In our shame-centric culture, the words Shame and Guilt have become almost synonymous. For example:
You should be ashamed of what you’ve done!
You should feel guilty about what you’ve done!
He looks guilty to me…
I’m ashamed of you!
You’re trying to take me on a guilt trip, aren’t you?
But historically and etymologically, these two words are very different. Here’s a run-down:
The transformation of learning into education paralyses man’s poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn. (“Tools for conviviality”, Ivan Illich)
I am currently reading 2 of Ivan Illich’s eye-opening books, “deschooling society” and “tools of conviviality”. I’ve been highlighting many passages from these books, and making occasional side notes. I think I should share some of these here on this blog. So here comes the first, in the context of my first clinical psychology placement coming to an end.
I find it amazing that, to learn to become a psychologist, we must sit down and endure the pedagogy of other psychologists–despite their common lack of teaching skills–while being completely restrained from observing them in the exercise of the very skills they are presumably trying to teach us.
From such a model of skill transmission, only one learning outcome is guaranteed: the factual knowledge that certain lecturing psychologists have slightly less of a soporific effect on their audience than most!
Besides spoken or written language, our thoughts are also mostly made up of language. We use words to think about ourselves, other people or the world in general. We use words to plan what we are going to do or say, and to make sense of our memories.
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Now on to the meat of this article:
Human beings are amazing. Our brains are constantly active, even when we are asleep. We are constantly thinking, whether we are aware of it or not. Our emotions are directly influenced by our thoughts. Whenever we feel anger, excitement, anxiety, joy or sadness, it is usually because of some thoughts we’ve just had.
Our brains can think very quickly, and some types of thoughts can become so automatic that we don’t realise we’re having them. These automatic thoughts, however, were not always automatic. We learned them at some stage. For example, if our parents constantly told us that we were clumsy when we were little, we probably believed them. Later on, when we would make little mistakes, we would have been more likely to attribute them to our clumsiness than to other factors, because we started to believe that we were clumsy. Little by little, that belief can become reinforced until it is well-established and completely automatic.
While I was writing this article (took me a couple of weeks!), I came across the following video which I thought was excellent and very relevant to my topic. I don’t agree with everything Daryl Cross says, but I love the way he puts things across. It makes a lot of sense to me.
What happens when we have acquired an automatic thought of being clumsy? We knock our glass of water at the restaurant, and almost immediately we feel overwhelmed with shame and anger. But it wasn’t the spilled drink that caused the anger, it was the following automatic thoughts: “I did this because I’m clumsy. My clumsiness makes me look ridiculous. I’ll always be like that”.
Often, the negative automatic thoughts we have about ourselves don’t stand up to simple reasoning. If we were really aware of them, we could easily debunk them because they’re usually very exaggerated. The thoughts I just mentioned are unreasonable:
Here is a quote by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, one of the 12 apostles of the LDS Church:
In all of this, I suppose it goes without saying that negative speaking so often flows from negative thinking, including negative thinking about ourselves. We see our own faults, we speak—or at least think—critically of ourselves, and before long that is how we see everyone and everything. No sunshine, no roses, no promise of hope or happiness. Before long we and everybody around us are miserable .
April 2007 General Conference, The Tongue of Angels
If we are in the habit of criticising ourselves, we will tend to think that other people also have similar thoughts as we do, and silently criticise everything we do. This makes it difficult for us to trust others, because we think they are always judging us.
We can’t read anyone’s mind, so it’s impossible to know for sure what people are thinking or planning. To deal with this huge amount of uncertainty, our brains are naturally inclined to make lots of assumptions, so we don’t have to spend every waking minute worrying about what other people might think or do to us. One of these is to assume that other people think the same way we do. This is a very useful assumption, and often it works just fine: humans have many things in common, including some of the ways in which we think.
