Lecture 7: Psychological Needs

(10-3-22)

Let us consider this notion of a, “psychological need”

• Needs versus wants (or even desirable conditions)
  • Your author/text presents the position that people are inherently active and, that activity that involves psychological needs is inherently interesting and satisfying.
  • He (and Ryan & Deci, who’s theory greatly influences Dr. Reeve) posit that all humans have 3 fundamental needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness; and that these are organismic (inherent in the organism).
  • “If one accepts the premise that all humans have a set of basic universal psychological needs,” (and if one limits one’s consideration of motivation to humans). Let us consider this premise:
  • What is the evidence that all humans need autonomy, competence, and relatedness? And that these are the only psychological needs?
• Much of what you text suggests is very reasonable but there is still the issue of whether these are universal aspects of human (let alone other species) motivation.
  • And much of the literature he cites in support of his conclusions are studies which are correlational in nature (Recall: selection/assignment based studies may look experimental but are actually correlation, you only know about “cause” if you are in a position to actually manipulate the independent variable.)
• Finally: What do we mean by “need”? A need is necessary, but necessary for what?
  • You need food or you will die. Necessary for survival?
  • You might need meaning and purpose in your life for happiness. Necessary for happiness?
  • You might need challenge in your life for development. Necessary for growth? (And, of course, how will be define and measure growth? Is growth necessary?)
  • Chen and colleagues (2015) believe that, “the needs of affiliation, autonomy and competence act like vitamins that are necessary for all people to function at their best.” (Deckers, 2018, p. 148)
  • Is “need” the best categorization for psychological factors?
• Deckers (2018) notes: “There is a very important difference between physiological and psychological needs that is anchored in the distinction between materialism and mentalism. Physiological needs refer to deficits that exist in the material body or brain. Psychological needs, however, do not have any material existence and are mental or psychological in nature.” (p. 243, bold face in original).
  • He goes on to say: “One difference is that psychological needs are only loosely linked to physiological needs and, in fact, there is a tendency to ignore their physiological basis. In the case of a psychological need, there is a deficit in a person’s set point level of some incentive, activity, or experience. For example, the person’s level of affiliation with others is less than hoped for.” (p. 243).
  • “Second, psychological needs are not clearly tied to prior experimental manipulations, such as food deprivation. Rather, psychological needs already exist as a result of an individual’s evolutionary or personal history.” (p. 243).
  • Deckers maintains that psychological needs have important functions and cites Sheldon’s (2011) two-process model of psychological needs.
    • Psychological needs motivate behavior that reduces or satisfies a need: negative reinforcement
    • The behavior that satisfies a psychological need results in positive experiences necessary for well being: positive reinforcement
    • He uses the example of the need to affiliate and belong:
      • interacting with others may reduce loneliness or a fear of rejection (negative reinforcement)
      • and lead to the pleasant feelings that can occur between people in a social relationship: intimacy motive (positive reinforcement)
  • Deckers further argues that psychological needs can exist in two forms:
    • trait: enduring characteristic of person
      • “First, as a trait, psychological needs refer to how much of an incentive or activity is required for a person to function best.” (p. 245)
    • state: temporary condition of person
      • “Second, as a state, a need refers to a temporary deficit, which refers to the discrepancy between current versus the desired level of some incentive, activity, or experience.” (p. 245).
  • Deckers additionally, following McClelland’s views (McClelland et al., 1989; Stratton et al., 2010) distinguishes between implicit and explicit psychological needs:
    • implicit motive: “the capacity of individuals to maximize satisfaction from engaging in need-relevant activities.” (Deckers, p. 247); the pleasure or satisfaction resulting from an activity satisfying a psychological need. [Your author will discuss his view of implicit needs in the next chapter. He believes these are social in nature (i.e., learned) versus the three psychological needs he believes are universal (innate).]
    • explicit motive: “resembles the conscious value a person places on a stimulus, activity, or experience.” (p. 247).
    • “A distinction between the two types of motives is that individuals are much more aware of the explicit motive compared to their implicit motives. . . . In fact, an explicit motives resembles incentive value.” (p. 247).
    • Assessment of implicit motives has tended to be based on projective measures, whereas much work on explicit motives has utilized objective questionnaires
