The Lab
Research Theme
The overarching question that guides research in our lab is, “What makes an optimal achiever?” We approach this question from a motivational perspective because motivation organizes and creates meaningful patterns in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Achievement motivation is particularly interesting to us because competence is such a salient incentive in our daily activities - be they social, educational, vocational, or avocational pursuits across the lifespan.
One strand of our work focuses on the development of achievement motivation. In the early childhood period, we are interested in how parenting and temperament interact and influence developmental trajectories for achievement motivation. In middle childhood and adolescence, we are developing and testing interventions for youth sport coaches to promote mastery strivings that will optimize youth achievement motivation and associated outcomes, both in and out of sport.
Another strand of work in the lab focuses on understanding the consequences of individual differences in achievement motivation. We use a process-focused approach to investigate how different forms of achievement motivation regulate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across the lifespan. These consequences include, but are not limited to, interpersonal behavior, emotion regulation (e.g., shame, pride), information processing, and task performance. We are especially interested in understanding how contextual characteristics and interindividual differences in achievement motivation, both independently and interactively, evoke predictable intraindividual patterns of variability in these outcomes. This work explicitly treats time as a critical dimension of experience and uses both experimental and ecological momentary assessment techniques to reveal process by obtaining repeated measurements on individuals. One example of this approach is our innovative study (with N. Ram & A. Pincus) using smartphones to collect intensive longitudinal data on behavior, emotion, and health at multiple timescales in the natural contexts of everyday experience.
A third strand of work involves our emerging interest in implicit motivation and automaticity. We have recently been experimenting with nonconscious evaluative and motivational processes to understand how they influence different aspects of behavior and emotion.
Click here to download current copies of the lab research poster, or lists of reprints and presentations based on our research. Click here to read the APA Science Brief about research in the Sport Psychology Lab.
Click here for information about the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory for assessing fear of failure, the 2x2 Achievement Goal Questionnaire for Sport, or the Sport Behavior inventory for assessing perceptions of the legitimacy of aggressive sport behavior.
Research Facilities
The laboratory has 443 sq. ft of dedicated research space and shares an additional 900 sq. ft. of research space with the other psychology labs in the department. It includes a conference area, six computer workstations with internet access, and storage space. Specialized software and hardware are available for experimental data collection (e.g., MediaLab, DirectRT, E-Prime) and data analysis (e.g., SPSS, AMOS, HLM, MPlus). Other equipment includes digital video cameras, audio transcription machines, an indoor putting green (100 sq. ft.), and a miniature basketball hoop.
Research Opportunities for Students
For information about research opportunities that are available to students, please see the page with information For PSU Undergraduate Students.