However, this assumption can be a problem unless occasionally challenged. If our thoughts are extreme, for example if they are very negative towards ourselves, assuming that everyone feels and thinks the same way about us is not only very inaccurate, it’s also very dangerous. Why is it dangerous? Because of something else we tend to do as humans: notice and remember the things that confirm what we believe, and ignore those that don’t. This is called the confirmatory bias.
As our self-talk becomes more negative, and we assume that other people are equally as judgemental towards us, we tend to notice the things they say and do that confirm our assumptions. This is made obvious when two people hear a third person say something, but when they talk about it later they remember something completely different. Let’s have an example: George is meeting his friends Lynn and Michael at school and is excited to show them his new shoes.
George: Hey, guys, what do you think of my new shoes?
Lynn: They’re not bad.
Michael: They’re awesome!
… later …
George (speaking to Michael): I can’t believe Lynn was so rude to me today, I don’t know what I’ve done to upset her!
Michael: What do you mean? She said she liked your shoes!
George: What are you on about? She hated them!
Michael: I’m sure she said they were nice, or something…
George: I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was obvious she hated them. In fact I think she hates me, I’ve been noticing little things she says, and she’s always talking and laughing about me when she’s with her friends…
Michael: I think you’re imagining things. She always says the nicest things about you when you’re not there, I’ve heard her lots of times. In fact I think she likes you!
As you can see, George has a fairly firm belief that Lynn doesn’t like him, and tends to look for things that confirm that belief. He believes that Lynn thinks that way, because that is the way he thinks about himself. This is leading him down an unfortunate path, because he may very well be destroying a potentially very strong friendship.
Once in a while, we need to step out of the comfort zone of our established beliefs about ourselves and others, and be willing to challenge them. This can be very difficult to do, especially if we have fed these beliefs for many years by consistently picking out bits of information that confirm them, and ignored those that go against them. Sometimes, these beliefs are reinforced by other people, the most powerful example often being our parents. However, we can challenge any belief we have if that belief is leading us to have a distorted and negative view of ourselves.
Before we can challenge them, however, we must identify them. They’re often so automatic that we’re not even aware that we’re thinking them. They’re like a psychological reflex, a mental shortcut that reduces the amount of mental effort we have to spend in reaction to events around us. If we want to change them, to “re-wire” our brain, we must be willing to spend that extra mental effort until our automatic thoughts have been modified to something less negative and more helpful.
One way to do this is to keep a little notebook and pencil in our pocket all the time, or to have a mobile phone that allows us to quickly take some notes for later. Every time we have a strong negative feeling like anger, depression or anxiety, we write down what triggered that emotion, and describe briefly how we’re feeling at that moment. Then, when we get home later on, we can go through our notes and spend a bit of mental energy to figure out what we were thinking at the time of our negative emotion. There’s always an automatic thought that gets activated by the trigger. It may be hard at first, but eventually you’ll start getting the hang of it.
So, once we’ve managed to identify some of the negative, automatic thoughts that we have about ourselves, we can start writing them down and challenging them. Writing all this down is essential, because if we try to just do it mentally, the automatic thoughts will win. It’s their domain, and they don’t like to be challenged. If you start writing them down, it gives you the opportunity to look at them at different times, when your mood is different, and when you’re likely to get more insights into them.
Thankfully, for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, it’s quite easy to challenge automatic negative self-talk. We have strong beliefs in the individual worth of every human being, as literal children of God. Our worth is not determined by our actions, or by the attitudes or thoughts of other people. Our worth is fixed and equal to everyone else’s.
Don’t be fooled by the vain promises of the gods of beauty, fame, pleasure and possessions. They would have you believe that your worth is determined by how devoutly you worship them, how much time and money you pour into their bottomless treasuries. The true God, our Heavenly Father, has made it clear that our worth is not determined by our actions. We are his children and he loves us, no matter what we do. We are the offspring of deity from the time we are born until we surrender our last mortal breath.
The most important belief for which we should seek confirmation is the belief that God is literally our Father, and that we are literally His children. The degree to which we believe these simple truths will determine how well we can challenge and re-program our negative self-talk.
