge and highly structured environments, like the example above, is that when people face moderately difficult and skill-testing tasks, they are likely to experience a sense of failure and frustration. This means that dreading failure can motivate avoidance behaviors so people will go out of their way to escape from being challenged. Before people will freely engage in optimally challenging tasks, the social context must tolerate failure and error making. Optimal challenge implies that considerable error making is essential for optimizing motivation. This is known as failure tolerance.
Terms: autonomy, perceived choice, competence, failure tolerance
Everyone has a need to belong. I think one of the biggest aspects of this website is to do simply do that. These websites allow people to go on and write what they feel. Everyone can read these entries; I believe these website have advantages for the authors of the post and the readers. The authors can get there true feeling off their chest, it helps them say what they wish they could say in person. For the readers, they can relate and feel like someone understands them. So with the chapter, I believe that the psychological need relatedness plays a huge part in these websites. The websites give a feeling to the readers that there is someone in this world who feels, or is experiencing the same things you are. For example when I read this post, “I’ll never regret anything more than the chances I didn’t take with you,” I felt like this is the exact words to what I have been feeling since I move up here to Iowa. This post reminded me of my ex-boyfriend. Lately I’ve been asking myself whether or not I should have left the way I did. Maybe it could have worked out between us if I tried one last time instead of giving up. Maybe we would at least be friends right now. I think most of these posts were mostly about regretting a choice they made. I think looking back and regretting it, did not satisfy their autonomy needs, because they are now doubtful of the choices they made or didn’t make, and it seems that they are going to second guess their choices for now on. When reading though the website, I didn’t see much for competence. I figure that this is something the writers lacked. I didn’t read about anyone challenging themselves, in fact I felt like a lot of the posts were sad. Reading these posts made me feel a little depressed, although I did laugh at some, I could recall them because of other sad post.
Key Terms: Need to belong, Autonomy, Psychological Needs, Competence, Relatedness
Everyone has secrets. Sometimes they are little ones, sometimes they are life changing. The problem is thee have no one to tell them to. I have never personally been on either of the two cites before. I have many friends who are addicted to it. After looking at the two cites I am intrigued. I keep thinking is this fro real or do these people just want attention. The other part of me says does that even matter. Even if it is a lie these people are still reaching out for help and need someone to talk to.
The need for belonging is everywhere in the posts. People need people to talk to and include them. This is called relatedness. People want to have a social interaction with those around them. The book says “we want others to understand for who we are as individuals.” This also means that we want to be around people who really do care for us. These people who post on post secret either do not have anyone like this in their lives or they are not comfortable telling a friend all their secrets.
Post Secret and One sentence help fulfill the need of autonomy also. A person wants to do things when they want to on their own term. With Post Secret and One Sentence a person decides if and when they want to tell their secret to another person. On this cites a person can finally say what they want without judgment and without anyone knowing who posted it. They finally get to let their story out so other s can see but yet no one knows it was them. Yet just telling a secret can be enough.
There were all types of emotions as I read these posts. Some were really sad others were ones that made me laugh. People have all types of secrets they want to share. I am very torn about which cite I liked better. The pictures on Post Secret made it some much more real, yet it felt a little too much. I like the simplicity of One sentence. It’s just words in black and white, so big show just the truth or what a person wanted to say.
There was one main one that I started to look at and found interesting. It read, “Five years and five phones later, I still add your number every time.” People hang onto others. Once we find a relationship were are comfortable in we do not want to give it up and forget it. Once we break up with someone or lose some one to death we want that interaction back. We want that person around to talk to. We have created a social bond with them. Social bond is when two people care about each other and like each other for who they are. Even after someone is gone we still want something to hold on to. It would make sense that this girl keeps moving this phone number form phone to phone. She may never use it but it gives comfort. It still has a tie to that person. I know I have had a few friends pass away, yet I still keep them as friends on Facebook just because it is comforting to be able to go and look at the picture.
These sites are very interesting. I just wish there was ways that psychologists could be able to find out who posted what so they could get the person some real help. Yet that would defeat the purpose of people being about to post a secret without anyone finding out who said it. People are struggling so much and I know everyone cannot be saved. I think they something could be done using these sites. If there were like chat rooms for people to talk to each other in or to something who could really help. I do think it is great that there is a safe place like Post Secret and One sentence where people can open up and say what they need to, to help them heal. This is a great autonomy support groups where people can read what others are going through and know that they are not alone with their problems. Autonomy support is when a person takes another person point of view. As I said I just wish there was someone these people could actually talk to.