  • Deckers agrees with Reeve that: “Not only do psychological needs motivate behavior; the failure to do so has negative consequences.”, “unfulfilled psychological need is accompanied by a particular set of symptoms of psychological ill health or low psychological well-being..” (p. 247).
  • A paper by Prentice, Halusic, & Sheldon (2014) begins by asserting that understanding human motivation is, “fundamental to the study of personality and psychological science more broadly”, has, “long relied on notions of basic human motivations for particular needs” but “One fundamental problem that faces these endeavors, though, is adequately defining a psychological need.” ( p. 73), “To date, conceptualizations of psychological nees remain somewhat varied . . . . and what is to be rightly considered a need is also a topic of debate” (p. 73. They suggest that, “many of these perspective tend to characterie needs in two basic ways” (p. 73), “two macro-theories” of motivation ( p. 73);
    • needs-as-experiential-requirements (they use Self Determination Theory as an exemplary theory), Maslow’s vitamin analogy
      • must be important for all member of a species, regardless of genetic predisposition, pesonal history, enculturation: individuals manifold stated wants may vary but what we need in order to be happy and health has been shaped by our shared phylogenetic development and is the same basic set for all people
        • it is not necessary for the degree of need to be equal in everyone for the universality to hold, “people can develop different dispositons ontogenetically around phylogenetically constant needs, much as proposed for the Big Five personalty traits” (p. 75)
      • they give examples of proposed universal psychological needs: belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), superiority (Adles, 1927), self-actualization (Rogers, 1961), self-esteem (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arnst, 2004), self-consistency (Heider, 1958), autonomry, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan , 2000)
        • these models often base arguments on demonstrations that satisfying a need leads to positive outcomes, increases in well-being or performance toward goals; and frustration leeding to negative outcomes
        • the challange, unless “stringent criteris are applied” is to avoid a “need zood akin to that of early instinct theories” (p. 75)
    • needs-as-behavioral-motives (the use Motive Disposition Theory as an exemplary theory): needs as, “impulses that initiate and guide particular behaviors toward particular rewards” (p. 75),
      • “an early example of needs-as-motives is provided by Murray (2938) who outlined a set of 5 classes of behavioral motives for deriving rewards from the enviornment.” (p. 75). Major figures are: McClelland (1984, 1985); Winter (1992), Schulthesis (2008), Sheldon & Schuler (2011), “and continues to provide a cornerstone for the study of human motivation.” (pp. 75-76).
      • MDT also suggests that the small set of behavioral motives it studies are broad and species typical, but assums that “all motives are learned” (McClelland, 1965, p. 322), “people vary in their motives due to learning historie” (p. 76)
        • Murray’s needs, much subsequent work focused on nAch, nPow, nAFF
    • This distinction (not by these titles) was previously considered by Sheldon, Ryan, & Reis (1996): “What makes for a good day? Competence and autonomy in the day and in the person”
      • “Some theorists refer to needs as innate and universal in humans (e.g., Aronson, 1967, Goldstein, 1939; Maslow, 1968), whereas other conceptualize nees as acquired individual differences in motives such as achievement, affiliation, and power (Atkinson, 1992; McClelland, 1985).” (p. 1277)
      • “Murray defined need broadly enough to include almost any chronic motivating force and thus arrived at a long list of 20 ‘primary’ needs. In contrast, we have applied a functional definiton, in which needs, when satisfied, provide the ‘psychological nutriments’ necessary for well being to occur (Ryan, 1995; Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci, 1996).” Sheldon et al., 1996, (p. 1277).
        • “we suggest that the importance of a postulated need can be established by showing that it uniquely predicts criterion measure of well-being, health, or development in virtually everyone.” (p. 1277)
    • Prentice et al. (2014) attempt to show how these perspectives can be intergrated, they suggest at, “MDT and SDT perspectives have been examining essentially the same constructs and processes, but at different time points in a goal sequence.” (.p. 78).
    • They offere their own definition of psychological needs: “tendencies to seek out certain basic tuypes of psychosocial experiences, to a somewaht varying extend across individuals, and to feel bood and thrive when thes basic experiences are obtained, to the same extent across individual” (p. 78).
  • Dr. Deckers considers a number of possible psychological needs, definitions that have been offered, measures, and psychological effects of unmet needs:
    • Achievement
    • Autonomy
    • Belong (relate, affiliate)
    • Closure
    • Cognition
    • Competence
    • Meaning
    • Power
    • Self-Esteem

