Inverted U-Shaped Curvilinear Relationship between Challenge and One's Intrinsic Motivation: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

The balance between task demand and one's competence is critical for the maintenance of intrinsic motivation. According to Flow theory and Self-determination theory, optimal challenge gives rise to the maximum intrinsic motivation, and an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between perceived challenge and one's intrinsic motivation is suggested. In order to provide direct experimental evidences for predictions of these theories, in this study, we employed the two-player StopWatch game that we previously designed, which made references to the game format of a badminton tournament. According to our manipulation, a male participant was defeated by the same-sex player paired with him (played by a well-trained confederate of the experimenter) in two matches, one with a wide margin (the complete defeat condition) and another with a narrow one (the near miss condition). Participants performed better and reported to enjoy the near miss match to a greater extent. Besides, an enlarged Stimulus-preceding negativity was elicited when participants were actively anticipating outcomes in the near miss condition, suggesting greater anticipatory attention toward the outcome and an enhanced intrinsic motivation to win. Thus, converging electrophysiological evidences from this study and our former study confirmed the inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between perceived challenge and one's intrinsic motivation.

Being Eager to Prove Oneself: U-Shaped Relationship between Competence Frustration and Intrinsic Motivation in Another Activity

“…Experimental studies in which competence frustration is directly manipulated by the researchers are required to establish this causal link. Besides, given that the present study only measured intrinsic motivation through self-report, it will be interesting to resort to behavioral measurement and/or neural indicators of intrinsic motivation to further clarify the long-term consequence of competence frustration triggered by the overwhelming challenge, demanding tasks, or negative feedbacks ( Meng et al, 2016 ; Domenico and Ryan, 2017 ; Ma et al, 2017 ; Meng and Yang, 2018 ). Another limitation of this study is that only 78 students satisfied the criteria of PCF > 4.7.…”

The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset and Intrinsic Motivation

“…Two recent motivation studies used free-choice measures, such as a stop-watch (SW) game, as an experimental task to assess participants’ intrinsic motivation [ 39 , 40 ]. A traditional SW game includes a stopwatch that starts automatically, and the player tries to stop the watch at a specific time.…”

“…Experimental stimuli were presented on the computer screen and participants were required to use the keypad to complete the SW tasks. It is interesting to note the relationship between the optimal challenge condition and intrinsic motivation using EEG [ 39 ]. Students performed better when they felt optimally challenged, and had enhanced intrinsic motivation in the game experiment.…”

“…Stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) is considered to be an electrophysiological indicator of motivation level. The EEG findings showed a larger SPN during the feedback anticipation period of the near miss condition than in the complete defeat condition, suggesting that participants were more intrinsically motivated to win in close games [ 39 ]. For the second study, fMRI was used to explore the degree of enjoyment for the preference levels of SW game [ 40 ].…”

A Surprising Source of Self-Motivation: Prior Competence Frustration Strengthens One’s Motivation to Win in Another Competence-Supportive Activity

“…In session 1, competence frustration was manipulated by setting different difficulties for the same task, which has been suggested to be a both simple and effective means of competence frustration manipulation (Ryan and Deci, 2017 ). In session 2, all participants worked on another task of medium difficulty, which was found to be competence-supportive to a great extent (Meng et al, 2016 ; Ma et al, 2017 ). In order to examine the effect of prior competence frustration on one’ motivation to win in a subsequent competence-supportive task, electrophysiological data of all participants were recorded and analyzed.…”