Anna's Blog on Motivation & Emotion

  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 en...

  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...

Let me introduce my character to you. Her name is Elizabeth Harmon, and she is a genius chess player. She is also an orphan, and she is struggling with a lot of emotional problems as well as drugs and alcohol dependency. But at the end, she always succeeds at achieving her goals. The right person appears at the right time when she is struggling the most and helps her find motivation to keep going. In this blog, I want to look closer at Beth Harmon and analyze how she overcomes all the difficulties and stays focused on her goal – to become an elite chess player (or maybe there is something else behind it?). But first, I would like to tell you some details about Beth - in case you haven't seen the show (which is by the way called "The Queen's Gambit"). Beth became an orphan when she was 9 years old and spent 6 years in an orphanage. While living there, she found a friend and a mentor, identified her true passion, and formed an addiction which would follow her througho...