(10-5-22)

All this being said, let us consider Dr. Reeve’s perspective:

• Psychological needs are the source of intrinsic motivation
• Three psychological needs are universal in humans (all of us, everywhere, built in, unlearned, intrinsic to the human condition); they are “organismic; humans are inherantly active
  • Autonomy : “psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior”, volitional action, self-endorsement
  • Competence : “psychological need to be effective in one’s interactions with the environment”, effectance, mastery, making progress
  • Relatedness : “psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people”; giving and receiving care, feeling connected
  • Dr. Reese on the benefits of psychological need satisfaction
    • Engagement
    • Personal growth
    • Intrinsic motivation
    • Internalization
    • Health
    • Well-being
  • and on the adverse effects of need frustration on these aspects of life.
• There is empirical support for the usefulness of using autonomy, competence, and relatedness as a framework for evaluating subjective well being and life satisfaction (Chen, et al., 2015; Nishimura & Suzuki, 2016); but, again, are these needs universal?
  • Possible exceptions
    • autonomy
      • leaders and followers, our place in the dominance hierarchy
      • Eric Fromn, fear of freedom; existential anxiety
      • cultural variation: individualist vs. collectivist cultures (see Boehm, Lyubomirsky, & Sheldon, 2011).
    • competence
      • competence would have to be seen as highly specific to our group, society, culture, historical period
      • Very few of you would have the skill to heat a piece of obsidian and, by dripping cold water on it, flak out a useful arrowhead. Absence of this skill would have been remarkable among adults of native American groups living in central Oregon several centuries ago (but they probably wouldn’t be able to do a Goggle search on the topic).
    • relatedness
      • autism (versus neurotypicals)
      • schizoid personality disorder (versus schizoid personality)

