Need for achievement is a person's desire for significant accomplishment, mastery of skills, control, or high standards. The term was first used by Henry Murray to describe a range of actions that include: "intense, prolonged and repeated efforts to accomplish something difficult[, t]o work with singleness of purpose towards a high and distant goal[, and t]o have the determination to win".
In philosophy, an action is an event that an agent performs for a purpose, that is, guided by the person's intention. The first question in the philosophy of action is to determine how actions differ from other forms of behavior, like involuntary reflexes. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, it involves discovering "[w]hat is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm". There is broad agreement that the answer to this question has to do with the agent's intentions. So driving a car is an action since the agent intends to do so, but sneezing is a mere behavior since it happens independent of the agent's intention. The dominant theory of the relation between the intention and the behavior is causalism: driving the car is an action because it is caused by the agent's intention to do so. On this view, actions are distinguished from other events by their causal history. Causalist theories include Donald Davidson's account, which defines actions as bodily movements caused by intentions in the right way, and volitionalist theories, according to which volitions form a core aspect of actions. Non-causalist theories, on the other hand, often see intentions not as the action's cause but as a constituent of it.
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. It is independent of the moral dimension, which is called moral agency.
The psychology of learning refers to theories and research on how individuals learn. There are many theories of learning. Some take on a more behaviorist approach which focuses on inputs and reinforcements. Other approaches, such as neuroscience and social cognition, focus more on how the brain's organization and structure influence learning. Some psychological approaches, such as social constructivism, focus more on one's interaction with the environment and with others. Other theories, such as those related to motivation, like the growth mindset, focus more on individuals' perceptions of ability.
Behavior change, in context of public health, refers to efforts put in place to change people's personal habits and attitudes, to prevent disease. Behavior change in public health can take place at several levels and is known as social and behavior change (SBC). More and more, efforts focus on prevention of disease to save healthcare care costs. This is particularly important in low and middle income countries, where supply side health interventions have come under increased scrutiny because of the cost.
In neurology, the Bereitschaftspotential or BP, also called the pre-motor potential or readiness potential (RP), is a measure of activity in the motor cortex and supplementary motor area of the brain leading up to voluntary muscle movement. The BP is a manifestation of cortical contribution to the pre-motor planning of volitional movement. It was first recorded and reported in 1964 by Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke at the University of Freiburg in Germany. In 1965 the full publication appeared after many control experiments.
Employability refers to the attributes of a person that make that person able to gain and maintain employment.
Self-regulated learning (SRL) is one of the domains of self-regulation, and is aligned most closely with educational aims. Broadly speaking, it refers to learning that is guided by metacognition, strategic action, and motivation to learn. A self-regulated learner "monitors, directs, and regulates actions toward goals of information acquisition, expanding expertise, and self-improvement”. In particular, self-regulated learners are cognizant of their academic strengths and weaknesses, and they have a repertoire of strategies they appropriately apply to tackle the day-to-day challenges of academic tasks. These learners hold incremental beliefs about intelligence and attribute their successes or failures to factors within their control.
Self-regulation theory (SRT) is a system of conscious, personal management that involves the process of guiding one's own thoughts, behaviors and feelings to reach goals. Self-regulation consists of several stages. In the stages individuals must function as contributors to their own motivation, behavior, and development within a network of reciprocally interacting influences.
The desire to learn is often related to the concept of ‘motivation’. Motivation is the most used concept for explaining the failure or success of a language learner. Second language (L2) refers to a language an individual learns that is not his/her mother tongue, but is of use in the area of the individual. It is not the same as a foreign language, which is a language learned that is not generally spoken in the individual's area. In research on motivation, it is considered to be an internal process that gives behavior energy, direction and persistence in research . Learning a new language takes time and dedication. Once one does, being fluent in a second language offers numerous benefits and opportunities. Learning a second language is exciting and beneficial at all ages. It offers practical, intellectual and many aspirational benefits. In learning a language, there can be one or more goals – such as mastery of the language or communicative competence – that vary from person to person. There are a number of language learner motivation models that were developed and postulated in fields such as linguistics and sociolinguistics, with relations to second-language acquisition in a classroom setting. The different perspectives on L2 motivation can be divided into three distinct phases: the social psychological period, the cognitive-situated period and the process-oriented period.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
Behavioural change theories are attempts to explain why human behaviours change. These theories cite environmental, personal, and behavioural characteristics as the major factors in behavioural determination. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the application of these theories in the areas of health, education, criminology, energy and international development with the hope that understanding behavioural change will improve the services offered in these areas. Some scholars have recently introduced a distinction between models of behavior and theories of change. Whereas models of behavior are more diagnostic and geared towards understanding the psychological factors that explain or predict a specific behavior, theories of change are more process-oriented and generally aimed at changing a given behavior. Thus, from this perspective, understanding and changing behavior are two separate but complementary lines of scientific investigation.
Determination is a positive emotional feeling that promotes persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles. Determination occurs prior to goal attainment and serves to motivate behavior that will help achieve one's goal.
The health action process approach (HAPA) is a psychological theory of health behavior change, developed by Ralf Schwarzer, Professor of Psychology at the Freie University Berlin of Berlin, Germany and SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw, Poland, first published in 1992.
Peter Max Gollwitzer is a German professor of psychology in the Psychology Department at New York University. His research centers on how goals and plans affect cognition, emotion, and behavior.
Zoltán Dörnyei was a Hungarian-born British linguist. He was a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He was known for his work on second language acquisition and the psychology of the language learner, in particular on motivation in second language learning, having published numerous books and papers on these topics.
Help-seeking theory postulates that people follow a series of predictable steps to seek help for their inadequacies, it is a series of well-ordered and purposeful cognitive and behavioral steps, each leading to specific types of solutions.
In psychological theories of motivation, the Rubicon model, more completely the Rubicon model of action phases, makes a distinction between motivational and volitional processes. The Rubicon model "defines clear boundaries between motivational and action phases." The first boundary "separates the motivational process of the predecisional phase from the volitional processes of postdecisional phase." Another boundary is that between initiation and conclusion of an action. A self-regulatory feedback model incorporating these interfaces was proposed later by others, as illustrated in the figure.
The 3H-model of motivation was developed by professor Hugo M. Kehr, PhD., at UC Berkeley. The 3C-model is an integrative, empirically validated theory of motivation that can be used for systematic motivation diagnosis and intervention.
Jutta Heckhausen is Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine. She specializes in life-span developmental psychology, motivation, individual agency and social context. She expanded her education at the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, Stanford University and at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, University Bielefeld, Germany. At the Department of Psychological Science at University of California, Irvine, she teaches in the areas of life-span development and motivational psychology.