I’ve just come to the conclusion that I tend to be impulsive. That trait seems to characterise many of my behaviours, some of which I’m not very happy with.
One day I will sever the link...
So what is impulsiveness?
Great difficulty resisting offers of instant pleasure or gratification, at the cost of long-term problems. My problematic foci of impulsiveness include:
Here are some things I do that are impulsive:
Two important features of problematic impulsive behaviours:
Does that sound like you? Many people struggle with what they call “food addiction”, “pathological gambling” or “compulsive gaming”. When we decide to do something about it, we typically target the behaviour itself, removing triggers (e.g. stop buying junk food, uninstall games from the computer etc.), or setting goals for behaviour reduction.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t address the impulsiveness underlying these behavioural patterns. Once you overcome one behaviour, you are likely to be attracted to another quick-fix, instantly gratifying behaviour.
Let’s compare impulsive behaviours with snacking on junk food. The impulsive person is looking for pleasurable emotions that are easily obtained, so we can call these “emotional junk food”. Just like physical junk food, emotional junk food gives you a quick boost, but has little nutritional value. If you’re used to snacking on emotional junk food all day, stopping suddenly will leave you feeling under-stimulated and emotionally peckish.
Just like physical junk food, emotional junk food prevents you from appreciating a full, nutritious meal. Never feeling truly hungry, you are never really aware of your emotional needs, and are never satisfied after a snack. You are also less motivated to engage in truly satisfying activities that really fulfil your needs. Have you ever noticed that when you’re eating junk food, you don’t really feel like eating healthy? Conversely, when I eat healthily for a while, I tend to feel less attracted by junk food.
I'm sure there's a carrot stick in there somewhere...
So, what is the remedy for emotional snacking? Having regular nutritious emotional feasts! Don’t worry too much about the impulsive behaviours, instead make sure you know what is emotional nutritious and satisfying, and have plenty of it. Do things you know you’re good at, but make sure they’re in harmony with your values. Otherwise it’s junk food for you (although it might be fine for someone else).
In practical terms, for me this might mean doing any of the following:
One of my personality traits is that I have an aversion for inefficiency. If I see someone do something a certain way, and it is obvious to me that there exists an easier, more efficient way of doing it, I find it incredibly difficult to refrain from making a comment. I’m beginning to realise and accept that these comments are generally not taken very well by those who receive them, and that I can sound rather pedantic when I make them.
Here’s an example: we have a microwave oven that we use daily to warm up Joshua’s milk bottles. This oven has the usual features of such devices, but it also has a number of shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is a 30-second “quick heat” button. You push it, and straight away you get 30 seconds of microwave emissions gently poured into your milk bottle. You push it again and you get 1 minute, and so on. Now, as soon as I discovered this button, I started using it whenever it made sense to me, and I never looked back. I never (as in NEVER) dialled 3.0.Cook from the time I found this button. Why should I? Why do in 3 (noisy) presses what can be done in 1?
Fortunately for her, Anne-Marie doesn’t think like I do. She doesn’t see the big deal with pushing only one button instead of 3. Perhaps more importantly, she doesn’t enjoy being told that her button-pushing is inefficient, and that I’ve found a way to spare her the superfluous 0.4 calories she expends by doing it. She might actually start using the button later on, and she probably does it when I’m not looking!
Until recently, that behaviour of hers really annoyed me. I just couldn’t see why someone would want to do things the “hard way” when it’s so blatantly obvious that there is a “better way”. After more than ten years of marriage, I was still stuck on that issue. I had failed to apply the principle I discovered on my mission:
“When someone behaves in a way that annoys you, it’s probably a reflection of something you do that annoys you.”