Words: Belonging, relatedness, Autonomy, Autonomy support, relationships, social bond
Before this assignment I hadn’t heard of either of these websites. They are interesting and seem to really help people express their issues. I’m not one to snoop into the personal lives of others, but I did find myself reading post after post. I liked PostSecret better than One Sentence because PostSecret was much more revealing in terms of sharing personal issues and secrets. However, I must admit I almost felt almost guilty reading other peoples secrets – regardless of the fact that they posted it willingly and that I have no idea who they are. Some of the posts were less dramatic and rather humorous; I can see how some people windup spending hours on these sites.
One of the comments I read on PostSecret that I think represented internalization was “He said laughing: “It isn’t rape if we’re married” and I believed him”. I think this post represents internalization because when a person feels emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved with another, he or she believes the other person is truly looking out for his or her welfare, relatedness is high, and internalization occurs willingly. In this persons case they feel the need to maintain their relationship with their husband, even while being degraded. In my opinion, she must “have believed him” because she wanted to believe that he wanted what was best for and that he would never harm her. For instance, she must have been satisfied with the relationship enough that she was willing to disregard what he said and keep the relationship going.
Another post I read from One Sentence that I thought lacked competence was “Every time I look at our baby boy, I’m reminded of how much I don’t want to do this”. This story represents a lack of competence because the individual who wrote it isn’t willing to face the challenges of having a kid and is seemingly overwhelmed. When the need for competence isn’t being satisfied it becomes frustrated, which can lead to emotional problems. If challenges are high and the skill level is low then the individual is over-challenged, which threatens competence. In this case having a baby boy to take care of is over-challenging for the individual because their skill level is too low, which in turn leads to the lack of competence.
All in all, a lot of the secrets and issues found on these two sites can be applied to psychological needs. I think the reason a lot of them post to the site is because they have a need to tell someone about their experiences. Even though the websites aren’t actual people they still act as a support system for some of these people and they can utilize it as an outlet. This keeps people from bottling up their feelings and emotions, which is why I think sites like this are as popular as they are.
Terms: psychological needs, competence, internalization, relatedness, over-challenged, relationships, bonding
My experience reading these was very interesting. I enjoyed reading them, and thought about how profound one sentence really can be when taken out of context. I used OneSentence, and some of them made me feel really sad, while others made me laugh. I looked at the PostSecret website, and didn’t really like it. It was hard to navigate and you couldn’t see any of the older posts, which I didn’t like. I feel like these kind of websites (Personally, I love DearOldLove) help people to better relate to themselves and to others who may be going through the same thing. When I read a particularly interesting one, I stop and think about how life is so confusing and interesting, and how my relatively normal day could have been one filled with remorse, death, or something hilarious like the people who post their sentences.
“Sometimes, learning that you’re the other woman is just as emotionally wrecking as discovering that there is another woman”. This is a post that was on OneSentence, and I think that this represents competence, because according to the textbook, “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,” (p.155). Because she found out that she was the other woman, therefore that her significant other was actually with someone else, she was no longer able to grow in the relationship and continue things on the kind of level that we all hope relationships that we are happy in to eventually go to. She cannot be competent in a relationship in which there is someone else. Her interactions with the significant other, and therefore her environment is no longer effective.
“I was the only one who could swim and could've jumped in to save him in time, but I just stood there in shock and will now never forgive myself.” This was honestly one of the most powerful and intriguing posts I read. I could visualize a group of people watching someone being swept down the river, and this person standing there in shock, while everyone else ran around, helpless to save him. I think this also defines the lack of competence that I talked about above. This person could have acted when the boy was swept away, but instead, panic set in and all they could do is watch the boy drown. Because this person couldn’t move to save him, they now feel as if they can never forgive themselves, which is part of what chapter six talks about if you experience failure intolerance and by following the flow model.
