Volitional aspects of achievement motivation and learned helplessness: toward a comprehensive theory of action control.

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview on the development of a theoretical framework for research on action control. It discusses that a person may have all the cognitive abilities that are necessary to solve a given anagram task and he or she may be sufficiently motivated to find the solution, and he or she may still fail to perform the necessary cognitive activities because he or she is unable to shield the task-oriented intention against competing action tendencies, for example, thinking about the self-evaluative implications of past failures to solve some other task. Likewise, persistence has been regarded as a pure motivational phenomenon. The duration of the time period a person persists on a task is not only a function of the strength of his or her motivation to solve the task as compared to the motivation to engage in some alternative activity, but also a function of the ability to protect the task-oriented action tendency against the interfering effect of competing action tendencies. The chapter discusses several historical reasons for the neglect of volitional processes in theories of action and it also presents several approaches in various subfields of psychology that are related to the problem of action control.