People approach pleasure and avoid pain. To discover the true nature of approach-avoidance motivation, psychologists need to move beyond this hedonic principle to the principles that underlie the different ways that it operates. One such principle is regulatory focus, which distinguishes self-regulation with a promotion focus (accomplishments and aspirations)from self-regulation with a prevention focus (safety and responsibilities). This principle is used to reconsider the fundamental nature of approach-avoidance, expectancy-value relations, and emotional and evaluative sensitivities. Both types of regulatory focus are applied to phenonomena that have been treated in terms of either promotion (e.g., well-being) or prevention (e.g., cognitive dissonance). Then, regulatory focus is distinguished from regulatory anticipation and regulatory reference, 2 other principles underlying the different ways that people approach pleasure and avoid pain. It seems that our entire psychical activity is bent upon procuring pleasure and avoiding pain, that it is automatically regulated by the PLEASURE-PRINCIPLE. (Freud, 1920/1952, p. 365) People are motivated to approach pleasure and avoid pain. From the ancient Greeks, through 17th- and 18thcentury British philosophers, to 20th-century psychologists, this hedonic or pleasure principle has dominated scholars ' understanding of people's motivation. It is the basic motivational assumption of theories across all areas of psychology, including theories of emotion in psychobiology (e.g., Gray, 1982), conditioning in animal learning

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Inspiration has received little theoretical or empirical attention within psychology. Inspiration is conceptualized herein as a general construct characterized by evocation, motivation, and transcendence. In Studies 1a and 1b, a trait measure of inspiration was developed and was found to have strong psychometric properties. Studies 2a–2c documented a nomological network consistent with the present conceptualization. Study 3 related inspiration to the holding of U.S. patents. Study 4 linked trait inspiration to daily experiences of inspiration, extended the nomological network to the state level, documented antecedents and consequences, and established incremental validity. This research provides a foundation for further study of inspiration, both as a general construct and in specific content domains (e.g., religion, creativity, interpersonal relations). Inspiration is an experience with which we are all familiar. We are inspired when insights or ideas imbue a task with a sense of necessity and excitement. We are inspired when a mentor or role model reveals new possibilities that we would not have recognized on our own. We are inspired when a sense of beauty, truth, or the divine moves us to pursue a goal more important than the mundane concerns that often occupy our minds. Although such experiences of inspiration are no doubt familiar to the psychologist, the topic has received little sustained attention within psychology and has been virtually ignored within personality and motivational psychology. Furthermore, inspiration has typically been conceptualized narrowly within particular content domains (e.g., religious, creative, interpersonal) or theoretical frameworks. We advocate a phenomenon-based approach (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2001) to inspiration that both embraces the breadth of the inspiration concept understood by the layperson and is informed by diverse theoretical perspectives. Our aims in the present research are to offer a conceptualization of inspiration, to validate the inspiration construct, and to establish its importance in mainstream empirical psychology.

Much of the richness of a collaborative learning environment comes from the differing constructions that different learners bring to the learning domain. However, the differences in terminology and its usage that stem from different construct systems can also be major impediments to collaboration. Techniques from personal construct psychology may be used to make such tacit differences overt and a source of rich discussion among collaborative learners. This article describes the use of construct elicitation, modeling and comparison services on the World-Wide Web to enable collaborative learners to understand one another's constructs. Keywords --- Personal construct psychology, repertory grids, World-Wide Web, collaborative learning. 1. Introduction Personal construct psychology (PCP) [1] emphasizes the idiographic nature of individual constructions of the world and hence raises questions about the basis of inter-personal collaboration and shared, social constructions [2]. PCP has been...

The self-concept plays an important role in conformity to sex-typed social norms. Normative beliefs that men are powerful, dominant, and self-assertive and that women are caring, intimate with others, and emotionally expressive represent possible standards for whom people ought to be and whom they ideally would like to be. In the present research, to the extent that sex role norms were personally relevant for participants, norm-congruent experiences (i.e., those involving dominance for men and communion for women) yielded positive feelings and brought their actual self-concepts closer to the standards represented by ought and ideal selves. A recurring theme in the popular psychology literature is that men and women are motivated toward different goals and values in everyday social relationships. Tannen's (1990) best-seller, You Just Don't Understand, suggests that women's "conversa-tions are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus " (p. 25), whereas men's are "negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can, and protect

The area of behavioral decision research, specifically the work on heuristics and biases, has had a tremendous influence on basic research, applied research, and application over the last twenty-five years. Its unique juxtaposition against economics has provided important benefits, but at the cost of leaving it disconnected from too much of psychology. This paper explores an expanded definition of behavioral decision research through the consideration of multiple levels of cognitive processing. Rather than being limited to how decision-makers depart from optimality, we offer a broader analysis of how decision-makers define the decision problem and link decisions to goals, as well as a more detailed focus on processes associated with implementing decisions. Over the past few decades the area of cognitive psychology has grown dramatically, social and developmental psychology have moved strongly in a cognitive direction, and behavioral decision research (BDR) has emerged as a new area of psychology. BDR is unique among psychological subfields in the impact that it has had on research outside of psychology - including its impact on economics, finance, public policy, law, medicine, marketing, organizational behavior, and negotiation. Unfortunately, BDR has also moved further away from many core areas of psychology, limiting its theoretical development and its integration with advances made in allied areas. Our central thesis is that the most well known part of BDR, the heuristics and biases approach, has been overly constrained by a focus on how people make mistakes at the point of decision. Research on heuristics and biases has implicitly assumed that the goal is known and that the details of implementing decisions are not part of the problem. The prescriptive goal is optim...

The authors outline a new identity for the professional psychologist termed Unified Professional Psychology (UPP). UPP combines recent movements toward a unified psychological science, an independent professional psychology, and Combined-Integrated (C-I) doctoral training programs in psychology. The value in the synthesis of these ideas is that they (a) provide a comprehensive system of thought that defines the science and practice of psychology in a commensurable manner, (b) offer a clear identity for the professional psychologist, and (c) set the stage for a training model that develops competencies that will prepare graduates to serve as leaders and advocates in a wide array of health settings. Issues pertaining to why a new view is needed and how UPP specifies the science–practice relationship are addressed in detail. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin

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