Terms: Comepetence, failure intolerance, flow model
First off I have never visited or even heard of these sites before this assignment was given out to us. The OneSentence site made me interested in reading how people could tell a small story in one sentence of what has happened to them. While the PostSecret site had the same feeling, but there were background photos to help me imagine particular situations that had happened to them, so I had a more visual perspective as I read the comments. I can see why people would willingly put their stories out there in a few sentences or less, one because it’s anonymous, so nobody knows you just posted that post. Secondly, if you don’t have someone close to talk with like a family member or personal friend or if it’s too deep that you don’t want anybody close to you to know about, you can easily write it on one of these two sites and nobody would give you backlash for it. Overall, I feel these sites are a good source for people to go on and let loose some of their pent up stress by either posting a comment or just simply reading posts made by others out there that are on the same boat.
“I got more action playing spin the bottle on the beach, kissing both boys and girls, in one night than I did with my girlfriend in over a year.” I read this on OneSentence and it deals with the need of relatedness. You can tell that clearly this poor person hasn’t been getting much action from their significant other, physically and most likely emotionally as well. In chapter 6 it mentions how for a satisfying social bond, the person needs to believe that they are cared for by the other person on the fact that they like them and on their welfare. We can pull from this sentence that the relationship between these two people is more of an exchanged relationship where acquaintances exist at. We can definitely rule out that it’s a communal relationship where the partners actually care about each other and their needs or what they’ve been up to. From this sentence you can see that one of the partners is straying away and if both partners don’t start caring more about each other, my guess is they won’t be lasting too much longer!
“I didn’t wear panties to your funeral.” This quote from the PostSecret website stood out to me a little more than some of the other ones. Here we see the psychological need of autonomy coming to light. Basically autonomy is being in control of your decisions and how you go about them. We make decisions on a daily basis whether to wear underwear throughout the day or not, and some of us even go as far as deciding whether to sleep with underwear on or not as well. I know a few people who go commando from time to time, and that is their own choice. But here we know that this person decided to choose the opposite and didn’t wear their underwear to that funeral. I would say intrinsic motivation came into play with this no under-wearing story, however we cannot guess or even begin to say whether or not this person was rewarded externally just from this one sentence.
Terms: relatedness, exchanged relationship, communal relationship, autonomy, intrinsic motivation
PostSecret is one of those things that I go thru phases of extreme obsession separated by periods of time where I completely forget it exists. I will spend hours just looking at everything for days and days (much like Facebook). When finally my interest slowly starts to peeter out, I usually forget all about it until someone brings it up and then (much like a best friend you haven’t seen in a long time) I go right back to it like I hadn’t missed any time. The ability to get glimpse in to someone’s life or thoughts, is touching, moving and inspiring. By having it anonymous and only the smallest of glimpses, the person reading doesn’t get a chance to make any sort of pre-judgments about the person posting. This makes it so that much of the posts are highly relatable to the readers and creates a chance for the reader to feel a strong empathetic response. One of my favorites was “I made a popular ‘it gets better video’ and now my life is crashing down around me. I wish the nearly 1000 people that watched my video could see what a fraud I am. It never gets better” – I knew nothing about this individual but I felt for them. The post itself wasn’t what made it my favorite but an email that was posted with it: “Maybe "better" appears at first in a way you can't understand. Or maybe you feel like it takes more time for you than someone else. But better is there, in front of you, even in the smallest of ways” … it tugged at my heart strings, I understood where this person was coming from and also hoped that the poster saw the email posted with it and was able to find some comfort in it. I think what makes it good is that you just never know anything pre-post and you don’t know if it got better for that individual post-post (haha). What makes this so good is the autonomy-supportive motivating style. It’s the person’s willingness to take the other’s perspective and to value personal growth opportunities during an activity, something that is able to be achieved because of the anonymous and unknown history of every poster. “People spot me as a difficult child, nobody spots my mother having BPD”. It makes you wonder how many children you see as ‘problem child’ are the direct result of issues the parents are dealing with. Organismic psychological need – “I can’t tell my parents about my steroid abuse” This could be a stretch, however, the environment provides the steroids and the need to have maturation thru exercise. The steroids become a problem but promotes the sort of body type that individual is after and thru oraganismic psychology promotes the sort of motivation and behavior that the individual becomes stuck doing.
TERMS: autonomy-supportive motivating style, Person environment, Organismic psychological need