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Advances in Motivation ScienceAssimilationist, reformist, and sociopolitical phases of school belonging research: A critical race and optimal distinctiveness review
Advances in Motivation Science, Volume 11, 2024, 171-213.
Jamaal Sharif Matthews, Kyle M. Boomhower, & Chino Ekwueme
Sense of belonging has long been recognized as a fundamental psychological need and essential component of achievement motivation and socioemotional thriving. However, research on school belonging has only recently begun to examine the barriers to, supports for, and experiences of belonging among racially marginalized students of color within U.S. schools and universities. Further, motivation science has a limited understanding of what belonging means, how it is internalized, and what shapes it for such students of color. In this article, we evaluate the developmental trends in school belonging research conducted with racially marginalized student populations. Through our review, we identify and describe three distinct and consecutive trends of school belonging research: assimilationist, reformist, and sociopolitical, as well as the ideological and methodological characteristics of each trend. Further, we employ critical race and optimal distinctiveness theories as conceptual guides to assess the affordances and limits of each trend and how the literature has evolved across these three trends. Finally, we offer insights for responsibly advancing school belonging research in ways that authentically address the needs of racially marginalized student groups and honor the cultural and contextual nuance of their lived experiences.
Motivation Science
Personal perspectives on mindsets, motivation, and psychology
Motivation Science, 10(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000304
Motivation researchers study the forces that drive, select, and direct behavior. As such, we seek to understand how people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions work together as they choose and pursue goals in their world. The author begins by tracing the fortunes of the field of motivation over the course of her career, from its heyday, to its fall from prominence, to its current resurgence. In this context, she traces her own career in motivation, starting with reinforcement learning, moving to attribution theory, continuing with achievement goals, and then focusing on implicit theories or mindsets. Throughout, she and her collaborators have tried to zero in on (and often intervene on) the personal and contextual factors that enhance challenge-seeking, effective persistence, educational achievement, and mental health, as well as the factors that influence interpersonal judgments and stereotyping. More recently, she has developed an integrative theory that identifies motivation as the foundation of personality and its development, and she has collaborated on a neuroscience-based theory that identifies motivation as a key factor in intelligent decision-making. The driving theme throughout her career has been how to harness motivation to promote and fulfill human potential.
Motivation and Emotion
Motivation and Emotion, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-024-10076-z
Travis C. Evans, Josie Carlson, Agnieszka Zuberer, Regan Fry, Sam Agnoli, Jennifer C. Britton, Joseph DeGutis & Michael Esterman
Social behaviors are guided in part by motivational and emotional responses to affective facial expressions. In daily life, facial expressions communicate varying degrees social reward signals (happiness), social threat signals (anger), or social reward-threat conflict signals (co-occurring happiness and anger). Thus, motivational and emotional responses must be sensitive to variations in social signal intensity to effectively guide social behavior. We recently developed a novel social approach-avoidance paradigm (SAAP), which uses morphed facial expressions to assess sensitivity to linear increases in social reward and/or social threat intensity. Prior to large-scale studies validating the test quality of the SAAP, however, it is necessary to first establish the psychometric properties and generalizability of these sensitivity metrics. In Study 1, we independently replicated SAAP task effects and demonstrated that motivational and emotional sensitivity measures exhibit strong psychometric properties and robust individual variability. In Study 2, we demonstrated that more complex social judgements (e.g., trustworthiness) are also sensitive to linear increases in social signal intensity, which differs across judgements. Although future research in larger samples will be needed to establish the test quality of the SAAP, these preliminary findings suggest that the SAAP exhibits adequate psychometric properties to justify this type of large-scale individual differences research.