What is Anne-Marie doing that annoys me? Refusing to take my superior advice when I repeatedly offer it to her. Do I do this too? You bet! Except Anne-Marie has more tact than I do, and she usually refrains from telling me how to do things in a better way. Or she simply doesn’t make a mountain out of a molehill! Perhaps, unlike me, she acknowledges that I may actually enjoy doing things in my own, idiosyncratic way, or that I derive from it certain benefits that are not apparent to her. An example might be people who decide to walk up the old-fashioned stairs instead of taking the escalators: they rarely get up any faster, but perhaps they enjoy and/or need the exercise!
So why do I have this urge to tell people how to do things more efficiently? Note that I’m not talking about correcting people’s spelling mistakes, that is a related but separate issue that is worthy of its own blog entry in the near future. I’m talking about getting annoyed when people persist doing such things as typing with 2 fingers, using only the mouse to copy-paste text from one document to another, or hand-scoring a MCMI-III manually instead of using a scoring software.
For a while I hypothesised that I had developed this habit as a result of my work as a programmer. After all, the main job of a programmer is to reduce the amount of repetitive, error-prone work humans need to do, by writing computer algorithms that take care of these tasks. Not only must these algorithms take over repetitious work, but they must do so in an efficient manner, making smart use of resources such as time and computer memory. When I’m working, every day I solve a multitude of small-to-large problems involving efficiency. I remember finding it difficult to get my mind around the basic principles of programming, in my early days. Perhaps my obsession with efficiency comes from that?
On the other hand, it’s also possible that my attraction to efficiency pre-dates and even triggered my interest for programming. I distinctly remember getting excited about the possibility of writing bits of text that could get understood and used by the computer to complete (often useless) tasks at a speed that dwarves human capacities. I think it’s quite likely that this is one of these “personality traits” that have been rather stable throughout my life, and I need to work with it.
Thankfully, another one of my personality traits is openness to new ideas. I’m becoming more open to the idea that people might like to do things their own way precisely because it’s their own way!
Something interesting happened tonight while I was driving back from a home teaching visit in South Yunderup. I was driving on Lakes Road, not far behind an ambulance (Peel Hospital is on Lakes Road), when I felt a rather strong, positive emotion in connection with the ambulance.
St John's Ambulance
Immediately my mind started making attempts at labelling the emotion, and making sense of it. My first reaction was to think about the future, and how this feeling may have something to do with my future career. Perhaps I will have more to do with hospitals than I thought. That was my line of thinking: I was trying to find meaning in the emotion I had just felt, and to use that meaning to anticipate my own decisions and path in the future.
A few seconds later I remembered some of the things I had learned last semester at Uni about a style of thinking called “Crystal Ball”. It is much more likely that my emotional reaction was linked to my past experiences, such as my childhood illnesses, Joshua’s birth, his heart surgery, my two hospitalisations for hypoglycaemia or Anne-Marie’s miscarriage, than to a future event. In each of these situations, ambulances and ambulance officers represented protection, safety, relief and comfort. Each time they alleviated my fears of the unknown future surrounding stressful or even traumatic experiences. It is quite natural that I would get a nice feeling when I see an ambulance.
It's so comforting to know the future... Or so they say!
However, it took a fair bit of thinking to arrive at that conclusion, and I don’t think I would have been able to reach these conclusions a few years ago, when I knew far less about the way people think. As I said, my first reaction was to interpret this emotion as an “omen”, a sign of my future vocation, and it is quite probable that, should I have decided to retain that interpretation, it would have influenced my future decisions in a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, why did I have this initial reaction? Do I have a strong need to know what the future holds for me?
I definitely think that most people are anxious to know what the future holds, to varying degrees and for slightly different reasons. We might be afraid of growing old or dying, of developing a disease that is prevalent in our family, of getting hurt in a freak accident, or of not achieving much and remaining a nobody throughout our life. These are common fears, and there are many others, because, let’s face it, none of us knows exactly what the future holds, not even what will happen tomorrow.