Cross connections

• An interesting article by Di Domenico and Ryan (2017) expands the discussion of intrinsic motivation both historically and neurologically. They begin with the standard Self-determination theory: “Intrinsic motivation refers to the spontaneous tendency ‘to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacity, to explore, and to learn’ (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p.70).”
  • They reject drive theory explanations of exploratory and mastery behaviors and review data that these, “are primarily energized by interest and appetitive mastery tendencies,not anxiety reduction.” (p. 3).
  • They review similar ideas: White (1959) effectance motivation: “a general behavioral and developmental propensity of many organisms” (p. 3), “White (1059) argued that effectance motivation is inherent to the activity of the central nervous system and described is as ‘what the neuromuscular system wants to do when it is otherwise unoccupied (e.g., by strong homeostatic drives) or is gently stimulated by the environment’ (p. 321).” (p. 3). “According to White (1959), the satisfactions associated with the effectance motive are not tied to consummatory activities, but are instead intrinsic to the arousal and maintenance of the activities that stem from it.” (p. 3).
  • They also cite DeCharms work on the origin/pawn position people take, “”DeCharms (1968) proposed that intrinsic motivation is based in people’s ‘primary propensity’ to experience themselves as causal agents, that is to experience their own actions as having an internal perceived locus of causality.” (p.3)
• They then turn to: “neuroethological perspectives on mammalian exploration: a starting point for conceptualizing intrinsic motivation in the brain”
  • They suggest, “the concept of intrinsically motivated exploration is consistent with the ‘affective neuroethologcal’ perspective of Panksepp and colleagues . . . . These researchers have argued that mammals are hardwired with a general-purpose SEEKING system that energizes many types of foraging and exploratory activities. Although the SEEKING system does service homeostatic imbalances and is responsible for energizing learned appetitive behaviors, it continuously operates to keep animals in a state of exploratory engagement with with environments. That is, the SEEKING system is believed to function as an objectless appetitive system–a “gord without a goal”–until the exploratory disposition it produces leads to the discovery and learning of useful regularities.” (p. 4). They cite Panksepp and Biven’s discuss of the SEEKING system (2012, p. 135).
  • “The core structures that comprise the SEEKING system in the rat are the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPRC), and the dopaminergic projections originating from the VTA the innervate these areas . . . . These regions are frequently called the ‘brain reward network.”
  • “The SEEKING system is thus believed to energize ‘many mental complexities that humans experience as persistent feelings of interest, curiosity, sensation seeking, and in the presence of a sufficiently complex cortex, the search for higher meaning’ (Panksepp, 1998, p. 145).” (p. 4)
• They consider related perspectives
  • Csikszentmihalyi (1990) concept of flow: “Flow refers to experiential states of total absorption, optimal challenge, and non-self-conscious enjoyment of an activity” 9p. 4), “like intrinsic motivation, when people experience flow, the satisfactions they experience are inherent to the activity itself and their behavior is ‘autotelic’ (auto = self, telos = goal) or performed for its own sake.” (p. 4)
  • Loewenstein (1994) proposed an ‘information gap’ hypothesis of curiosity according to which curiosity arises when people experience a discrepancy between what they know and what they want to know. Although this knowledge discrepancy is supposedly experienced as aversive, satisfying curiosity is pleasurable and people therefore voluntarily seek out elicit curiosity.” (p. 5). They go on the point out: “Perhaps the most notable divergence between SDT and Loewenstein’s account concerns his description of curiosity as a consummatory, drive-reduction process–i.e., the closure of information gaps.” (p. 5)
  • A final possibly related concept they discuss is the higher-order personality trait of plasticity (the shared variance of extraversion and openness/intellect) from the Five-Factor or Big Five model of personality. DeYoung (2010, 2013) argued that plasticity “represents stable interindividual differences in people’s exploratory tendencies” (p. 5), “people high in plasticity are hypothesized to ‘desire exploration for its own sake (i.e., they treat it as a goal in itself) and engage in it even at times when exploration will not obviously further their goals’ (DeYoung, 2013, p. 8).” (p. 5), and references , “association with dopamine” (p. 5).
• They propose a preliminary neurobiological model of human intrinsic motivation with two propositions:
  • Proposition I; intrinsic motivation is supported by dopaminergic systems
    • They review three lines of evidence: (1) intrinsic motivation is an elaboration of the exploratory activities subserved by the mammalian SEEKING system and dopamine is central to the neurochemistry of this system. (2) like I.M., dopamine is associated with increased positive affect, cognitive flexibility, creativity, and exploration in the face of novelty. (3) some evidence of a direct link between I.M and dopamine.
    • Dopamine neurons originate in the midbrain and have two modes of activity: tonic and phasic. In tonic mode: neurons exhibit a steady baseline rate of firing, promotes the normal functioning of relevant neural circuits and “may reflect the general strength of animals’ exploratory SEEKING tendencies (p. 6). in the phasic mode, dopamine neurons exhibit short burst os activity or inactivity, “The phasic mode of dopamine transmission may ‘transiently activate SEEKING patterns in coincidence with specific cue- or context-dependent information, attributing to such information an incentive motivational, action-orienting effect’ (Alcaro and Panksepp, 2011, p. 1810).” (p. 6).
    • Brobeg-Martin et al. (2010) proposed a model based on two types of dopamine neurons that exhibit distinct types of phasic activity: value-coding neurons and salience-coding neurons. Value-coding neurons are phasically excited by unexpected rewarding and inhibited by unexpected aversive events.” Following Tricomi and DePasque (2016), we therefore propose that a high rate of dopaminergic signaling within the value system is inherent to the performance of intrinsically motivating activities.”
    • “DeYoung ( 2013) proposed that salience-related dopaminergic activity energizes exploration ‘in response to the incentive value of the possibility of gaining information–that is, it drives curiosity and the desire for information’ (p. 4).” (p. 7)
  • Proposition II: intrinsic motivation entails dynamic switching between brain networks for salience detection, attentional control and self-referential cognition
    • salience network: believed to support the detection of subjectively important events and mobilization of attentional and working memory resources in service of goal-directed behavior
    • anchored in the anterior insula (AI) and dorsal ACC and includes major subcortical nodes in the amygdala, NAcc, the SN, and VTA (p. 8)
    • suggests “the AI functions as a dynamic hub for modulating the activity of two other large-scale brain networks: default mode network: high level of activity during passive resting states involving internally-focused, self-referential cognition and the central executive network (DLPFC) & posterior parietal cortex (PPC); important substraits of working memory and executive functions, show elevated activity during cognitively demanding, externally focused activities. The default mode and central executive networks often function in an antagonistic manner: activity in one is accompanied by suppressed activity in the other
    • They suggest that this antagonistic dynamic between the default mode and central executive networks, along with the role of the salience-mediating switching instigated by the anterior insula (AI) “may inform three characteristics of intrinsic motivation” (p. 9): (1) intrinsic motivation entails cognitive absorption and non-self-conscious enjoyment of an activity; (2) i.m. is reliably associated with enhanced performance, cognitive flexibility, and deeper conceptual learning: consistent with greater mobilization of central executive network; (3) “classic perspectives that describe autonomy or authenticity as a state of ‘organismic congruence’ (e.g., Rogers, 1961) characterize it as an embodied cognitive process whereby sensory and visceral information is permitted to access and direct one’s attention, in a bottom-up manner, to events of subjective importance and meaning”. . . . “The salience network, and the AI most specifically, with its receipt of sensory and visceral input and its interoceptive functions. . . . would seem well-suited to support this aspect of autonomy, especially during intrinsic motivation when people orient themselves to stimuli that spontaneously grip their attention and interest.” 9. 9)
• They finally consider the third leg” “beyond exploration, curiosity and mastery: intrinsically motivated social play”
  • The subcortical PLAY system governs the rough-and-tumble (R&T) interactions of mammals, energizing them to develop and refine their physical, emotional, and social competencies in a safe context” (pp. 10-11), “in early mammalian development, R&T play constitutes a type of embodied social cognition that provides a basis for cooperation and the adaptive self-regulation of aggression.” (p. 11), “We might therefore regard play as intrinsically motivated socialization . . . . an expression of people complementary tendencies toward autonomy and sociality in development, . . . . Indeed, research in SDT suggests that in addition to competence and autonomy, people have a basic psychological need for relatedness, a sense of feeling meaningfully connected with others (p. 11). They conclude that more work is needed to, “differentiate these types of intrinsic motivation in humans.” (p. 110)