When body positivity falls flat: Divergent effects of body acceptance messages that support vs. undermine basic psychological needs.

Although women now have access to messaging about body acceptance, the risks and benefits of such messaging are not well-researched. Using a self-determination theory framework, we contrasted need-supportive versus need-undermining messages about body acceptance. One message supported the basic psychological need for autonomy (i.

Owning Up to Negative Ingroup Traits: How Personal Autonomy Promotes the Integration of Group Identity.

Objective: Our experiences, attributes, and behaviors are diverse, inconsistent, and often negative. Consequently, our capacity to assimilate divergent experiences-particularly negative aspects-is important to the development of a unified self. Whereas this process of integration has received attention at the level of personal identity, it has not been assessed at the level of group identity.

Self-determination, self-regulation, and the brain: autonomy improves performance by enhancing neuroaffective responsiveness to self-regulation failure.

The importance of autonomous motivation in improving self-regulation has been a focal topic of motivation research for almost 3 decades. Despite this extensive research, however, there has not yet been a mechanistic account of how autonomous motivation works to boost self-regulatory functioning. To address this issue, we examined the role of autonomy in 2 basic self-regulation tasks while recording a neural signal of self-regulation failure (i.

Preserving integrity in the face of performance threat: self-affirmation enhances neurophysiological responsiveness to errors.

Self-affirmation produces large effects: Even a simple reminder of one's core values reduces defensiveness against threatening information. But how, exactly, does self-affirmation work? We explored this question by examining the impact of self-affirmation on neurophysiological responses to threatening events. We hypothesized that because self-affirmation increases openness to threat and enhances approachability of unfavorable feedback, it should augment attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors.

Ironic effects of antiprejudice messages: how motivational interventions can reduce (but also increase) prejudice.

Although prejudice-reduction policies and interventions abound, is it possible that some of them result in the precise opposite of their intended effect--an increase in prejudice? We examined this question by exploring the impact of motivation-based prejudice-reduction interventions and assessing whether certain popular practices might in fact increase prejudice. In two experiments, participants received detailed information on, or were primed with, the goal of prejudice reduction; the information and primes either encouraged autonomous motivation to regulate prejudice or emphasized the societal requirement to control prejudice. Ironically, motivating people to reduce prejudice by emphasizing external control produced more explicit and implicit prejudice than did not intervening at all.

On the self-regulation of implicit and explicit prejudice: a self -determination theory perspective.

The present study identifies a broad taxonomy of motives underlying the desire to regulate prejudice and assess the impact of motivation to regulate prejudice on levels of explicit and implicit prejudice. Using self-determination theory as the foundation, six forms of motivation to regulate prejudice are proposed. In Study 1 (N = 257), an exploratory factor analysis reveals evidence for the six proposed dimensions.