Even more relevant to the story I just told, we don’t know our own future decisions. We might feel certain that we will never do or say something (“I would never do anything to hurt you!”), or we may be extremely confident that our chosen career as a marine biologist best defines us and suits our interests, and that we will never change, but the truth is that we don’t know. People change daily, and are often unaware of the general direction towards which their character and personality are evolving. Most people are at least vaguely aware of their own changeableness, and this can cause anxiety about the future.
Hence, to avoid the darkness of an unknown future in which our own self is a stranger, we seek meaning and purpose through religion, good causes and the occasional self-fulfilling prophecy. The nice thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they shift the locus of responsibility for our decisions away from ourselves: we’ve received some sort of “sign” or “clue” as to what we should do, we then act as if that sign were a fact, our interpretation of the meaning of the sign is then more likely to occur, and when it does we see confirmation that an external source has benevolently guided our decisions.
Once in a while, it’s good to be able to let go of absolute responsibility for every single choice and mistake we’ve made. Mistakes, though abhorrent to our society, are a normal, healthy and necessary part of life and are required for growth, learning and personal fulfilment. My religion doesn’t teach that all mistakes are sins and require repentance and guilt, in fact only very few mistakes fit that description, compared with the infinite variety of ways in which we can mess up each day.
Crystal ball thinking, however, can be a problem when it completely shifts the balance of responsibility away from us, and we start blaming all our problems or giving credit for all our blessings on external influences. If I do well at a very difficult exam, it wasn’t 100% a fluke, it wasn’t 100% God’s work, and it wasn’t 100% through my own merits.
Then again, it might be 100% due to cheating 🙂
Doesn't she just look passionate and enthralled?
Meet Jan, a 19-year-old young woman, who has just started a three-year undergraduate degree in psychology at a West Australian University. She’s excited about the subject and about the opportunities for new friendships. She’s also nervous and unsure about her abilities to cope with the high demands of higher education, including writing essays, conducting literature research and dealing with the dreaded but compulsory field of inferential statistics. She also feels rather overwhelmed by the amount of text she is supposed to read in just 4 short months, and wonders how she will ever achieve all of this. However, she is committed to this subject, she wants to become a psychologist, help people in need, and she’s very interested in understanding how people think and why they do what they do.
If this sounds familiar to you, try to remember the time when you were in Jan’s shoes. How enthusiastic were you about your studies? How energised did you feel each morning as you got out of bed, thinking about the lectures you had scheduled to attend that day? How curious did you feel as you delved into your textbooks, especially those without any pictures in them? Have you ever experienced academic burn-out, and how did it affect your performance?
When I speak to my fellow students, I often ask them about what motivates them to keep studying despite the multitude of challenges. Almost universally, I see no passion for the subject they once may have cared for. Instead I see a focus on obtaining grades, and obsessing with what these grades mean for them as a person and for their future career. I see students who cram for exams, certain that their ultimate achievement as a student is to receive the highest possible mark. I see fatigue, a great deal of emotional, psychological and physical fatigue that sometimes strains their relationships and can lead to burn-out and attrition.
Despite these challenges, most of the students I know achieve extraordinarily well, getting High Distinctions and honours, and most of the time get much higher grades than me. The question is, are they still enthusiastic about what they learned last year, or 2 years ago? Do they go back to re-read some journal articles or textbooks they enjoyed? Do they continue to perform statistical analyses on their data a whole year after submitting their honours thesis? In other words, did their study lead to true learning and personal growth, and are they more dedicated to learning today than they were last year? Has their true potential been reached, or have there been some constraints, possibly systemic constraints, on their growth?
Even more importantly: are self-actualisation and vitality measured by Universities? Should they be? Can we assume that all students who receive an undergraduate degree have obtained the maximum possible benefits from their three years of dedicated study, just because they got good grades and met all the requirements? What should we assume about those who fail or drop out? Did they fail, or did the system fail them? Maybe we shouldn’t assume anything, but that is a tough call in the context of Australian higher education.
