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11 - At the Crossroads of Women’s Experience

Insights from and Intersections between Motivation, Emotion, Gender, and Culture

from Section 3 - Cognitive and Social Factors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2020

By
Joyce S. Pang  and
Nicola Baumann
Edited by
Fanny M. Cheung  and
Diane F. Halpern
Fanny M. Cheung
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Diane F. Halpern
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College, California
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Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss research in motivation, self-regulation, and emotion that includes gender as a variable. Specifically, we propose using an intersectionality perspective and a culturally situated understanding of women’s motivational and emotional experiences, and describe data from our labs in Germany and Singapore in order to illustrate this position. Our findings indicate that women’s motivational experience in achievement domains is tied to avoidant motivation and their lower ability to self-regulate negative emotion in the face of goal difficulties or goal failure. Compared to men, women’s more fearful enactment of the implicit achievement motives is related to their adoption of a lower self-attributed achievement motive, which, in turn, lowers women’s well-being. We discuss how cultural norms and gender socialization lead to a complex interplay of parenting, social-normative, and personality systems and processes that contribute to a different motivational and emotional experience for men versus women.

Keywords

Implicit motivesexplicit motivesachievement motivationself-regulationemotion regulationgenderculturegender stereotypesintersectionalityPersonality Systems Interaction theory
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of the International Psychology of Women , pp. 153 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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Joyce S. Pang is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  As a personality psychologist, she is interested in the assessment of individual differences and in making finer distinctions between personality dimensions in order to increase theoretical understanding of how personality affects behavior. Specifically, she adopts a person x situation perspective to understand how individual differences in motivation predict different reactions within different social contexts, which in turn lead to important personal and social outcomes.  She is particularly interested in the implicit motives for achievement, power, and affiliation: how to measure them, make differentiations between them, and determine how individual differences in these motives affect performance, health, and well-being. Pang was born and raised in Singapore. She attended Smith College in Massachusetts for her BA and obtained her PhD from University of Michigan.  She picked up Argentine tango in graduate school, and has danced ever since. After she obtained tenure, she took a short leave of absence to spend a couple months in Argentina learning more about the dance. She is currently living and working in Switzerland, and expects to be there for another two years.

Nicola Baumann is a Full Professor at the University of Trier, Germany. She did her diploma, PhD, and habilitation (the German postdoc qualification to gain tenure) at the University of Osnabrück. She has held research fellowships at the University of Rochester, New York (1999–2000), the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2014–2015), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (2019). Baumann’s research on implicit motives, self-regulation, and self-determination is located at the intersection of personality, motivation, cognition, and social psychology. She investigates the “what” (what moves people to action) and “how” (how people regulate their action) of human goal striving from the broader perspective of Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory. In addition to her scientific achievements, she has worked as an applied psychologist and nurtures the exchange between research and practice.

Baumann was born and raised in Germany. She had four one-year stays abroad: 1983–1984 University High School of Northern Colorado, USA (at age 16); 1999–2000 University of Rochester, New York; 2014–2015 Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; and 2019 University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. At the University of Osnabrück, there was a good mix of colleagues from the USA and Russia, allowing the integration of very different approaches to science.

Baumann, N., Chatterjee, M. B., & Hank, P. (2016). Guiding others for their own good: Action orientation is associated with prosocial enactment of the implicit power motive. Motivation and Emotion, 40, 56–68. doi:10.1007/s11031-015-9511-0CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, L. E., & Peterson, B. E. (2010). Gender and motivation for achievement, affiliation–intimacy, and power. In Chrisler, J. & McCreary, D. (Eds.), Handbook of gender research in psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 41–62). New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-1467-5_3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhl, J. (2000). A functional-design approach to motivation and self-regulation: The dynamics of personality systems interactions. In Boekaerts, M., Pintrich, P. R., & Zeidner, M. (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 111–169). San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Pang, J. S. (2019). Feedback as implicit motivational incentives: Approach and avoidant achievement motivated Singaporean university students’ responses to success versus failure feedback. In Liem, G. A. D. & Tan, S. H. (Eds.), Student motivation, engagement, and growth: Asian insights. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shields, S. A. (2013). Gender and emotion: What we think we know, what we need to know, and why it matters. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 37(4), 423–435. doi:10.1177/0361684313502312Google Scholar
Wagner, L., Baumann, N., & Hank, P. (2016). Enjoying influence on others: Congruently high implicit and explicit power motives are related to teachers’ well-being. Motivation and Emotion, 40, 69–81. doi:10.1007/s11031-015-9516-8Google Scholar

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