Publications by authors named "David B Miele"

Article Synopsis
  • Psychological research has primarily focused on how individuals manage their thoughts and behaviors to prioritize long-term goals over immediate rewards.
  • There has been less emphasis on understanding how people regulate their motivational states, which is surprising since this plays a key role in self-control dilemmas.
  • The concept of "metamotivation" is introduced as a crucial aspect to explore, as it could provide valuable insights into the factors influencing self-control success or failure.
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Parents can be instrumental in promoting young children's early mathematics and literacy skills. However, differences in parents' beliefs can influence their behavior during parent-child interactions. We examined how parental beliefs about the fixedness of children's math and reading abilities shape their interactions with their 4- and 5-year-old children during an educational activity.

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Although intrinsic motivation is often viewed as preferable to more extrinsic forms of motivation, there is evidence that the adaptiveness of these motivational states depends on the nature of the task being completed (e.g., Cerasoli et al.

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Self-regulation research highlights the performance trade-offs of different motivational states. For instance, within the context of regulatory focus theory, promotion motivation enhances performance on eager tasks and prevention motivation enhances performance on vigilant tasks (i.e.

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Recent metamotivation research revealed that Westerners recognize that promotion versus prevention motivations benefit performance on eager versus vigilant tasks, respectively; that is, they know how to create task-motivation fit with respect to regulatory focus. Westerners also believe that, across tasks, promotion is more beneficial than prevention (i.e.

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Metamotivation research suggests that people may be able to modulate their motivational states strategically to secure desired outcomes (Scholer & Miele, 2016). To regulate one's motivational states effectively, one must at minimum understand (a) which states are more or less beneficial for a given task and (b) how to instantiate these states. In the current article, we examine to what extent people understand the self-regulatory benefits of high-level versus low-level construal (i.

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This study used mixed-effects logistic regression to examine undergraduates' (N = 142) evaluations and reasoning about scenarios involving disability-based exclusion. Scenarios varied by disability [autism spectrum disorder (ASD) versus learning disability (LD)], the context of exclusion (classroom versus social), and whether or not a grade was at stake. Participants were more likely to determine exclusion was acceptable if the excluded student had an ASD diagnosis, there was a grade at stake, and it occurred in a classroom.

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Remembered utility is the retrospective evaluation about the pleasure and pain associated with a past experience. It can influence choices about repeating or avoiding similar situations in the future (Kahneman, 2000). A set of 5 experiments explored the remembered utility of effortful test episodes and how it impacted future test choices.

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The feeling of being in the zone (related to "flow") is marked by an elevated yet effortless sense of concentration. Prior research suggests that feelings of being in the zone are strongest when the demand posed by a task matches one's level of ability (i.e.

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Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M(age) = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (M(age) = 10.

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The cues contributing to people's metacognitions of agency were investigated in two experiments in which people played a computer game that involved trying to "touch", via a mouse moving a cursor, downward scrolling X's (Experiment 1), or trying to "explode" the downward scrolling X's (Experiment 2). Both experiments varied (a) proximal action-related information by either introducing or not introducing Turbulence into the mouse controls and (b) distal outcome-related information such that touched X's "exploded" either 100 or 75 % of the time. Both variables affected people's judgments of agency (JOAs), but the effect was different.

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Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question.

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Because numerous studies have shown that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, a single dominant heuristic, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), has been posited to explain how people interpret encoding fluency when assessing their own memory. However, the inferences people draw from feelings of encoding fluency may vary with their beliefs about why information is easy or effortful to encode. We conducted two experiments in which participants studied word lists and then predicted their future recall of those items.

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Previous research overwhelmingly suggests that feelings of ease people experience while processing information lead them to infer that their comprehension is high, whereas feelings of difficulty lead them to infer that their comprehension is low. However, the inferences people draw from their experiences of processing fluency should also vary in accordance with their naive theories about why new information might be easy or difficult to process. Five experiments that involved reading novel texts showed that participants who view intelligence as a fixed attribute, and who tend to interpret experiences of processing difficulty as an indication that they are reaching the limits of their ability, reported lower levels of comprehension as fluency decreased.

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The more accurately people assess their comprehension, the more likely they are to engage in study behaviors that precisely target gaps in their learning. However, comprehension regulation involves more than knowing when to implement a new study strategy; it also involves deciding which strategy will most effectively resolve one's confusion. In two experiments, we explored how people's motivational orientations influence which study strategies they select to regulate their comprehension.

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