Perhaps we shouldn’t assume either that the purpose of higher education is to educate, promote personal growth, and stimulate creativity and natural curiosity. Perhaps it has become something else, something used for other, less lofty purposes.
If that’s the case, then I’m going to do something about it. My honours thesis was the first step.
Well that’s a bummer. Apparently last Friday I didn’t write my 750 words, falling short by only 20 words. I think there must have been a bug in the system, because I distinctly remember seeing the little green popup saying something, although I’m not 100% sure that something was the congratulations for having reached the limit.
So now I’ve failed the May challenge, with only 3 days to go, and I’ve broken my 35 day streak. Initially I was pretty upset about this, and feeling a bit demoralised. I seriously considered stopping this daily writing so I can have more time to spend on other things.
However, I realise that I had already broken the challenge before on those days when I just copy-pasted earlier blog posts instead of writing original stuff. That was really silly. Why am I doing this 750 words thing? To get the longest running streak? To get badges? To feel good about myself and boast to others about how well I’m doing? As much as it makes me feel ashamed, it seems that these are indeed some of the reasons I’ve been doing it.
However, there are other reasons too that are still valid:
There are many benefits to this writing habit, and I value all of them enough to continue writing even though I didn’t complete the challenge this month, and broke my streak.
Thinking more about it now, I have decided that, on days when it’s really not convenient or even possible to write 750 meaningful words, I’ll just skip it. It’s important and useful, but it’s not a priority that overrides all others. I don’t want to care about having a long running streak, and I don’t want to care about earning any rewards other than those that are intrinsic in the process of writing. I enjoy writing, so why do I need any other incentives?
In fact, if I feel that my entry was meaningful and helpful enough, I won’t even worry about reaching the 750 word limit. I understand that this limit is set because, on average, it tends to take deeper thought and soul-searching to come up with that many words, but sometimes I get to that level before this limit. For example, today’s entry has already helped me to reflect on my daily writing, and to decide that I should continue with it, but not be as inflexible as I have been in the past. Knowing what I know about intrinsic motivation should have informed me about this detrimental effect of extrinsic rewards.
What am I talking about? Interestingly, over and over again the lessons of life take me back to what I’ve learned about self-determination and the quality of motivation. When you really enjoy doing something for its own sake, you tend to be naturally motivated to do that thing, you don’t need external rewards or even personal challenges. However, if you get the promise of external rewards or set yourself a challenge for that particular activity (e.g. writing, painting etc.), it tends to undermine this intrinsic motivation, and you are more likely to discontinue this activity, whether or not you get the reward or achieve your challenge. Unfortunately our society is very focused on extrinsic rewards, competition and measurable achievements, so our natural inclinations towards certain activities tends to be stifled.
I have felt this many times, particularly in regards to music. I first got interested in playing the piano when my parents bought us a cheap Pink Panther piano-accordion toy. They noticed that I used to play some recognisable tunes on the keyboard, so they talked and talked and eventually decided to buy an upright, acoustic piano and get me signed up for one-on-one home lessons when I was 8. That purchase represented a very large expense for them, and was a great sacrifice, something I didn’t understand until a few years ago when I temporarily re-acquired this piano and found the invoice for its purchase inside its cover.
The piano, extension of my soul...
Now, my parents had noticed an intrinsic motivation in me towards playing the piano, and they built upon that by buying one for me. That was an excellent move on their part. Having one-on-one lessons was also fantastic. However, I wasn’t always very motivated to perform the exercises given by the teacher, because I didn’t have a lot of choice in what these exercises were (lack of autonomy thwarts intrinsic motivation). I was very confident in my own abilities though (high competence promotes intrinsic motivation) and I got along well with the teacher (high relatedness promotes intrinsic motivation). So, for the first few years of learning the piano, I did really well and motivation wasn’t an issue.
