Frank W. Wicker

Participant descriptions of guilt and shame

The purpose of this research was to see if naive raters could distinguish between guilt and shame in ways consistent with the descriptions of emotion theorists. In two studies, 152 participants recalled occasions on which they had experienced guilt or shame and rated these experiences on a large number of scales that represented either basic dimensions of emotion or attributes previously postulated to differentiate between these two emotions. Shame and guilt situations differed on a number of attributes, including felt powerfulness, self-control, self-consciousness and exposure, activity, inferiority, surprise, alienation from others, facial sensation, self-attribution of justice, and expectation of punishment. Many commonalities in the meaning of the two concepts were also suggested, most importantly in terms of basic attributes such as pain, tension, and arousal. Results were consistent with several previous accounts of the essential differences between guilt and shame, but not with all such descriptions.

Perceived Competence and Autonomy as Moderators of the Effects of Achievement Goal Orientations.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of two moderators – perceived competence and perceived autonomy – in the relationships of achievement goal orientations with a broad range of learning‐related variables, including interest, effort, learning strategy use and academic achievement. Perceived competence and autonomy played roles as moderators by strengthening the positive effects of a mastery goal pursuit on outcome measures of adaptive use of learning strategies and effort, respectively. However, no moderating role of either perceived competence or perceived autonomy was found for the effect of a performance‐approach and performance‐avoidance goal pursuit. In addition, perceived competence played a significant role in determining the level of academic achievement in the context of multiple‐goal pursuit. For students with high perceived competence, the adoption of high performance‐approach goals resulted in a higher level of achievement regardless of the levels of mastery goals. In contrast, students with low perceived competence showed the highest achievement when high performance‐approach goals are paired with low mastery goals.

Relationships among affective and cognitive factors in humor

Abstract One hundred and twenty-five college students rated a total of 74 jokes, chosen by stratified sampling, on funniness and on 13 other scales suggested by humor theories. Highly similar factor structures were found with two sets of jokes. Ratings of surprise, resolution, and originality correlated strongly with funniness and helped define a factor on which funniness ratings loaded. Scales pertaining to painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic were positively correlated with funniness but defined a factor essentially independent of it. Partial correlations suggested that these scales were related to funniness through their common relationship with incongruity and resolution scales. Ratings of how much a joke made subjects “feel free” correlated much more highly with ratings of incongruity and resolution than with ratings of painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic. Results were interpreted as providing support for an incongruity-resolution theory of humor, and for the interdependency of affective factors with incongruity-resolution mechanisms.

Photographs, drawings, and nouns as stimuli in paired-associate learning

Color photographs and simple line drawings were compared with corresponding concrete nouns as stimulus items in paired-associate learning. Greater recall was found with pictorial stimuli, but a predicted difference between photographs and drawings was not significant. The two types of pictorial stimuli did differ, however, in proportion of intralist intrusion errors and in reported use of mediation. Both surpassed word stimuli whether rote learning or a mnemonic strategy was reported. These results do not support theories that attribute picture superiority to incidental cues or to implicit mediational strategies.

Involvement as a Temporal Dynamic: Affective Factors in Studying for Exams

Changes in indices of involvement, affect, and cognition were observed over successive phases of studying for a test. A total of 92 students, 32 in Study 1 and 60 in Study 2, gave ratings related to involvement and mood over several study phases. These studies were methodological improvements over previous ones on this topic, the first study because it did not depend on simulation and the second because it reduced the memory component of the rating task. Yet results replicated those of earlier studies in indicating that involvement increases and that other affective reactions tend to show correlated decreases across phases of studying. These results support our earlier descriptions of involvement as a dynamic, multifaceted phenomenon with both cognitive and affective components.

Motivation When Optimism Declines: Data on Temporal Dynamics

To contribute to a description of motivation variables across time, the authors examined temporal changes in these variables as the time to pursue a test-taking goal approached. In three samples, expected performance, grade-level standards, and perceived adequacy of effort decreased as the test time approached, but other indices of motivation did not always decrease. Data indicated that (a) there is a strong relationship between expectancies and implicit goal setting, (b) students may sometimes change goal levels and definitions of success to maintain their desire for chosen goals despite declining expectations, (c) effects of event proximity on goal-achievement expectations may be based on overestimating the adequacy of future effort, and (d) the degree to which expectancy and value predict motivation appears to vary with exam proximity. Results revealed a temporal complexity in motivation variables and in the relationships among them.

Moods, goals, and measures of intrinsic motivation

ABSTRACT Behavioral and self-report measures of intrinsic task interest were compared in their relationship to measures of momentary mood and long-term motivational orientation across conditions differing in sources of extrinsic motivation. The two measures of task interest did not correlate with each other and had significantly contrasting correlations with moods and life goals. The behavioral measure was related negatively to apparently intrinsic affects and goals and was positively related to fatigue. Relationships were also quite different across conditions. Results support reservations about the equivalence of the two most used types of measures of intrinsic motivation and point to factors that affect them in independent or contrasting ways. The Free Choice Time measure, for example, seems to depend on how treatments affect interest in alternative activities, not just interest in the target activity itself.

Studies of Loss Aversion and Perceived Necessity

Abstract An explanation of the loss-aversion function of prospect theory that relates the theory to a distinction between positive-based and negative-based incentive value was investigated. We predicted that betting decisions would show loss aversion to the extent that they involved necessary goals—goals that were more likely to be negatively based (associated with a threat of negative alternatives). Therefore, conditions that increased perceived goal necessity should have increased the magnitude of the loss-aversion effect. The results from 194 subjects in two studies supported this prediction. Factors related to perceived goal necessity (e.g., telic dominance, imagined proportion of financial assets to be gambled, proportion of assets in a necessities account, actual proportion of income spent on necessities) were related to reluctance to take hypothetical bets. Relationships seemed to be contingent on bet characteristics (amount and win-loss ratio). A third study suggested that these results reflected ...

Studies of mood and humor appreciation

A total of 189 students in two studies rated jokes on funniness and several other scales after rating their own mood on the Nowlis-Green Mood Adjective Check List. Subjects in Experiment 1 gave a second and third set of mood ratings after their joke-funniness ratings. Three mood factors—surgency, elation, and vigor—reliably predicted joke appreciation in both studies. More tentative evidence linked humor appreciation to concentration, social affection, excitement, freedom, and (lack of) fatigue, but humor appeared independent of aggression, anxiety, tension, and inhibition. Relationships among joke-scale ratings were highly similar for subjects reporting relatively positive moods and those reporting more negative moods. Results were discussed with reference to several humor theories.

Student Expectations about Affective Correlates of Academic Goal Setting.

AbstractWe studied “affective expectations” that may influence students’ willingness or unwillingness to study. Detailed expectations were elicited by having students imagine moods and appraisals at several stages of pursuing hypothetical classroom goals that differed in specificity and difficulty. They expected affective benefits much more than they expected affective penalties of goal setting; goal specificity, for example, reduced perceived coercion-distrust and improved mood before and after grade outcomes. Interactions suggested especially negative affect with easy/indefinite goals and stronger effects of goal characteristics in earlier phases of goal pursuit. Students also expected goal setting to increase importance of the goal and commitment to it. We concluded that students’ expectations of affective consequences should support rather than disrupt beneficial effects of goal setting on performance.