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 depre...