Later on, however, we moved to a larger town and I joined a music school. My interests for the piano wavered for a while, and my parents got worried that I would stop practicing and waste my talent (as well as the piano!). To help me get back to it, they started nagging me to do my exercises, reminding me how much money they had spent on the piano, and how I was wasting my talent etc. I don’t remember if they set up any reward system, but I certainly remember the negative reinforcement of the nagging. This really didn’t help my intrinsic motivation, but occasionally I found myself attracted to the ivories and playing for the pleasure of it.
Today I have no reward system surrounding playing the piano, no outward pressures to perform, and I absolutely relish any and all opportunities I have to play. I love taking very challenging pieces of music and slowly, painstakingly playing through them, enjoying the beautiful chords and melodies (particularly Rachmaninov and Chopin). The fact that I don’t even have a keyboard at home (something I tend to remedy soon, hopefully!) makes these opportunities even more rare and enjoyable. I often play just for the pure enjoyment of it, and I don’t care whether or not I sound clumsy and out of rhythm.
I tend to be like this with my writing, singing, baking, painting and photography, and I’d like to be more intrinsically motivated to study, and even to work. My intrinsic motivation to do these two things is, of course, threatened by the external reward systems inherent in them (grades and accolades for studies, money and recognition for work). If only I could care less about external rewards!
Today I met with Ken Robinson, my honours thesis supervisor in 2010 and a good friend since 2006. He’s a senior lecturer and researcher at Edith Cowan University, and has agreed to be an assistant supervisor for my PhD project. We spent most of today in his office at the Joondalup campus of ECU, preparing my honours’ research report for publication in the scientific journal “Motivation and Emotion“. This is the first time I’ve ever prepared a manuscript for publication, and I’ve never read nor heard anyone’s first-hand experience of this process before, so I thought it’d be worth a blog entry.
First of all, what is this publishing thing all about? Why would you ever want, after a whole year of gruelling, hard work to get a degree, to go back to your research and spend unpaid, precious time preparing it for publication? What’s in it for you? The fact is that most honours students never publish their research, even though it is often of extremely good quality. So, why should they bother, and, really, should they bother at all?
The first answer that might come to mind is money. However, this would only come to mind if you’re mostly unacquainted with scientific research, particularly in the field of psychology. No, you don’t get any money from publishing, in fact it’s more likely you’ll have to pay in some cases (for example, if you have colourful illustrations in your article). You’ll also have to spend hours of unpaid work to prepare your manuscript, hours that might be put to relatively more productive use. So, what other incentive could there be to publish your research?
Fame! Prestige! Worldwide acclaim and celebrity status! Perhaps an appearance on Today Tonight! You got it, that’s definitely why I’ve decided to publish my research. With several thousands of readers each month, and an average of 1.3 citations per article over the past 2 years, the journal of Motivation and Emotion is the ideal place to catch the attention of the big wigs in the world of psychology, and to start building an internationally renowned career, getting flown all over the globe to various symposia and conferences for notoriously anticipated keynote addresses.
OR NOT!
You got it, I was being sarcastic, but only facetiously. Here are the real advantages of publishing my research, for my point of view:
There, I think I summed it up pretty well. The most important point is certainly the first one. I didn’t do my honours research just for the sake of graduating and getting into a Masters/PhD programme. I actually wanted to learn, test some hypotheses, and report on what I found. I’m still interested in the subject. In fact, even months after submitting my thesis, I was still running analyses, researching the literature, and communicating with the Self-Determination Theory community. I care about this topic, I think it has profound implications for psychology as a field, as well as for education.
Now, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I am at least slightly attracted by the prospect of getting some recognition for my research. I do enjoy the occasional pat on the back, and I like to know that what I do is appreciated by others. However, I try very hard not to focus on this attraction, because I feel it tends to distract me from the real benefits of what I’m doing, which benefits are hopefully less about me and more about other people. That includes my family. I am committed to my family, and I’m determined that my career will never override my family’s needs. That is part of my mission plan in life.
Multum in Parvo 