Schüler
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Psychologisches Institut » Allgemeine Psychologie » Prof. Dr. Veronika Brandstätter-Morawietz » Schüler
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | Motivation and Health | ||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | The beneficial effects of regular exercise on health and subjective well-being are well demonstrated. It is also well-known that lack of exercise favours main risk factors of coronary heart diseases. Thus, it is an important goal to motivate people to change their behavior and to exercise more regularly. One way to help people change their behaviour is to support motivational processes: 1) The model of context sensitive pattern of incentives Because positive incentives play an important role in the determination of behaviour, we asked sportspersons of different kinds of sports (running, bodybuilding, fitness) with a standardized interview form for their incentives during their sports acitivity. Their answers could be categorized into four types of incentives: positive vs. negative incentives concerning the process of exercising and positive vs. negative incentives concerning the results of exercising. The answers of the athletes also showed that incentives of different types occurred at the same time. In order to find out how the different types of incentives work together, we analyzed what pattern of incentives is the best to predict commitment to sports, regularly exercising and well-being in two studies. An additional longitudinal study showed that incentive patterns varied across the time. A second longitudial study is planned to replicate the result. The idea of patterns of incentives and their variation across the time were brought together in a model of context sensitive pattern of incentives. 2) The motive - incentive fit With the standardized interviews we created catalogues of incentives for each sport activity. Among those categories are, for example, achievement-related incentives, affiliation-related incentives and flow experience. Actually, a study is conducted that should test, whether persons, whose motives (i.e., achievement motive, affiliation motive) fit with the incentives in sports will exercice more regularly and maintain sport activity for a longer time period compared with persons without a motive –incentive- fit. A long term goal could be to use incentive-catalogues of sports to advise people which sport activity they should choose. Another way to help people change their behaviour is to strengthen their volitional strategies: Because planning has proved to be an effective volitional strategy, an experimental field study with obesity patients was conducted that compared a planning-intervention group with a control group in different parameters of exericising behaviour. |
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| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | motivation, self-regulation, action plans, adiposity | ||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
Others |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Dec 2005 to Dec 2007 |