Anna's Blog on Motivation & Emotion

  Basic emotions of Beth Harmon. Which emotions does she experience most often, and which ones of them help her to achieve her goals? * * * Reeve (2009) provides a list of 6 basic emotions: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. In this post, I am going to look at which of these emotions are commonly experienced by Beth Harmon and which of them help her to succeed. Fear " Fear is an emotional reaction that arises from a person's interpretation that the situation he or she faces is dangerous and a threat to one's well-being " (Reeve, 2009, p. 313). Beth has very little fear (or at least she makes us believe so). In the beginning of one of the episodes, we hear her mother's voice talking to little Beth. Here are her words: "Dark is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, I'd go as far as saying there's nothing to be afraid of . Anywhere. The strongest person is the person who isn't scared to be alone. It's other people you got to worry abo

  Ability, effort or luck? What is the secret of Elizabeth Harmon's successes and failures? *** In this post, I want to look at Elizabeth Harmon's success and failures from the perspective of the Attribution Theory . According to the Attribution Theory, there are the following causes of success/failure (i.e., attributions): ability, effort, task difficulty, luck , and lack of knowledge . They share three common properties: locus, stability, and controllability . In regard to these properties, the aforementioned attributions can be categorized as internal/external (locus), stable/unstable (stability), and controllable/uncontrollable (controllability) (Weiner, 1985). *** At first, it seems that Beth Harmon relies solely on her own abilities and effort . In one of her interviews, she tells the journalist: "The board is the entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it. I can dominate it. And it's predictable . So, if I get hurt, I only have my

  HOPE FOR SUCCESS or FEAR OF FAILURE ? Is Beth Harmon a  success-oriented or failure-avoidant person? Or maybe both? *** Cognitive hope is a “positive motivational state that is based on an interactivity derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal-directed energy), and (b) pathways (planning to meet goals)” (Snyder et al., 1991,  as cited in Turner et al., 2021) ).  Ability to construe multiple pathways to obtain goals provides adaptability. Beth Harmon went through a lot of difficulties and loses in her life. At the age of 9, she lost her mother in a car crash (it was a suicide). She was sent to an orphanage and spent 6 years there. In the orphanage, she met her first mentor and her teacher - Mr. Shaibel. She lost him too, as she was not allowed to visit him in the basement and play chess with him. Later, she lost her adoptive mother, Alma, who died of hepatitis. All of these loses had a deep effect on Beth and led to periods of sadness, stagnation, and depression. But at the e

  Elizabeth Harmon as a mastery-oriented person Today, I would like to look at how Elizabeth Harmon's motivation and success align with self-efficacy . Reeve (2009) defines self-efficacy as "a generative capacity in which the individual organizes and orchestrates his/her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances he/she faces" (p. 233). He lists the following sources of self-efficacy :          Personal history in trying to execute a particular behavior         Observations of similar others who are trying to execute that particular behavior          Verbal persuasions from others           Physiological states "Once enhanced, self-efficacy expectations provide the cognitive-motivational foundation underlying personal empowerment : involves processing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives; occurs as efficacy and engagement replaced doubt and avoidance" (Reeve, 2009, p. 241). If a person manage

  Mastery vs Performance Chess as Sport In the USSR and present Russia chess is considered to be a sport, a very competitive sport. Very often learning this game begins with mastery goals and turns into achievement. In this post, I would like to look at Beth Harmon's success from the perspective of the Expectancy-Value Theory,   instrumentality, and interest . Mastery Goals and Performance Goals ,   as described in Reeve (2009), differ from one another in terms of the person's understanding as to what constitutes competence. With mastery goals, "the person seeks to develop greater competence, make progress, improve the self, overcome challenges through intense and persistent effort" (p. 183). With performance goals, the person "seeks to demonstrate or prove competence, display high ability, outperform others, and succeed with little apparent effort. Achieving a performance goal means doing better than others" (p. 183). Instrumentality as a value component i

How can we explain Beth's success from the perspective of Self-Determination theories? How did her motivational reasons impact her success? Did they change over time? Let's consider Cognitive Evaluation Theory and Organismic Integration Theory . Cognitive Evaluation Theory offers three basic needs for intrinsic motivation: competence (our abilities and skills), autonomy (our personal agency), and relatedness (relationships with other people). Organismic Integration Theory offers us a continuum which has amotivation at one end, extrinsic motivation (external regulation, introjected regulation, and identified regulation) in the middle, and ends with intrinsic motivation (integrated regulation).  For an overview of both theories, see (Reeve, 2009). What was Beth's motivation when she decided to learn how to play chess? She was 9 year old when she saw Mr. Shaibel, the orphanage custodian, playing this game. And she got fascinated with it right away.  Of course, there was